推薦語：投資是包裝成資產轉移的燒錢黑盒，狗屁工作是自我陶醉式浪費時間陷阱
原文：Paul Gramham - How To Lose Time And Money
翻譯：FesonX
1998 年我們賣掉自己的初創公司，我突然有了一筆鉅款。當時我必須思考一個以前從未想過的問題：怎麼留住這筆錢。我知道返貧和致富有都是可能的。但過去幾年我總在研究致富之路，卻對由富轉貧一無所知。如今，爲了避免返貧，我必須知道返貧的路徑有哪些。
When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.
由此我開始關注財富是如何流失的。如果你問孩童時期的我，富人是怎麼變窮的，我會回答說他們花光了自己所有的錢。那是發生在書和電影的情節，因爲這種方式最精彩紛呈。實際上，大部分財富並不是因爲花費超支流失的，而是由於投資失敗。
So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.
大手筆花錢時你很難不會注意到。品味一般的人花掉幾萬美金會覺得”哇，我花了好多錢“。而一旦你開始交易金融衍生品，你會在眨眼間燒掉一百萬美金（有多少損失多少，真的）。
It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking "wow, I'm spending a lot of money." Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.
大多數人眼裏，把錢花在奢侈品上會引起警惕，投資就不會。購買奢侈品似乎是一種享樂行爲。除非你繼承財產或者買彩票中了一筆錢，你已被規訓爲放縱會遭致困境。投資繞過了這些警告。你並沒有在花錢；你只是把錢轉移爲另一種資產。這也是爲什麼當別人向你推銷昂貴的東西時，會告訴你”這是一筆投資“。
In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. Luxuries seem self-indulgent. And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery, you've already been thoroughly trained that self-indulgence leads to trouble. Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment."
解決方法是培養一個新的警示。這是一件棘手的事，因爲阻止你過度消費的預警太深入人心了，幾乎像刻在我們基因裏，而阻止你做出糟糕投資的警告則需要學習，並且這個警告有時候是相當違反直覺的。
The solution is to develop new alarms. This can be a tricky business, because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive.
前段時間我意識到一些令人震驚的事：與時間相關的場景和金錢很相似。最危險的浪費時間行爲並不是花在玩樂上，而是用在做虛假的工作上。當時間被花在玩樂時，你很清楚你在自我放縱。警報很快就拉響了。如果哪天早晨我起牀，躺沙發上看一整天電視，我會感覺糟透了。光想這件事就讓我畏懼。躺在沙發上看兩個鍾電視，我就會開始覺得不舒服，更別說待一整天。
A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.
當然，我也有呆在電視機前一整天的日子——如果我問自己，那天你做了什麼，這些日子都會以一事無成作爲答案結束。過完這些天后，我的感受也很糟糕，但沒有比呆在沙發上看一整天電視的更糟的了。如果我花一天時間看電視我會覺得自己在墮落。如果我花一整天做着表面上像真的工作但並沒幹成任何事的時候，同樣的警鈴並不會響起。例如，坐在辦公桌前處理郵件。並不有趣，但它一定是工作。
And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work.
對於時間和金錢，避免享樂已經不足以保護你。也許足夠保護狩獵和採集者，也許對所有前工業社會都受用。因此，天性和後天培養的結合可以讓我們避免自我放縱。但這個世界已經變得更復雜了：現在最危險的陷阱，是繞過自我放縱的警報、模仿更符合道德感的行爲。最糟糕的是，這些行爲甚至很無聊。
With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they're not even fun.
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