We Do Not Have Enough Time

I have decided what I want to do in retirement. I want to produce music.

So here is how I want it to go. I want to reach out to one of my favorite producers, like Tim Green, and offer to pay him $100,000 to move into my house for a month and teach me how to produce. First, I have to build a studio. Once I retire, I will clear out the trading desk and computers and put a music studio in with keyboards and modular synths. I suppose I could take some classes from Berkelee, too.

Now, here is the thing. I’m 52, and I have enough money to retire right now. So why not do it now? Because I also love trading, and I figure I have a 10-13 year runway to make as much money as possible. But if I can retire right now, what use do I have for the money? Well, I want to buy a place in Miami, and I want to give a significant amount of it away. A lot of good can be done with it. So I want to trade, and I want to make music, and I also want to write books.

The problem is, I don’t know how much time I have left. Even though I don’t exercise, I don’t drink or smoke, I eat right, and I get plenty of sleep, so I probably have an above-average life expectancy, but let’s say average to be conservative. Let’s say I live until age 80. That gives me 28 years to do all this stuff.

It’s not enough time.

If you’ve been reading these newsletters faithfully, you know I don’t have a very high opinion of wasted time, like watching TV or playing video games. Not to say that I don’t watch TV, but when I am, I am usually writing something on my computer and only half-paying attention to what is happening on the television. I will see the occasional movie. I will read the occasional book. On rare occasions, I will go out of my way to just kill time doing something, like going for a walk. But my days are pretty much filled up with crap. This morning, I got up early, took a shower, and went to Starbucks to work on my upcoming book SUPERINVESTORS. I wrote about 2,500 words. Then I went out for brunch, and then I came home and practiced DJing for about an hour and a half. Then I sat on the couch and worked on the book some more, but didn’t get much done because the cats were all over me. Then I made some phone calls and went to dinner, and now I am back on the couch writing this essay. It will take me about 60-90 minutes, and then, around 8pm, I’ll be done for the day and just veg out on social media. Actually, I’ll be thinking about the market open Sunday night, because I have a lot of risk on, and the word is that Trump is taking steps to finalize the end of the Iran war. Then I will go to bed. Another full day tomorrow, back to Starbucks to write another 4,000 words of the book, then I’ll probably start in on Lyn Alden’s new book in my fancy library, and then, I’ll go out to dinner with my assistant and his buddy, and who knows what after that. Maybe more DJing. If I’m not busy, I’m actually miserable.

All of this is for a higher purpose. I want to write bestsellers, I want to be a famous touring DJ, and I want to make a shit-ton of money. And I want to do all of this before I take a dirtnap. And here’s the thing: I might not have until age 80. Maybe I only have until age 70, or 65.

And then what? I will have missed out on my retirement. How many stories have you heard of people who retired after long, productive careers and were dead just weeks after they quit? So maybe I should retire…earlier? Like, now?

I think about this pretty much every day. It’s a cliché to say that life is short, but man, it really is short. And when you’re young, you’re an idiot—you have no idea of the value of time. I didn’t really start getting focused until around age 32. My 20s were a complete waste—all partying. I think that is a pretty common experience. Youth is wasted on the young. I’m a slow learner and late bloomer for sure. Even in my early 40s, I was working at about half speed. Yes, I have a successful financial newsletter, but after you’ve been doing it for many years, it does not take a lot of time, and I was taking long lunches and playing afternoon racquetball games. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I started working like a man possessed. It was in my late 40s that I started to feel my own mortality, and I started to realize that there wasn’t much time left on the clock, and I had better get busy living or get busy dying. Naturally, I chose the former.

There is a joke about longevity—the problem with living another ten years is that all those years come at the end. Ha ha. True, but in my mind, there is nothing better than being a senior citizen and going out there and embarrassing yourself on stage. My grandfather was skiing into his 70s. He also had a plane and a sailboat. He died at 83. Broke, but he could not be accused of molding away in front of the TV in retirement. He actually was a very competent skier—he was the one who taught me when I was about 12. But yeah, I fully plan on touring around and playing music well into my 60s—or longer! Carl Cox is in his 60s. I saw Dubfire at Space in Miami a few months ago and he’s older than me. It can be done. But to my earlier point, we simply do not have enough time, and if you don’t make full use of the time we do have, then on your deathbed, you will have regrets. I should have done this, or that, but I never did. I never want to be in that position. I live in fear of being in that position. From that standpoint, you could say that I am operating from a regret minimization framework.

Of course, there is such a thing as workaholism, and the most common regret that people have on their deathbeds is that they should have worked less and spent more time with their kids. Well, I don’t have any kids. I am married, been married for coming up on 29 years, and my wife is pretty ambitious, too, and doesn’t have a lot of wasted time, so our relationship is basically the two of us living independently, working towards our own goals. We get in bed at night and cuddle. But we’ll be sitting on the couch, and I’ll be working on a book, and she’ll be working on a book, and we’re both happy. And I spend plenty of time with the cats, trust me. Maybe I would feel differently if I had kids. Elon Musk has like 16 kids and I don’t get the impression he sees much of them. Seems to work for him.

I’ve written several pieces about death, and death is entirely necessary, because without death, we would never get anything done. We’d be playing the ding-a-ling banjo forever. Death imposes a sense of urgency in your life. Trust me, I feel it. I got a cold about a month ago, which turned into a nasty sinus infection, which turned into an eye infection, and I was sick for about two weeks, getting practically no sleep, when I finally went to the doctor and got antibiotics, and then I got better for a few days…and then I got another cold. When I got sick when I was younger, it wouldn’t be for a month. It would be for a few days, and I would bounce back. Hell, Kyle Busch just died of a sinus infection! He was a busy guy, and probably shrugged it off and didn’t get the medical attention that he needed. These days, when I get sick, I feel closer to death. I get flu vaccines and pneumonia vaccines, but one of these days, something is going to take me out. Everyone knows that 22-year-olds are invincible. The picture of health. I was in such good shape when I left the military, that I couldn’t even participate in the disability scam. I have no desire to be Bryan Johnson. Or Ray Kurzweil. I don’t fear death at all—I welcome it. But not until I’ve done everything I wanted to do.

So no, I don’t really have much in common with the TV/video games time-wasting crowd. In fact, I take a huge, messy shit on those people. When I go to bed at night, I want to be exhausted—mentally exhausted. If I don’t fall asleep within 10 minutes, it means I didn’t work hard enough. That includes the weekends. That includes long weekends, like this one. I want to spend my life running like I hit an inside-the-park home run. If you’re under 40 and reading this, get ready: it’s going to happen to you. You start thinking about your life, and what your legacy will be. And then you start staring in the mirror, with that clock ticking in the background. 28 years is about 14 million minutes. That may sound like a lot, but I just blew 100 of them. There is nothing I would rather be doing.

***Public Service Announcements

- You can see me DJ live in Nashville on June 19^th at Night We Met. I’m playing in support of Cristoph. You can get tickets here.

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