Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...
"But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it."
(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)
I like this mindset and have tried to adopt it as I’ve made some money. What has proven more insidious than being tempted to buy yachts though is just the daily creep of spending slightly more on everyday things or when you travel.
I think you're referring to the agricultural revolution, before which humans were hunter-gatherers. But even when people were moving around a lot, they didn't go very far, and I don't think it was for the same reasons.
> Hunter-gatherers tends to have much greater home ranges than pre-industrial sedentary farmers. It has been estimated that pre-industrial English people living in small townships would have had a home range of 900 hectares (9 km2), close to that predicted for an omnivorous mammal of their same body mass.
> Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development.
With the development of agriculture, people staying in one place seems to have been the normal for a while now.
Even with the hunter-gatherer societies we know about, AIUI, they tend to have a village/community from which they go out from, i.e., they are 'non-migratory'.
One of the dictionary definitions of “sedentary” refers to living in the same spot and not traveling, usually used in anthropology to talk about non-nomadic populations.
Traveling is something I live for. It’s been a great joy in my life to see and experience the variety of nature and culture around the world. You can certainly warp it into an extravagant experience though. I’m struggling to see where narcissism comes in though - maybe travel with the intent of showing off on social media?
Not sure if I'd call it narcissism, but whenever I hear about friends of mine (mostly friends of friends to be fair) going to Japan after they'd just gone on a cruise to Antarctica, and the trek through the Alps is also already planned, it makes me feel uneasy, but I can't quite put my finger on why. I've always felt uneasy around people that spend so much money on themselves and their own pleasures.
I'm unsure why I feel uneasy, but I guess I'd be less uneasy when someone has a lot of money and they spend it on things that others can enjoy too. That's just me though, I'm not trying to influence what people do with their money.
I give away a lot, or buy people things I know they'd enjoy. I feel bad spending a lot on myself if I know other people need it more. Or maybe it's a selfish thing to make me feel less bad when I do spend on myself.
I bought a house, lived there for a couple years and then bought a better tractor (Kubota L45) than we had on the farm growing up. Now I can get 10 truckloads of woodchips from ChipDrop and mulch a whole acre of my yard in an afternoon.
Interestingly; that goes to whether someone is a hedonist or not. Dumping money into personal pleasures would defeat the point of the wealth for many. The idea of bettering themselves is expressed through boosting social status rather than hedonistic pleasure. If you gave the average man on the street more money they'd buy yachts and whatnot because they know that people have yachts generally have a higher social status than people who do not. They don't have a strong concept of wealth independent of status.
You can see Francis bacon's studio in Dublin. They moved it from London to a museum in Dublin. I don't think he would have liked that - he was born in Dublin but I think he lived his life in London and maybe didn't care for Dublin that much.
It's a god damn mess. Shit is piled everywhere. You can see some works in progress. Apparently he bought a lot of art books of other artists. It was a big process to move it:
"she assembled a team of conservators, curators, and archaeologists to carry out the move. The archaeologists made survey and elevation drawings of the small studio, mapping out the spaces and locations of all the objects, while the conservators prepared the works for travel and curators tagged and packed each of the items, including the dust. The walls, doors floor and ceiling were also removed."
She made it as a present for her son. Maybe only he is the big Terry Pratchett fan? On the other hand, this is made with so much love to detail, she obviously knows a lot about Pratchett.
All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4)
It's wild how you can read basically any Discworld book and find gems like that one. I read them as a teenager and loved them, going back to them decades later I find that there was so much wisdom in there that my teenage brain hadn't even begun to appreciate.
Guards, Guards (from 1987) is crammed with them:
> They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...
> No one said anything. The cowards, thought each man.
So much insight about the human condition in those books.
I have to weigh in with my favorite quote, also from Guards! Guards!
> ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
> He waved his thin hand and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.
> “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us [bad people]....we’re the only ones who know how to make things work."
> "You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”
> > ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
A little more highfalutin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:
> The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Many many of his books were best-sellers, and remained so for a long time.
Plus I suspect a lot of parents had them around the house, and they've found a second life in their children.
The covers always fascinated my child, for example. I have the complete collection of Discworld novels as paperbacks, and I remember my kid looking at them, pulling them off the shelf to do so, even before he could read.
In short Pratchett was very much mainstream, in the UK for a long, long time.
You're kidding. That's a miniature setting? I know that a photo can elide details that give us scale but I would never have noticed. I thought the coat hanger was a bit oddly gaudy and blobby for a full size but if it were miniature that makes sense. Hard to get that detail. Nicely done! Also, the website itself is pretty neat and old school. I'm quite the fan.
You can see the shadow that the frame is casting in to the miniature, if that helps you see it.
To my eye the grain on the desk also looks far too large compared to the way it would look with such a grain on a regular sized desk photgraphed from the implied distance.
You can see the gaming influence in several of the books. In particular, a big part of Snuff was inspired by the goblin caves in Oblivion (IIRC had had a mod created that made the goblins peaceful, and he also contributed to the Vilja companion mod), and you can see his love of the Thief games in various parts of Night Watch and Making Money.
Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...
"But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it."
(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)
I like this mindset and have tried to adopt it as I’ve made some money. What has proven more insidious than being tempted to buy yachts though is just the daily creep of spending slightly more on everyday things or when you travel.
Traveling is a strange phenomenon that has mutated into a narcissistic behavior. Not sure where it comes from.
Care to explain more?
Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development.
I think you're referring to the agricultural revolution, before which humans were hunter-gatherers. But even when people were moving around a lot, they didn't go very far, and I don't think it was for the same reasons.
> Hunter-gatherers tends to have much greater home ranges than pre-industrial sedentary farmers. It has been estimated that pre-industrial English people living in small townships would have had a home range of 900 hectares (9 km2), close to that predicted for an omnivorous mammal of their same body mass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
> Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development.
With the development of agriculture, people staying in one place seems to have been the normal for a while now.
Even with the hunter-gatherer societies we know about, AIUI, they tend to have a village/community from which they go out from, i.e., they are 'non-migratory'.
Sedentary isn't the word you're looking for.
One of the dictionary definitions of “sedentary” refers to living in the same spot and not traveling, usually used in anthropology to talk about non-nomadic populations.
what word would you suggest?
Domesticated.
Homebodies, grounded, rooted?
settled, static, parochial
Traveling is something I live for. It’s been a great joy in my life to see and experience the variety of nature and culture around the world. You can certainly warp it into an extravagant experience though. I’m struggling to see where narcissism comes in though - maybe travel with the intent of showing off on social media?
Not sure if I'd call it narcissism, but whenever I hear about friends of mine (mostly friends of friends to be fair) going to Japan after they'd just gone on a cruise to Antarctica, and the trek through the Alps is also already planned, it makes me feel uneasy, but I can't quite put my finger on why. I've always felt uneasy around people that spend so much money on themselves and their own pleasures.
Would you be less uneasy if those people earned less money or gave more money away?
I'm unsure why I feel uneasy, but I guess I'd be less uneasy when someone has a lot of money and they spend it on things that others can enjoy too. That's just me though, I'm not trying to influence what people do with their money.
What do you, or friends you are not uneasy around, spend your money on?
I give away a lot, or buy people things I know they'd enjoy. I feel bad spending a lot on myself if I know other people need it more. Or maybe it's a selfish thing to make me feel less bad when I do spend on myself.
I bought a house, lived there for a couple years and then bought a better tractor (Kubota L45) than we had on the farm growing up. Now I can get 10 truckloads of woodchips from ChipDrop and mulch a whole acre of my yard in an afternoon.
Interestingly; that goes to whether someone is a hedonist or not. Dumping money into personal pleasures would defeat the point of the wealth for many. The idea of bettering themselves is expressed through boosting social status rather than hedonistic pleasure. If you gave the average man on the street more money they'd buy yachts and whatnot because they know that people have yachts generally have a higher social status than people who do not. They don't have a strong concept of wealth independent of status.
This documentary of a French nouveau-millionaire perfectly showcases this mindset: https://youtu.be/jK4wnCLuBtI?is=2Q2QYQyfoCnaObhv (AI powered English subtitles available)
> "I bought 10 Kangoo vans"
> "I used to drink one bottle of [awful] wine a day, now I drink 10"
> "He bought 1500 pairs of the [horrible] shoes he wears everyday"
> "I used to spend a month a year camping, now I can spend 10 months a year camping"
Note: this is not a real documentary but a satirical one.
> "I used to spend a month a year camping, now I can spend 10 months a year camping"
Okay but most of those are contemptible and that one sounds like a marked change in one’s commitment to enjoying life.
You can see Francis bacon's studio in Dublin. They moved it from London to a museum in Dublin. I don't think he would have liked that - he was born in Dublin but I think he lived his life in London and maybe didn't care for Dublin that much.
It's a god damn mess. Shit is piled everywhere. You can see some works in progress. Apparently he bought a lot of art books of other artists. It was a big process to move it: "she assembled a team of conservators, curators, and archaeologists to carry out the move. The archaeologists made survey and elevation drawings of the small studio, mapping out the spaces and locations of all the objects, while the conservators prepared the works for travel and curators tagged and packed each of the items, including the dust. The walls, doors floor and ceiling were also removed."
https://hughlane.ie/arts_artists/francis-bacons-studio/
Thanks for sharing this. On a related note the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh has recreated sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi's studio, it's incredible to see: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/paolozzi-studio
Kinda surprised the website doesn't have clacks[1] overhead.
1. http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com
She made it as a present for her son. Maybe only he is the big Terry Pratchett fan? On the other hand, this is made with so much love to detail, she obviously knows a lot about Pratchett.
All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY. Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4)
Taken from: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather
It's wild how you can read basically any Discworld book and find gems like that one. I read them as a teenager and loved them, going back to them decades later I find that there was so much wisdom in there that my teenage brain hadn't even begun to appreciate.
Guards, Guards (from 1987) is crammed with them:
> They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...
> No one said anything. The cowards, thought each man.
So much insight about the human condition in those books.
I have to weigh in with my favorite quote, also from Guards! Guards!
> ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
> He waved his thin hand and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.
> “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us [bad people]....we’re the only ones who know how to make things work."
> "You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”
> > ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
A little more highfalutin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:
> The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450864-the-line-separating-...
And for modern times:
* “Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
I'm surprised how big pterry still is. I love his books, even today, but he's gone 10 years now, with no real new stuff.
I've always assumed to be non-mainstream, so I'm surprised but happy to see how he seems to move into the list of cultural eternals.
Many many of his books were best-sellers, and remained so for a long time.
Plus I suspect a lot of parents had them around the house, and they've found a second life in their children.
The covers always fascinated my child, for example. I have the complete collection of Discworld novels as paperbacks, and I remember my kid looking at them, pulling them off the shelf to do so, even before he could read.
In short Pratchett was very much mainstream, in the UK for a long, long time.
You're kidding. That's a miniature setting? I know that a photo can elide details that give us scale but I would never have noticed. I thought the coat hanger was a bit oddly gaudy and blobby for a full size but if it were miniature that makes sense. Hard to get that detail. Nicely done! Also, the website itself is pretty neat and old school. I'm quite the fan.
You can see the shadow that the frame is casting in to the miniature, if that helps you see it.
To my eye the grain on the desk also looks far too large compared to the way it would look with such a grain on a regular sized desk photgraphed from the implied distance.
TIL he was an avid gamer!
This is a great story about the Oblivion mod he worked on: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-story-behind-the-oblivion-mod-...
In his Usenet days he was also active on the newsgroups about the game Thief, he played that a lot.
You can see the gaming influence in several of the books. In particular, a big part of Snuff was inspired by the goblin caves in Oblivion (IIRC had had a mod created that made the goblins peaceful, and he also contributed to the Vilja companion mod), and you can see his love of the Thief games in various parts of Night Watch and Making Money.
Earlier in time, Interesting Times has a parody of Lemmings.
His daughter is (or at least was) a game designer.
That narrow desk makes me uneasy. Seems like a mini ordeal where you have to perfectly line up the chair to insert and extricate yourself.
This is so fascinating. had no idea he had a 6-screen set up, was a doom fan, and the Alzheimer's page hits hard, as he died of that
Pretty sure that was the point.
His reason for having 6 screens was "I don't have room for 8".