Meaningful Returns

Dave Winer, one of the fathers of the Internet, wrote a great post on his blog the other day about Peter Thiel and “the struggle to live more than one life.”

The point of the post is this: no amount of money or cool things will allow you to be more than a single human. You can only drive one car at a time, sleep in one bed at a time, wear one pair of shoes at a time, live one life at a time.

I find this to be incredibly unsettling, because it draws attention to the unwanted reality that I am often not fully present in the place where I am by definition bodily present. But I also find this to be freeing, because it puts in sharp relief the absurdity of trying to outdo others with the way we spend money. And the funny thing about absurdity is that it can teach us things about ourselves that nothing else can.