【翻译】如何输掉时间和金钱 How To Lose Time And Money

推荐语：投资是包装成资产转移的烧钱黑盒，狗屁工作是自我陶醉式浪费时间陷阱

原文：Paul Gramham - How To Lose Time And Money
**翻译：**FesonX

1998 年我们卖掉自己的初创公司，我突然有了一笔巨款。当时我必须思考一个以前从未想过的问题：怎么留住这笔钱。我知道返贫和致富都是有可能的。但过去几年我总在研究致富之路，却对由富转贫一无所知。如今，为了避免返贫，我必须知道返贫的路径有哪些。
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.

由此我开始关注财富是如何流失的。如果你问孩童时期的我，富人是怎么变穷的，我会回答说他们花光了自己所有的钱。那是发生在书和电影的情节，因为这种方式最精彩纷呈。实际上，大部分财富并不是因为花费超支流失的，而是由于投资失败。
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.

大手笔花钱时你很难不会注意到。品味一般的人花掉几万美金会觉得”哇，我花了好多钱“。而一旦你开始交易金融衍生品，你会在眨眼间烧掉一百万美金（有多少损失多少，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.

大多数人眼里，把钱花在奢侈品上会引起警惕，投资就不会。购买奢侈品似乎是一种享乐行为。除非你继承财产或者买彩票中了一笔钱，你已被规训为放纵会遭致困境。投资绕过了这些警告。你并没有在花钱；你只是把钱转移为另一种资产。这也是为什么当别人向你推销昂贵的东西时，会告诉你”这是一笔投资“。
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.”

解决方法是培养一个新的警示。这是一件棘手的事，因为阻止你过度消费的预警太深入人心了，几乎像刻在我们基因里，而阻止你做出糟糕投资的警告则需要学习，并且这个警告有时候是相当违反直觉的。
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.

前段时间我意识到一些令人震惊的事：与时间相关的场景和金钱很相似。最危险的浪费时间行为并不是花在玩乐上，而是用在做虚假的工作上。当时间被花在玩乐时，你很清楚你在自我放纵。警报很快就拉响了。如果哪天早晨我起床，躺沙发上看一整天电视，我会感觉糟透了。光想这件事就让我畏惧。躺在沙发上看两个钟电视，我就会开始觉得不舒服，更别说待一整天。
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.

当然，我也有呆在电视机前一整天的日子——如果我问自己，那天你做了什么，这些日子都会以一事无成作为答案结束。过完这些天后，我的感受也很糟糕，但没有比呆在沙发上看一整天电视的更糟的了。如果我花一天时间看电视我会觉得自己在堕落。如果我花一整天做着表面上像真的工作但并没干成任何事的时候，同样的警铃并不会响起。例如，坐在办公桌前处理邮件。并不有趣，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.

对于时间和金钱，避免享乐已经不足以保护你。也许足够保护狩猎和采集者，也许对所有前工业社会都受用。因此，天性和后天培养的结合可以让我们避免自我放纵。但这个世界已经变得更复杂了：现在最危险的陷阱，是绕过自我放纵的警报、模仿更符合道德感的行为。最糟糕的是，这些行为甚至很无聊。
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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