Reason for Living Newsletter No. 4 | Can You Treat Love Like a Business Deal?

Reviewed in this issue: The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Calson

Thomas Walker-Werth

Apr 18, 2024

Issue no. 4, 18 April 2024

Welcome to the Reason for Living newsletter!

In this issue:

Feature Article: Can You Treat Love Like a Business Deal?
Book Review: The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Calson
Recently Posted: Accepting that Your Brain’s Not Broken

Feature Article: Can You Treat Love Like a Business Deal?

Do you have any relationships in which it feels like you’re putting in more than you’re getting out? Or any in which you’re getting out a lot more than you’re giving?

Such imbalances—which can happen in all kinds of relationships, romantic, friendship, or business—can lead to a great deal of hurt and are ultimately destructive to both parties. One party becomes the giver, constantly sacrificing time and energy without reward. The other becomes the parasite, dependent on and beholden to their source of energy.

In order to evaluate when you’re in this kind of situation, it’s important to recognize that different kinds of relationships are built on different kinds of values. If you’re putting in a ton of effort at work, but your boss is paying you very little, the values in question are material—productive output vs. money—and can be quantified relatively easily. But in friendships and romantic relationships, the values involved are mostly spiritual—that is, such non-physical things as companionship, emotional support, inspiration, and respect—and these are much harder to measure.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not heartless or uncaring to keep track of how much value you’re getting out of a relationship vs. how much you’re putting in. Quite the opposite: it’s essential to a happy, flourishing life for all parties. Evaluating people on how much value they add to your life may sound cold and calculating, but if you bear in mind the difference between material and spiritual values, it’s actually the opposite—it’s deeply principled, moral, and comes straight from the core of who you are. The following quote from Ayn Rand is particularly helpful in clarifying this distinction:

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.

If you choose somebody to be your romantic parter or close friend, that should be someone you love because of his or her character. Such relationships are still trades of value for value, just like a business relationship or a casual friendship. But rather than money, pleasure, or company, the primary currency in these relationships is virtue—the principles and values that person embodies in action and which you admire. (Those material values are still part of the value you get from the relationship, but they are secondary.) Such people should reinforce the qualities of character you want to build in yourself. They should reflect the kind of person you seek to be.

When you’re considering how much value you get out of a relationship, consider how much value you place on the other person’s virtues of character. Do you admire that person’s choices? Do you wish you could be more like that person? Is he or she someone you’d rush to defend from moral criticism? If so, factor that value into your thinking when considering how much you get out of the relationship. If not, consider if the relationship is really as close as you think.

In Chapter 8 of Reason for Living, I discuss this topic in greater detail, and get into Aristotle’s helpful division of friendship into three categories: use friends, pleasure friends, and character friends. For updates on the book, follow the Reason for Living Instagram account at @rfl_reasonforliving.

Book Review: The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Calson

Do you want to be rich? Most of us do, but our culture is nonetheless quick to criticize anyone who admits to selfishly desiring and pursuing wealth. Books on achieving wealth are plentiful, but finding ones that don’t try to justify the desire for the good life in altruistic terms are hard to come by. Perhaps that’s part of why George S. Calson’s The Richest Man in Babylon is still in print nearly a century after its original publication: It accepts the idea that wanting to be wealthy is a legitimate goal and makes no attempt to justify it in selfless terms.

Another reason for the book’s enduring popularity is the innovative framework it uses to present the principles of financial management in a clear, easy-to-understand way. Rather than present a dry explanation of the ideas, it uses a series of fictional parables set in ancient Babylon, many of which involve people asking the titular “richest man in Babylon,” Arkad, for advice in making “gold come gladly” to their purses. Through these stories, you see the principles in action as the characters escape debt and achieve a greater degree of financial independence. The storytelling framework and colorful descriptions makes the lessons much more memorable than they would be in a matter-of-fact presentation.

The principles themselves are very simple and straightforward, yet most people today are unfamiliar with them thanks to the virtually complete lack of financial education in modern schooling. For example, in explaining the second of the book’s “Seven Cures for a Lean Purse,” “Control thy Expenses,” Arkad explains to his student of money-making: “What each of us calls our 'necessary expenses' will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary . . . Confuse not the necessary expenses with thy desires.” Many people will, when told they need to spend less if they want to get richer, object that they couldn’t afford to. But if they drill down into their expenditure, they will find things they don’t strictly need. In a modern context, these may include such things as TV streaming subscriptions, social nights out, and the latest smartphone or gaming system. Cutting out such expenditure and, instead, putting 10% of your monthly income directly into a savings pot (which you can later invest or loan out—the book includes a few sections on how to do so wisely) can “make thy gold multiply.”

The one downside of the Babylonian setting is that some of these sound principles are difficult to implement in today’s world of government financial regulation, with its constantly inflating currencies, heavy taxation of income and savings, and strict rules on moneylending. In those respects, the book is a welcome and necessary reminder that a simpler financial system is possible and desirable.

Until then, this book is an excellent starting point for those keen to change course from the multitude and get familiar with the basics of growing wealth. Once you’ve absorbed its principles, you can then proceed to study today’s financial world in more detail. Without those principles, the modern financial system, about which we are taught so little in school, can easily seem overwhelmingly complex and impenetrable.

Recently Posted: Accepting that Your Brain’s Not Broken

Are we in control of our minds, or are we slaves to our genetics?

These questions present a vicious false alternative, very common in modern discourse, which can make dealing with mental health conditions very challenging. All too often, those diagnosed with such conditions as ADHD, BPD, and autism are either encouraged to brush off the problem by sheer force of will, or to let it define every aspect of their lives.

Finding the rational middle ground—accepting the aspects of your nature that are beyond your control while taking charge of how you behave and life your life—can be very challenging. Fortunately, a few books exist that achieve this balance correctly, and one that does so for those dealing with ADHD is Accepting that Your Brain’s Not Broken by Dr. Tamara Rosier.

In this recent article for Objective Standard Institute’s blog, On Solid Ground, I relay some of the lessons I learned from this book and how they helped me manage my ADHD more effectively.

This Week’s Reason for Living Quote:

“Make an effort to stay aware of the good things happening in the world as well as the bad, and focus your emotional energy on the things you can actually control—your work, your life, your mental health—not global conflicts or whatever scare story the media has latched onto this week, month, year, or decade.”

Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life will be available for preorder in mid-late 2024.