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- Exploring the outside in, coming to an end, and starting from $0
Exploring the outside in, coming to an end, and starting from $0
Logan
May 08, 2025
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Exploring the outside in, coming to an end, and starting from $0
Happy Thursday! Thanks for reading Intentional Dollar — where we look at old money ideas through a new perspective.
What’s inside?
One idea to experiment with
Two quotes from others
Three questions to dig deeper
Four lines of poetry for the point
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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One idea to experiment with:
The Outside In:
There’s no reliable external method for me to understand the quality of your life, and the same is true if you were to gaze at mine. Left to these limitations, we make quality of life assessments by status, possessions, and relevant external factors. We walk around saying, “Ah this person has what I want—they have the good life,” or, “That person must not be doing well; they bought a smaller house.”
It’s like a simple color filter. We scan the environment and bin everyone into two distinct, simplified groups: red circle people and green circle people.
Red circle people are those we don’t envy: junky car, disheveled clothes, old house, low-status job. Their exterior looks less than desirable and we assume the internal must be an identical representation: red, red. The other bin is the green circle group—they have what we want. By all external signals, they are green, green.
A designer dress paints a clear exterior image, but reveals nothing about the quality of the owner’s internal state. Perhaps the exterior dress is to mask a deep unhappiness inside. Perhaps the put-together exterior is a false facade hiding the shambles below. Perhaps the money we assume exists was already spent or borrowed to paint the picture. The point is, we don’t know.
Consumption is deftly capable of hiding the underlying internal state, which is why it remains a poor proxy for measuring true quality of life.
This said, we constantly assume the green outside equals green inside. All good: big custom home, happy family. New BMW, fulfilling and amazing job. Conversely, we assume the red exterior means awful internal states: junky car…you’re poor, hate your job, lack a strong family connection, and have low-status? This doesn’t quite make sense, yet we still behave this way—looking up to the haves and down on the have-nots.
Absolutely no one else on this planet knows how you feel better than you do. You know the flaws, the failures, and the fractures intimately. You know about the credit card statement that you can’t pay. You know about the fault line in your family. You know about the empty bank account. Successes are far more visible than failures, and we can hide a lot with external masks.
This upward envy leads us down the consumption path. Pursuing possessions and status like the gold at the end of the rainbow. What we can’t attain through emulation, we fantasize about having. Envious, we dream of what it’s like to be them.
Naval Ravikant said it was like wanting pieces of others’ lives but not the full package. And that’s not the deal. It’s all or nothing.
And I think this highlights the point. We don’t really know what quirks, sacrifices, and pain that culminated in the outward presentation of what someone else has. But we probably wouldn’t want them.
We’re all a giant commingled ball of red and green, good and bad, successes and failures.
you and I mistake reality by expecting the outside appearance to mirror the internal state
Two quotes on coming to an end:
All comes to an end. If you’re living so that others’ bestow their admiration upon you, remember this: you come to an end and those admirers do too. Better to pursue more durable endeavors.
“Everything lasts for a day, the one who remembers and the remembered.”
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
Three questions on starting from $0:
If you lost everything (job, assets, home, college degree, etc) and had to restart, where would you begin, what would you do?
Assuming you can’t make it back the same way you originally made it, what would you do?
What can you learn from this sunk cost risk aversion that rests inside?
Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.
Four lines of poetry for the point:
What’s on the outside doesn’t always show
The internal states that wear a red glow
We expect the external to mirror what’s within
Living perpetually deceived by the high status human
Contact Me:
Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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