时间和财富是如何流失的

时间总是在不经意间流逝，那金钱呢？

如果你有很多钱，成了富人，怎么能够保证自己不在回到贫困里呢？

昨天，我读到保罗·格雷厄姆的一篇文章，关于时间和财富是如何流失的。读完很有感触，就把它翻译了出来，以下是我的译文，请欣赏。

时间和财富是如何流失的

原文：《How To Lose Time and Money》

译者：subond

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.

1998年我卖掉了自己的创业工作，我突然得到了很多钱。我开始不得不思考从未想过的事情——如何不让金钱流失。我知道从富人变成穷人是可能的，就像从穷人变成富人是可能的一样。尽管我花了很多时间研究从穷人变成富人的道路，但我对从穷人变成富人的道路一无所知。现在，为了避开这些道路，我必须知道他们在哪。

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.

所以我开始关注财富是如何流失的。如果你像小孩子一样问我富人是如何变穷的，我会说他们花光了他们所有的钱。这就是书上和电影里经常发生的，因为能花光钱的方式真是多种多样。但事实上，大多数财富的流失不是因为过度支出，而是不良投资。

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.

很难在不注意的情况下发光一大笔钱。一个品味普通的人很难在没有意识到「哇，我竟然花了这么多钱」的情况下轻松花掉几万美元。然而，当你开始交易金融衍生品的时候，眨眼睛你可能就会损失一百万美元（实际上，你可以花掉更多，只要你想）。

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.”

**在大多数人的头脑里，花钱购买奢侈品会引发警报，但投资不会。**奢侈品就像自我放纵。除非你通过继承或者彩票获得了很多钱，否则你已经接受了彻底的训练，自我放纵会导致麻烦。投资绕过了这些警报。你没有花钱，你只是将一种资产变成了另一个资产。这就是为什么那些向你兜售昂贵物品的人会说“这是一种投资”。

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.

**解决办法就是开发新的警报。**这可能是一件棘手的事情，因为尽管防止过度支出的警报如此基本，甚至是刻在我们的 DNA 里，但防止不良投资的警报只能学习，并且有时相当反直觉。

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.

几天前，我意识到一件有意思的事情——在这件事情上，时间和金钱大致相同。**浪费时间最危险的方式不是娱乐，而是花在伪工作上。**当你花时间娱乐的时候，你知道自己在自我放纵。警报很快就会响起。如果有一天我早上醒来，坐在沙发上看了一整天的电视，我会觉得有什么事情非常不对劲。光是想想就让我畏缩。坐在沙发上看两个小时电视，我就会感到不舒服，更别说一整天了。

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.

然而，我肯定有过整天坐在沙发看电视的日子，如果你问我那天做了什么，答案会是：基本上什么也没做。这些日子过后，我也感觉很糟糕，但没有什么比整天在沙发上看电视更糟糕的了。如果我花了一整天看电视，我会觉得自己正在自我毁灭。但是，在我什么都没做的日子里，同样的警报不会响起，因为我正在的事情表面上看起来像是真正的工作。比如，你在办公桌前处理邮件。这不好玩。所以它必须是工作。

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.

时间也好，金钱也罢，避免娱乐已经不在能够保护你了。这可能足以保护原始社会的狩猎采集者，也许前工业社会的所有人们。所以，天性和后天结合促使我们避免自我放纵。但是世界开始变得复杂：现在最危险的陷阱是一些新的行为，这些通过更善意的模仿绕过自我放纵警报的行为。最糟糕的还有，它们甚至不好玩。

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

感谢Sam Altman，Trevor Blackwell，Patrick Collison，Jessica Livingston和Robert Morris阅读本文的草稿。