Two Core Desires: The Margin Has Already Been Found is a proposition of self-understanding (suffering and motivation). It holds that the whole of what a life asks for can be collapsed into two things—the desire to awaken (in order to leave suffering and find joy) and the desire for financial freedom (in order to buy back the time to awaken)—and that, on the question of how to allocate the hours of a life, the “margin” has already been found: meditation, together with the work that issues from meditation, is far more worth doing than pouring great quantities of time into socializing or making money, though being with one’s family remains essential. The original formulation runs: “1. To want to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find joy. 2. To want financial freedom—in order to have time to awaken. ‘If these two can be done, every problem is solved.‘”
The Convergence of Two Desires
The starting point of the proposition is an extreme act of reduction: compressing the tangle of life’s goals down to two core desires and no more. The first is the desire to awaken, whose aim is to leave suffering and find joy; the second is the desire for financial freedom, whose aim is to buy back the time to awaken. These two are the root that suffices to settle everything:
- To want to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find joy. 2. To want financial freedom—in order to have time to awaken. “If these two can be done, every problem is solved.”
The two are not laid side by side as equals; they stand in a hierarchy of means and end. Financial freedom is not itself the terminus. Its entire value lies in “buying time”—redeeming the stretch of life that would otherwise be spent earning a living and reinvesting it into awakening. Awakening is the true end, for it points toward leaving suffering and finding joy. In other words, this is a single, one-directional chain: wealth as the lever, time as the intermediary, awakening as the terminus. This “let one thing govern all” reduction shares its root with the line of thought in Long-Termism: Abstraction Reaches the Essence, and the Process Is to Be Savored—abstracting until one touches the essence.
Wealth as the Ransom for Time
The second desire calls for separate comment, 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 retains only one function: to buy time back. Its logic runs thus—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 an end in itself.
This stance is mutually confirmed by 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 in Net Gains for the Soul: Disenchanting the Pursuit of Money—earning money is granted no ultimate value of its own; it is affirmed only insofar as it can serve a higher end.
The Margin Already Found
If the first two sections set the ordering of ends, then “the margin” answers the operational question: within a finite day, where should each unit of time be put. The judgment is that meditation, together with the work that issues from the process of meditation, carries a marginal value far higher than socializing or simply making money:
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. (original wording)
The “margin” here is a trade-off in the economic sense: when one more unit of time is invested in meditation and the work tied to it, the return already plainly exceeds what the same unit of time put into socializing or making money could buy. At the margin, therefore, time should keep flowing toward the former. But this judgment does not dismiss every non-meditative activity across the board—being with one’s family is singled out and marked “essential,” forming a hard constraint that lies outside the marginal calculus. This runs in one line 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 comparison of “worth it or not.”
Finance Bows Out, and the Center of Gravity Shifts
This margin was not established out of nowhere; it came through a shift in the center of gravity. Long years were given over to finance, yet the positioning of finance was always instrumental—it was at once a way of knowing the world and a source of income, and both served a higher end:
Since finance is merely my way of knowing the world, and also my current source of income, I have kept at it. But the age of AI has arrived, and my focus will turn to AI and to the practice that AI cannot replace.
Here two reasons are given for the shift in the center of gravity. First, finance was never more than “a way of knowing the world” plus “a source of income”; it holds 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 has reordered the ranking of value: whatever can be replaced by AI suffers a loss in worth, while “the practice that 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”. Thus the center of gravity moves from finance toward AI and practice, which is in essence pressing time still further onto the main chain of “buying time to awaken.”
The Inner Consistency 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 joy) → the layer of means (financial freedom, for the sake of buying time) → the layer of operation (the margin: time flows toward meditation and its attendant work, 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 leaving suffering and finding joy, that final demand; and within this proposition awakening is presupposed as an inner labor that no external thing can stand in for, that not even AI can replace—a point that can only be fully grasped by reference to 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 freedom that comes of seeing more clearly. It is for just this reason that “every problem is solved” is no optimistic assertion but the logical conclusion that follows once this chain of ends is walked through to the end: when time is redeemed and continually invested in awakening, every other demand loses its reason to exist on its own.
Sources
- My Archive—the two core desires: “to want to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find joy,” “to want financial freedom—in order to have 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 positioning of finance and “my focus will turn to AI and to the practice that 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