My Tao - Sitting There, Doing Nothing

I came to the early realization in life that inactivity is greatly underappreciated, and I have since come across numerous examples that confirm this. Most horror stories about great losses involve high levels of activity. Inactivity would have saved a lot of people a lot of money, headaches and worry.

In my career as a software engineer, I can only think of a handful of projects that made much sense. I'm unsure to this day if my career was a net benefit or loss to society as a whole. I made some money for myself. But I know that a lot of projects were a waste of time, and the benefits that came from the projects that made some sense may not have covered the losses.

As for the money I made, much of it was lost to the taxman and wasted on bad investments. So little money was kept by me in the end that I was no better off when I was in full employment than I am now, ten years into an early retirement.

The idea that inactivity may be more profitable than activity is so contrary to Western culture that few appreciate the logic of it. However, the truth of the matter is evident everywhere, including financial markets. There's a thing that we can buy and hold that does nothing, yet makes a profit relative to many other things that we might have chosen instead.

That thing is gold. It's despised for the fact that it just sits there. It produces nothing. It employs nobody. It's a cold piece of metal. However, relative to a large number of investment choices, gold has done very well. In fact, it's up relative to the S&P 500 when measured from year 2000. That means that gold has done better than most alternatives.

This tells us that it isn't just I who feel that I haven't contributed much to society through my career. Most careers result in losses for investors when measured against gold. Inactivity would have been the better choice.

Another way of looking at this is that most businesses are engaging in value destruction. The only reason this isn't more apparent is that we no longer measure wealth creation relative to gold. We measure it against fiat currencies which are deliberately debased in order to create the illusion of wealth creation. However, the truth will reveal itself at some point. When pensions come due in the future, the payouts in terms of purchasing power will be much less than what was paid into the schemes.

Sovereign

By Heritage Auctions for image, Mary Gillick for coin - Newman Numismatic Portal, Public Domain, Link