A Quotation
“The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.” -Willem de Kooning
I think the reason this quote struck me is this: the history of human progress seems to be the increasing fraction of time spent on leisure activities. Indeed, the people who make the greatest leaps forward seem to be the people who devote the most time to “leisure”, broadly defined. What I mean by this is that the less time you have to spend putting food on your families (as the president would say) the more time you have to devote to pursuing something you really care about. The holy grail, of course, is a job where you are doing what you would be doing otherwise and you just happen to be paid for doing it. The world would be a different place if folks like Isaac Newton hadn’t had the leisure time to sit around thinking and observing. The best thing about this is that our leisure time is set to explode in our lifetimes as robotics and miniaturization offload increasingly more human activity to machines.
