You win the game by maximizing eudaemonia.
Money is a unit. It measures a specific thing — perceived value, mostly — but it’s often treated as the score for the whole game. Stop confusing it for eudaemonia (a vibes-based measurement of how much one is living a satisfying life, derived from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). Money is only one input, and it’s less weighty than friendship, work, impact, hobbies, and legacy. (Individual weights vary.)
Here are units that I or loved ones have applied to life in the last week.
Joy per calorie. A method of choosing what food to consume. One slice of candied orange brings me more joy than an entire non-dried orange. One slice of sun-dried orange may bring even more.
Attention-efforts. Measuring time not in minutes but in effort required to keep your attention on the task. This is like golf: low score is good. The lower the attention-effort, the more you’ll naturally do it (and, generally, the more you’ll enjoy it). I create the grocery list because it’s low attention-effort for me. Partner buys the groceries because it’s low for her. Both of us hate the other’s activity. Dividing the task into more precise chunks enables better isolating and optimizing.
Keystrokes. How many discrete small movements it takes to achieve a task. (I presume it comes from a CS context where the number of operations mattered to a program.) My father uses this one — he texts “Y” for yes and “Ack” for “acknowledged.” With practice, by both minimizing and bunching together keystrokes into “chunks”, you’ll need fewer attention-efforts to execute the same program.
BTUs (British Thermal Units). The manner through which to keep Partner happy despite last week’s sweltering early summer here in New York City. A happy partner-hour is worth more BTUs than I’d otherwise run. (I installed an AC last week.)
Team alignment. A Partner addition. A vector with directionality (“for the team vs for the individual”) and magnitude. Use cases: “Are the other person and I aligned?” and “Is this person doing a selfish thing?” Also applicable in situations where your thoughts diverge from your feelings. When the dot product is too high, investigate.
Money. Perceived value. Not to be confused with actual value.
A unit I used at 17 and now realize was terrible: Facebook friends. The game rewarded me for playing it. Turns out it wasn’t “social media” — it was an ad platform.
A unit I still use and probably shouldn’t: hourly rate. Old habit from the ghostwriting years, when optimizing it was most of the game. A better version: (joy-per-hour + dollars-per-hour) / attention-efforts-per-hour. More-precise denominator, richer numerator, honest about what I’m actually trying to maximize.
As you age, you develop more precise units. You improve your own vision and you learn from friends.
Thanks, Partner.
Julian Wise 