Two Core Desires: The Margin Has Already Been Found is a proposition within self-knowledge (suffering and motivation). It holds that the whole of what a life asks for can be made to converge upon just 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 allot the time of one’s life, the “margin” has already been located: meditation, together with the work that issues from meditation, is far more worth doing than pouring large stretches of time into socializing or making money, while keeping company with one’s family remains necessary. The original formulation runs: “1. The desire to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find joy. 2. The desire for 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 proposition begins with an extreme act of reduction: it compresses the tangle of life’s goals down to two core desires and no more. The first is the desire to awaken, whose end is to leave suffering and find joy; the second is the desire for financial freedom, whose end is to buy back the time to awaken. These two are the root sufficient to settle everything:
- The desire to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find joy. 2. The desire for financial freedom—in order to have the 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 stretches of life that would otherwise be spent earning a living and redirecting them toward awakening. Awakening is the true end, for it points toward leaving suffering and finding joy. In other words, this is a single one-way chain that uses wealth as the lever, time as the intermediary, and awakening as the terminus. This kind of reduction—letting one thing govern all—shares its lineage with the move in Long-Termism: Abstraction Reaches the Essence, and the Process Is to Be Savored of “abstracting until one reaches the essence.”
Wealth as the Ransom for Time
The second desire needs separate comment, because it is the one most easily misread as a craving for wealth itself. In this proposition, financial freedom is stripped of any worldly connotation of possession and left with a single function: to buy back time. Its logic runs—time is for awakening, and earning a living devours time, so financial freedom is needed to put a stop to that devouring. Wealth is therefore the ransom for time, not the end.
This stance corroborates Time Can Stretch Without Limit: Attention Is the Scarcest Thing of All: if attention and time are the most precious resources of all, then 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—making money is granted no ultimate value in itself and is affirmed only insofar as it can serve a higher end.
The Margin Already Found
If the first two sections set out the ordering of ends, then the “margin” answers the operational question: within a finite day, where should each unit of time be invested? The judgment: meditation, together with the work produced through the process of meditation, carries a marginal value far above that of socializing or of merely 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. (verbatim from the original)
The “margin” here is a trade-off in the economic sense: when one more unit of time is invested in meditation and its attendant work, the return already plainly exceeds what the same unit of time would buy if put into socializing or earning. At the margin, then, time should keep flowing toward the former. Yet this judgment does not dismiss every non-meditative activity out of hand—keeping company with one’s family is singled out and marked “essential,” forming a hard constraint that lies outside the marginal calculus. 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 Exits, and the Center of Gravity Shifts
This margin was not fixed out of nowhere; it came through a shift in the center of gravity. Long immersion in finance came first, yet the sense of what finance was for had always been instrumental—it was both a way of knowing the world and a source of income, and both served a higher end:
Since finance is only 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 shift to AI and to the cultivation that AI cannot replace.
Here two reasons for the shift are given. First, finance was never more than “a way of knowing the world” plus “a source of income”; it holds no ultimate standing in itself—the same position as the disenchantment of finance in Finance Is a Deadly Boring Game: Human Nature Is the Final Level. Second, the coming of the age of AI has reordered value: whatever can be replaced by AI is devalued, while “the cultivation that AI cannot replace” is thrown into relief—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 the center of gravity moves from finance toward AI and cultivation, which in essence presses time still further onto that main chain of “buying time to awaken.”
The Inner Coherence of the Proposition
Put the three cards together and a closed structure becomes visible: the layer of ends (awakening, in order to leave suffering and find joy) → the layer of means (financial freedom, in order to buy time) → the layer of operation (the margin: time directed 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 summit because it points toward leaving suffering and finding joy, the final demand; and in this proposition awakening is presupposed to be an inner labor that cannot be replaced by any external thing, nor by AI—a point that can only be fully understood 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 possessing, but the release that follows seeing more clearly. It is just for this reason that “every problem is solved” is not an optimistic assertion but the logical conclusion 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 for existing on its own.
Sources
- My Archive—the two core desires: “the desire to awaken—in order to leave suffering and find joy,” “the desire for 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 English self-statement of the margin: “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 shift to AI and to the cultivation 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