cycleseverspare - Tumblr blog

cycleseverspare · 7 months ago

Text

Skeletons are Selfish Things

Occasional introspection is a good thing. Careful accounting of our values can better inform our actions. Careful accounting of our actions, can further develop our values. These are the benefits of looking inward.

And it is by looking inward, to our very core, that we inevitably find our skeletons (I mean our literal skeletons) and consider that perhaps they are selfish freeloading pieces of shit.

Consider this: if you could invest your money in something which has practically zero risk, and makes you a continuously compounding profit of like 2% annually, would you? Most people would answer yes -- after all this is what savings accounts are supposed to be. But hang on a second, because is that actually really worth it?

Let's say you make $1,500 a week. (You're reading this on tumblr, so chances are that you make hilariously less, but let's pretend for the sake of argument). You pocket $300 for the week's expenses, and responsibly put the rest into your savings account. At the end of the month, you take out another $400 to pay for rent and bills (you're reading this in English, so chances are it's hilariously more than that, but let's just pretend for the sake of argument), and at the end of the month you'll have saved around $4,800. Do that every month for a year, and you'll have saved about $53,991 for the year.

Presuming you keep your rent money in your saving's account and withdraw it with no fee at the end of each month, the amount of money in that account over a period of 12 months, at a continuously compounding annual interest rate of 2% will look like this.

It's a bit difficult to see, but the graph above accounts for interest accruing as you deposit, ultimately resulting in an extra $1k for doing nothing (You're reading this while living in a country with a financial system, so chances are after CPI adjusted inflation this extra $1k actually amounts to roughly $0, but let's just pretend for the sake of argument). So that looks like a perfectly reasonable graph, right?

Okay cool, now here's a graph depicting the percentage of atoms in your body over the span of a year which were there there when the year began.

As we’d expect, we find that on the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the first month of the year, you have approximately 100% of the atoms you started the year with. By 6 months in, most of those atoms have been replaced, leaving you with a little over 17% of the year's original atoms. By the time the year is out, only 2% of the atoms you started the year with are still in you.

Now, fairness would dictate that each atom should benefit in proportion to either the amount of your body that it makes up, or the number of hours of work it put in toward the invested paycheck. But practically speaking, at any given time, if you are to take all of your money out of your savings account and treat yourself, it's not feasible to pamper only the atoms that worked for that money. All atoms in your body at the time you decide to use the money benefit in roughly equal proportion regardless of whether or not they were in your body during the time for which the paycheck was issued. Meaning the atoms that did put in the work only benefit in proportion to the number of them that remain in your body at the time of pampering. We can use this to create two new measures.

The “Mass Adjusted Benefit” (MAB), which measures how much of the total money invested is of benefit to the atoms which are both currently in your body and in your body at the time the money was earned, and

The “Mass Adjusted Benefit per Hour Worked” (MABHoW) which measures how much of the total money invested is of benefit to the atoms which are both currently in your body and in your body at the time the money was earned.

The MAB is useful under the assumption that your body is an ideal communist utopia, and atoms benefit in proportion to the amount of your body that they constitute (instead of the number of work hours they put in). For simplicity's sake, if we presume that all atoms in your body have equal mass and are equally likely to be replaced, the MAB graph for weekly deposits of $1200 into a savings account with a continuously compounding 2% annual interest rate looks like the orange line here (blue is still just the amount of money that would accrue in the account if you made no withdrawals, and depicted for comparison):

In other words, presuming you decide to treat all of the atoms currently in your body as citizens of a perfect communist utopia, and presuming you don't care about the atomic citizens that leave your communist utopia, and presuming none of the atomic citizens understand the concept of risk, then at a continuously compounding 2% annual interest rate, the optimal length of time to save money for is precisely one week shy of 3 months. At which point, you should **not **invest your latest paycheck, and you should withdraw all of the money made between now and 2.75 months from now from your savings account (which we will assume started with 0 dollars in) and spend all of it on yourself. Presuming you deposited $1,300 a week, that would be $12,466 including interest, of which $5,072 would go to the atoms that were there to earn any of it.

However, as noted earlier, that's not the only conception of fairness. We might instead decide that atoms should profit only in proportion to the number of hours they were on the clock. Determining the optimal amount of time to save up under this more meritocratic scheme is what the MABHoW measure (graphed below) is for.

As we can clearly see, at a continuously compounding 2% annual interest rate, the most meritocratic length of time for which to save money is 0 days. Under this you should always spend your money immediately. In fact, just having to wait until the end of the week to access your paycheck means that every minute you procrastinate on rewarding yourself is huge ripoff for any atoms relative to a scheme whereby you could use money as you earn it (pictured in green).

Of course, this is only for a continuously compounding annual interest rate of 2%. You might wonder how high the interest rate would need to be under a meritocratic system in order for saving money to be worth it. And the answer to that is at least 392% **if you intend to save for a decade. Anything with less than a 392% interest rate is CLEARLY not worth it for **any of the atoms that were around to work for it the whole time.

On an atom by atom basis, for anything less than a 300% interest rate, you might as well just take all of that money and give it to a random hobo. He’ll be freeloading about as much as any of your other atoms will be.

Now, this is all under the simplifying assumption that all of the atoms in your body replenish at a constant rate. But if you know anything about dead people, you know that their skeletons tend to stick around a lot longer than the rest of them. It would seem reasonable then to note that if you save up money, most of the atoms in your body are working for the exclusive benefit of the atoms in your skeleton. But hang on there, don’t go surgically removing your skeleton just yet, because actually it turns out that only dead people’s skeletons do that. Living skeletons shed their atoms quite a lot, however, they do so much more slowly than wet stuff like neurons do. Most estimates hold that

the average human adult sheds only 20% of their skeleton a year.

This should make you feel a little better about your skeleton, but not much better about the situation in general. After all, your skeleton is only 15% of your body. And while it is replaced more slowly, it is still replaced way faster than would justify any realistic return on investment on atom by atom basis. So if not even your skeleton’s atoms are around to reap the benefits of your investment, what *is *benefiting from all of that penny-pinching?

You might say “Me! I am! The conscious entity that emerges from my lived experiences and persists through an accumulation of those experiences in memory! Obviously!” And that’s entirely valid, except really much worse. Because while 98% of the atoms in your body have been replaced by entirely different ones by the end of a year, **memories are replaced or just plain up lost MUCH faster than that. On the order of **days.

Sure, you can make them stick around a lot longer by rehearsal, but you do that for such an absurdly small portion of your experiences that it’s basically negligible. And worse still, the ones you’ve rehearsed / memorized the most are the dumbest ones, like the alphabet, or the sequence of months, or vocab words, or basically all of the stuff that everyone else has had to memorize just to function in society. Meaning there isn’t really that much special about your particular copy of the alphabet, or the Gregorian calendar, or the periodic table that you know so well. And for the stuff that’s truly special -- admit it, you can barely even visualize the face of your best friend from 6th grade.

“Aha!” you might say “Your reasoning won’t work on me! For I am a dualist! *I believe in some concept of a soul separate from that of the material world.” *And that’s all well and good under some very particular dualist assumptions, but if your reason for dualism is in line with any of the major organized religions then it’s worth noting that those would prefer you not be materialistic, and give as much of your money as possible to the church.

So really, no matter how you look at it, most people have no real justification for saving money.

0 notes