Health: The Table Everything Else Sits On
You don’t have to be smart to get rich. You have to stay alive.
In the money tree I said the whole thing runs on two inputs: the seed you plant, and the time you let it grow. In where capital comes from I spent a whole post on the seed. This post is the other input. The one nobody can earn for you, sell you, or hand you. Time.
Here’s the strange thing about time in this game. We’re lucky — those of us with access to the US stock market sit in front of an engine that has paid out for a century. Lots of people on Earth don’t get that access by default. But if you’ve got it, the math is almost insultingly simple. You don’t need to pick winners. You just need to stay alive a long time.
So the most important financial skill turns out not to be financial at all. It’s staying alive, and staying well, long enough for the tree to do its work.
The table and the things on it
I just listened to Diary of a CEO, and one image from it stuck. Picture a table. On the table sits everything you own and love — your job, your money, your family, your friends, your hobbies. The table itself is your health and your safety.
Lose something on the table, and you survive it. Lose your job — you still have your family, your friends, your time, your next move. The table holds. You rebuild. But lose the table — your health, your life — and everything on it crashes to the floor at once. There’s no rebuilding from that. The job, the money, the tree you spent forty years growing: all of it only has value while there’s a you to own it.
Safety is one rule: don’t die
Safety, stripped to the bone, is a single instruction: don’t die. No matter what.
Most of staying alive isn’t heroic. It’s subtraction. Don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t do the stupid, thrilling, low-odds thing that has a small chance of ending everything. Most catastrophes aren’t bad luck falling out of a clear sky. They’re someone choosing, just once, to stand somewhere they didn’t need to stand, or do something they didn’t need to do.
I’m not selling fear. I’m saying: when a choice carries a small chance of ending the table, the upside almost never covers it. A good time is not worth the table. Boring and alive beats exciting and gone.
I built a rough life-expectancy estimate to make this concrete. Watching a number move when you change one habit lands harder than any lecture, including this one.
“But I’ll miss out” — you already do, and it’s fine
Here’s the quiet fear underneath all the risk-taking: play it safe, and you miss the experiences that make life worth living. I felt this too. Let me try to talk us both down.
There will always be experiences you never get to have. You can’t climb Olympus Mons on Mars yet. You can’t talk to Einstein because he is dead. You will not know what it’s like to see in the dark by echolocation, the way a bat does. Your body isn’t built with that sense. The whole world only ever reaches you through your nervous system. You are, permanently, limited to the senses you were issued. An entire ocean of experience is simply off-limits to the hardware you’re running. If you want to feel how much is out there, zoom from an atom to the whole universe in one scroll. Almost all of it, you will never touch.
So a certain amount of missing out isn’t a tragedy. It’s the baseline condition of being a person. The list of things you’ll never feel is already infinite. Skydiving, bungee jumping, what a mansion feels like to live in — drop those on the “never” pile, and the pile stays the same size. It was infinite already.
And one more thing: even the experiences you do chase don’t stay. We burn through novelty fast. The thrill, the view, the new thing — within weeks it turns into wallpaper your eyes slide right past. I’ve watched it happen to every shiny thing I ever wanted badly. The feeling you risked the table for has a shorter shelf life than you think.
So if not sensation, then what?
Which leads somewhere I didn’t expect. If raw sensation and pure emotion fade this fast — if they’re not actually the point — then what is the point of a life?
I genuinely don’t know. But I’m sure you can’t find the answer if you’re not around to look for it. Whatever the meaning turns out to be, every version of it requires you to still be here. Staying alive isn’t the goal. It’s the precondition for ever having one.
That’s enough reason for me. Protect the table. Keep looking.
What about sacrifice for a better world?
Answer is no, because you may be wrong. You can never be 100% sure that you will not regret. If you die for it, there is 100% chance to never find out.
How to actually keep the table standing
Lectures are easy. Here’s the boring, doable version — the habits I try to hold myself to, with mixed success.
Sleep. Fall asleep on time. Wake up on time. The same hours every day, so your body stops fighting you. This is the one I write about in waking on the first alarm. Bad sleep makes the diet harder, the exercise harder, the thinking worse. Fix sleep first. The research that made me stop treating sleep as optional is in Why We Sleep.
Move every day. Not a heroic gym program you’ll quit in March. Every day — even if it’s just a stretch. A daily small thing beats a weekly big thing you keep skipping. You are a sports person. Identity drives habit. Build the habit until you feel bad without exercise. I track mine in a plain-text workout app, and keep the streak honest with Redo.
Eat for the body, not the tongue. The flavor is not the goal. Sugar, salt, fried crunch — those are feelings, superficial and fleeting. A sense is chemical reactions in your brain. The same wallpaper problem as everything else. Eat for the machine instead: vegetables, nuts, berries, beans, less processed food, low sugar, less fried.
The surprising part: do it often enough and your body learns to want it. Even your gut bacteria shift over to the new menu and start asking for it. Taste isn’t fixed. It’s trainable. You can teach yourself to crave the thing that’s good for you.
Lastly, permit yourself to steal the taste from very tiny portions if you really crave it.