Two Core Desires: The Margin Has Already Been Found is a proposition within the self-inquiry into suffering and motivation. It holds that the whole of what a life asks for can be compressed into two things—wanting to awaken (in order to leave suffering and find peace) and wanting financial freedom (in order to buy back the time for awakening)—and that, on the question of how to apportion the hours of one’s life, the “margin” has already been found: meditation, together with the work produced out of that meditative process, is far more worthwhile than pouring large amounts of time into socializing or making money, while being with one’s family remains necessary nonetheless. The original formulation runs: “1. To want to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find peace. 2. To want financial freedom—in order to have the time to awaken. ‘If these two can be done, every problem is solved.‘”
The Convergence of the Two Desires
The starting point of this proposition is an act of extreme reduction: compressing the tangle of life’s goals down until only two core desires remain. The first is wanting to awaken, whose end is to leave suffering and find peace; the second is wanting financial freedom, whose end is to buy the time to awaken. These two are called the root sufficient to settle everything:
- To want to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find peace. 2. To want financial freedom—in order to have the time to awaken. “If these two can be done, every problem is solved.”
These two are not parallel; they stand in the hierarchical relation of means to end. Financial freedom is not itself the terminus. Its entire value lies in “buying time”—redeeming the stretches of life that would otherwise be spent earning a living, and reinvesting them in awakening. Awakening is the true end, for it points toward leaving suffering and finding peace. In other words, this is a one-way chain that uses wealth as the lever, time as the intermediary, and awakening as the terminus. This “letting one thing govern all” reduction springs from the same source as the “abstracting until you touch the essence” line of thought in Long-Termism: Abstraction Reaches the Essence, and the Process Is to Be Savored.
Wealth as the Ransom for Time
The second desire calls for separate treatment, because it is the one most easily misread as a craving for wealth itself. In this proposition, financial freedom is stripped of its worldly connotation of possession, and only one function is kept: buying back time. Its logic runs—time is for awakening, and earning a living devours time, so financial freedom is needed to put an end to that devouring. Wealth is therefore the ransom for time, not the end in itself.
This stance corroborates Time Can Stretch Without Limit: Attention Is the Scarcest Thing of All: since attention and time are the most precious resources, the only legitimate reason to accumulate wealth is to free time from forced labor. It also echoes the disenchantment of money-making in Net Gains for the Soul: Disenchanting the Pursuit of Money—making money is granted no ultimate value of its own, and is affirmed only insofar as it can serve a higher end.
The Margin Already Found
If the first two sections give the ordering of ends, then the “margin” answers the operational question: within a finite day, where should each unit of time go. The judgment is that meditation, together with the work produced out of the meditative process, carries a marginal value far higher than socializing or mere money-making:
giving myself more time to devote to meditation and producing work from that process is far more worthwhile than spending huge amounts of time on social interactions or making money. But accompanying my family—that, I still consider essential. (verbatim from the original)
Here the “margin” is a trade-off in the economic sense: when one more unit of time is put into meditation and the work bound up with it, its return already plainly exceeds what the same unit of time would buy if spent socializing or making money. So at the margin, time should keep flowing to the former. Yet this judgment does not condemn all non-meditative activity wholesale—being with family is singled out as “essential,” forming a hard constraint that stands outside the marginal calculation. This is of a piece with The People You Hold Dear Are the Reason to Keep Going: family is not a cost to be optimized away but the very reason to keep going, and so it never enters the marginal weighing of “worth it or not.”
Finance’s Exit and the Shift of Center of Gravity
This margin was not fixed out of thin air; it was reached through a shift in the center of gravity. Long years had been thrown into finance, but the sense of what finance was had always been instrumental—it was both a way of understanding the world and a source of income, and both served a higher end:
Since finance is only my way of understanding the world, and is also my current source of income, I have kept at it all along. But the age of AI has arrived, and my focus will turn to AI and to the kind of practice AI cannot replace.
Two reasons for the shift are given here. First, finance was never more than “a way of understanding the world” plus “a source of income,” with no ultimate standing of its own—the same stance as the disenchantment of finance in Finance Is a Deadly Boring Game: Human Nature Is the Final Level. Second, the arrival of the age of AI reorders value: whatever can be replaced by AI loses worth, while “the kind of practice AI cannot replace” stands out all the more—precisely the core argued in AI Cannot Awaken: Meditation Is the One Thing AI Can Never Replace and What AI Cannot Do Is Worth the Most: The Moat Is Cost, Awakening, and “Becoming”. So shifting the center of gravity from finance toward AI and practice is, in essence, pressing time still further onto that main chain of “buying time to awaken.”
The Inner Coherence of the Proposition
Set the three cards side by side and a closed structure comes into view: the layer of ends (awakening, for the sake of leaving suffering and finding peace) → the layer of means (financial freedom, for the sake of buying time) → the layer of operation (the margin: time flowing to meditation and the work bound up with it, with family as a hard constraint). The three layers interlock, and no demand is left dangling. Awakening sits at the top because it points toward that final demand of leaving suffering and finding peace; and awakening, as this proposition presupposes it, is an inner discipline that can be replaced neither by any external thing nor by AI—a point that can only be fully grasped against Before Awakening, Fate Is Fixed; After Awakening, There Is Freedom and To Know the Illusion Is to Leave It: To See Through Is to Be Free: awakening is not more possession, but the release that comes from seeing more clearly. For just this reason, “every problem is solved” is not an optimistic assertion but the logical conclusion that follows once this chain of ends has been walked through: when time is redeemed and continually directed toward awakening, the remaining demands lose any reason to exist on their own.
Sources
- My Archive—the two core desires: “to want to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find peace,” “to want financial freedom—in order to have the time to awaken,” “if these two can be done, every problem is solved.”
- Learning English with Midjourney—the margin, in the original English: “meditation and producing work from that process is far more worthwhile than…social interactions or making money. But accompanying my family—that, I still consider essential.”
- Manuscript —the instrumental placement of finance and “my focus will turn to AI and to the kind of practice AI cannot replace.”
See also
- Time Can Stretch Without Limit: Attention Is the Scarcest Thing of All
- Before Awakening, Fate Is Fixed; After Awakening, There Is Freedom
- Finance Is a Deadly Boring Game: Human Nature Is the Final Level
- AI Cannot Awaken: Meditation Is the One Thing AI Can Never Replace
- The People You Hold Dear Are the Reason to Keep Going