The Die With Zero Cheat Code Part 1

PS The audiobook version of my book Deep Response is now up on Audible/Amazon. As of Friday it’s something like 50% because of inscrutable Amazon-algorithm reasons. Non-Amazon option coming soon.

Several months ago Sarah asked me if I thought about mortality much, and what I thought about Bill Perkin’s book Die With Zero (DWZ).

I do think about mortality much, as it happens, and I used her question as an excuse to read DWZ. Turns out I do have thoughts about it. Here’s part 1, an overview.

The DWZ Claims:

To be for people with surplus wealth. He comes right out and says if you’re scraping to get by, the book is of little value to you. He is specifically targeting oversavers - people who work most of their lives and die with large fortunes that they spent very little of.
The purpose of life is to have positive/fulfilling/rich/rewarding/etc experiences.
Money is the primary way to access experiences.
(Implicit, not stated: the primary purpose of work/a job is to generate money)
Money left unspent when you die represents un-lived experiences - it represents a waste of labor.
The primary forms of wealth are time, money, and health.
As you age, your access to certain kinds of experiences will diminish and even close. (For example, you cannot have a young-20-somethng European hostel-backpacking experience if you are a 60yo with a bad back and bougie tastes).

The DWZ advice, in oversimplified list form, is to:

Organize your desired experiences per decade, so you don’t lose access to experiences as your age increases/health declines.
Get your financial affairs in order so that your baseline needs are met,
Execute bequeathments before you die, not after.
Allocate your surplus wealth to your desired-experience list with the aim to spend approximately all of it by the time you are likely to die.

My claims in response to DWZ:

If everyone followed the DWZ advice we would burn the planet up even faster than we already are: from a resource stewardship perspective his advice is ecocidal. I state this as a technical/thermodynamic opinion, not a moral one. GDP is a measure of economic consumption and is tightly correlated to energy and resource usage, of which we’re already at 1.7x times the global sustainable limit. This is a matter of math, not sin, on the first order. I leave second-order ‘moral’ claims to others.
The fundamental premise of DWZ assumes that The Way to get a good life is to buy it - to convert money into experiences. DWZ is ideologically consumer-core.
The right cheat code unlocks for a much higher percentage of the population the high-fulfillment life that DWZ is attempting to point at from within the ideological constraints of consumerism. No surplus wealth required, just time and attention.
Bonus: with the DWZ Cheat Code not only is high-fulfillment unlocked for most humans, we don’t have to trash the planet to do it.

I’ll expand my thoughts on Die with Zero in Part II.

Practically Speaking

I’m a huge fan of wheat and rye. I get the stuff in 25lb sacks for north of 1,000kcal/$ - organic, grown in the US, and packed with nutrients. I make hearty pancakes and flatbread with it.

The trick is, I have to mill it. I had access to a mill at Quail Haven (I’ve never known my mom to be without a grain mill) but now that I’m up in Alaska I needed my own mill.

Grain mills got popular after the pandemic and prices rose. A used Whispermill goes for $300 minimum on ebay.

I found a Whispermill for $167 on ebay - the catch being that it was just the mill, without the filter-bucket that the milled flour ejects into. It’s sort of an important component, but I figured I could rig something up. Behold:

A stick of PEX pipe, a re-purposed protein powder jug, some register filter pads, and five minutes with a drill bit later, and I’m in wheat-milling business again.

Fatbikes are Made for Alaska

I’m back in Alaska, just outside of Fairbanks.

I got a fatbike (a 2011 Salsa Mukluk) and am hustling to be prepared to do a bikepack trip with some friends in the White Mountains in a week.

Sunrise ride

11F (-12C). Balmy for this time of year.