The Newspaper, the Morning, the Silence.
I remember the morning clearly, though I could not tell you the exact date. It was one of those provincial Romanian autumn mornings when Botoșani wraps itself in a particular grey that is not quite fog and not quite cloud — a diffusion of light that makes everything feel slightly provisional, as if the day has not yet committed to existing. My father was still alive. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his hands around a mug of tea, and he was reading a newspaper. Not the economic supplement. Not the business pages. He was reading the human interest section — stories about ordinary people doing unremarkable things in unremarkable places — and he was completely absorbed.
"The most important investment you can make is in yourself. The second most important is in the people around you." — Paraphrased from Warren Buffett's philosophy of life
I asked him once why he never read the financial news. He was a mechanic. He understood systems: the hydraulic logic of a brake line, the thermal economy of an engine that runs cold in winter. Surely he would be curious about the economy, about markets, about the machinery of money. He looked up from the paper. He said: "I already know how that ends."
I did not understand him then. I was young enough to believe that not understanding something was a temporary condition — that all mysteries dissolved eventually into information, that the gap between ignorance and knowledge was merely a matter of time and effort. I thought he was being dismissive. Now I think he was being precise.
What he meant, I have come to believe, was not that he knew the outcome of any particular stock or currency. He meant that he understood the narrative structure of the financial story — its rising action, its false climaxes, its final reckoning. He had watched men in the neighbourhood accumulate things: a second car, a larger flat, a dacha outside the city. He had watched those same men grow incrementally lonelier with each acquisition, their worlds narrowing as their possessions multiplied. He understood how it ended because he had seen it end, repeatedly, in the lives of men he knew.
It was only years later, reading a transcript of a speech by Warren Buffett — a man whose relationship to capital is rather more complex than my father's — that I found the same thought expressed in a different register. Buffett, speaking to students at a university, said something to the effect that when you arrive at old age, you will not measure your life by the balance in your account. You will measure it by the number of people who genuinely love you. The specificity of "genuinely" matters. Not professionally admire. Not politely tolerate. Not dutifully attend. Love, with all the inconvenience and irrationality that word implies.
I have been thinking about that idea — and about my father's newspaper, and about Cory Doctorow's recent arguments about technofeudalism, and about what it means to be a person living inside the attention economy — ever since.
The Architecture of What We Measure
Let us be honest about the world we have built. We live inside a measurement apparatus of staggering sophistication and almost complete misdirection. We measure gross domestic product, which counts prison construction and divorce lawyers and cancer treatment as economic contributions but assigns no formal value to a grandmother who raises her grandchildren, to a neighbour who checks on an elderly man during a heatwave, to a friend who drives three hours because someone needed to not be alone. We measure follower counts and engagement metrics and conversion rates. We measure employee performance in quantifiable outputs and educational attainment in standardised scores. We have, over several generations, built an entire civilisation on the premise that what cannot be measured does not fully count.
This is not a moral failure so much as an epistemic one. The things that can be measured tend to be the things that are easy to measure — transactions, quantities, frequencies. The things that matter most — the quality of attention, the depth of commitment, the texture of affection between two people who have known each other long enough to know each other's silences — these resist quantification not because they are vague but because they are irreducibly particular. They belong to specific people in specific moments, and the moment you abstract them into data, something essential evaporates.
Warren Buffett understands this with a clarity that is almost paradoxical. Here is a man who has spent his professional life inside the most sophisticated measurement apparatus ever constructed — the capital markets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — and who has arrived, after seven decades of extraordinary financial success, at a conclusion that sounds almost naively simple: the metric that matters is love. Not love as sentiment, not love as rhetorical flourish, but love as the concrete, observable fact of whether other people choose to include you in their lives when they are under no obligation to do so.
This is a harder metric than it sounds. Money, at least, obeys rules. It accumulates predictably if you follow certain disciplines, invest patiently, avoid catastrophic errors. Love does not compound in the same way. It is not earned through diligence alone, nor protected by diversification. It requires something closer to what Brené Brown calls vulnerability — the willingness to be genuinely seen, which necessarily involves the risk of not being accepted. This is why many people, particularly those who have succeeded in financial terms, find the love metric so troubling. They are excellent at controlling variables. Love does not submit to control.
What the Longest Study of Human Happiness Actually Found
In 1938, a group of researchers at Harvard University began following 268 male undergraduate students with the intention of understanding what makes a good human life. The study, which became known as the Harvard Grant Study and has since been expanded into the broader Harvard Study of Adult Development, is now the longest-running longitudinal study of adult life in history. Its subjects have included presidents and addicts, war heroes and suicides, men who found contentment and men who spent their entire lives circling it.
Robert Waldinger, who became the study's fourth director, and Marc Schulz, who co-authored the landmark 2023 book The Good Life based on the data, summarised what eighty-plus years of evidence showed: the quality of relationships is the single strongest predictor of late-life health and happiness. Not wealth, though a baseline of financial security matters. Not professional achievement, though meaningful work contributes. Not intelligence, though it helps navigate difficulties. Relationships — their depth, their reciprocity, their capacity to provide genuine comfort in moments of distress.
What makes this finding both reassuring and slightly alarming is its specificity. The study did not find that any relationships would do. Acquaintances, professional networks, transactional friendships — these did not move the needle significantly. What mattered was what Waldinger describes as "social fitness": the ongoing, effortful maintenance of connections with people who know you, accept you, and choose to remain present in your life across time and change. This requires something that the modern economy actively discourages: availability. Presence. The willingness to be interrupted.
Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who worked in palliative care and published her observations in The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, found something consistent with Waldinger's data. The regrets she heard most frequently were not financial. No one lying in a hospice bed wished they had earned more or invested more wisely or climbed one additional rung on the professional ladder. They wished they had worked less. They wished they had stayed in contact with friends. They wished they had let themselves be happier — which, read carefully, means they wished they had permitted themselves to need other people more.
This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern so consistent across cultures and contexts that it begins to look like a structural feature of human experience rather than a cultural preference. We are, as the evolutionary anthropologists argue, deeply social animals — more social, in some respects, than our individualist mythologies acknowledge. Our nervous systems are literally regulated by contact with other people. Daniel Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology research suggests that the boundary between "self" and "other" is far more permeable than Western philosophy has generally acknowledged: we co-regulate each other's emotional states, we are shaped by the quality of our early attachment relationships in ways that persist across a lifetime, and we experience social exclusion in neural regions that overlap with physical pain.
If this is true — and the evidence suggests it is — then the cultural emphasis on individual achievement and financial accumulation is not merely a values problem. It is a biological miscalculation. We are optimising for the wrong variables.
Technofeudalism and the Privatisation of Connection
Here is where Cory Doctorow enters the argument, and where things become more complicated.
Doctorow, in his concept of "enshittification" and in the broader framework he has developed around platform capitalism, describes a process by which digital platforms progressively degrade their service to users while enriching themselves and their shareholders. But there is a dimension of this argument that deserves more attention than it usually receives: the enshittification of human connection itself.
Yanis Varoufakis, in Technofeudalism, makes the structural argument: digital platforms have recreated something analogous to feudal rent-extraction, positioning themselves as the unavoidable intermediaries through which all economic and social activity must pass. But the more insidious version of this, the one that concerns me when I think about the Buffett metric, is what happens to genuine human connection when it is routed entirely through platforms that have a direct financial interest in making it feel urgent, essential, and perpetually insufficient.
Social media does not want you to feel loved. It wants you to feel almost loved — close enough to keep scrolling, far enough to keep seeking. The architecture of approval — the like button, the follower count, the viral post — is not designed to produce the settled sense of being genuinely known and accepted by people who matter to you. It is designed to produce an addictive simulation of social approval that requires constant renewal and never quite resolves into the real thing. This is not an accident. It is the business model.
The technofeudal condition, as I understand it applied to the question of love and connection, is this: we have allowed the most intimate and essential dimension of human experience — the experience of being genuinely connected to other people — to be intermediated by platforms whose financial interest lies precisely in ensuring that connection remains permanently incomplete. We pay for access to the simulation of community with our attention, our data, and, gradually, our capacity to maintain the slower, less spectacular, more genuinely nourishing forms of human relationship that do not produce content.
A long conversation between two old friends, conducted over a meal that lasts four hours, generates nothing for any platform. It leaves no trace in any algorithm. It cannot be monetised, accelerated, or scaled. It is, from the perspective of the attention economy, almost entirely without value. And yet it is precisely the kind of exchange that Waldinger's research identifies as the substance of a good life.
Viktor Frankl's Question and the Silence Behind It
Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and several other concentration camps, and emerged with a therapeutic framework — logotherapy — built on a single premise: that the primary human motivation is not pleasure or power but the search for meaning. In Man's Search for Meaning, he describes observing, under conditions of extreme deprivation and terror, which prisoners maintained their psychological coherence and which collapsed. The determining factor, more than physical strength or practical resourcefulness, was what he called an orientation toward meaning — the sense that one's suffering was connected to something or someone beyond oneself.
The people who survived with their humanity intact, Frankl observed, were frequently those who maintained a vivid inner relationship with someone they loved — a wife, a child, a friend — even in the absence of any possibility of contact. Love, in Frankl's framework, is not merely an emotion. It is an orientation of consciousness, a way of being present to the world through one's connection to another person. It is, he wrote, the highest goal to which a person can aspire.
This is a long way from the spreadsheet model of human fulfilment. But it connects, in an unexpected way, to Morgan Housel's argument in The Psychology of Money — which is, at its core, not really about money at all. Housel's central observation is that financial decisions are emotional decisions, and that the emotional content of financial decision-making is almost never about money per se. It is about fear, status, identity, control, and the desire to protect the people one loves. The happiest relationship to money, Housel suggests, is one in which money is understood as a means — specifically, as a means of purchasing time and autonomy, which are themselves means to the end of spending genuine time with the people who matter.
The problem is that the accumulation of money has a tendency, once it passes a certain threshold of genuine security, to become self-reinforcing and self-justifying. The pursuit of additional wealth begins to feel meaningful in itself, independent of any purpose it might serve. This is what Ken Honda, drawing on Japanese philosophical traditions, describes as "money trauma" — the anxiety-driven relationship to financial accumulation that persists long after its original motivation has been addressed. Honda's concept of "true wealth," which overlaps with the Japanese idea of ikigai, places relational and experiential richness at the centre of a good life, with financial sufficiency as a necessary but clearly secondary condition.
What Aristotle Knew That We Have Forgotten
The Western philosophical tradition has, at its best, been quite clear about this. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, identifies eudaimonia — often translated as happiness but more accurately understood as flourishing or living well — as the highest human good. His analysis of what constitutes flourishing gives friendship a prominent place. Not friendship as networking, not friendship as mutual utility, but what he calls perfect friendship: the relationship between people who genuinely wish each other well for no reason other than the quality of the other person's character. This kind of friendship, Aristotle argues, takes time — years, in fact — to develop, because it requires sufficient mutual knowledge to be genuine rather than merely convenient.
The Stoics had a somewhat different angle but arrived at an adjacent conclusion. Seneca, writing to his friend Lucilius in letters that have survived two millennia, returns repeatedly to the question of how to live in relation to the fact of one's mortality. His consistent answer is that the quality of one's remaining time depends almost entirely on the quality of one's inner life and the authenticity of one's relationships. Wealth, status, and pleasure are, in Stoic terms, indifferents — things that may or may not accompany a good life but that do not constitute it. What constitutes it is virtue, understood not as moral rectitude in the narrow sense but as the full deployment of one's distinctly human capacities, including the capacity for genuine love and friendship.
What is striking, looking across these traditions, is how consistent the conclusion is and how persistently it is resisted by the cultural and economic structures of every era. Every generation seems to have to rediscover, usually through personal experience of loss or illness or bereavement, what the philosophers have been saying for twenty-five centuries. The reason this knowledge does not accumulate — the reason each generation must relearn it — is perhaps the most important question the essay raises.
The Father's Hands
My father's hands were extraordinary. Not in a poetic sense — in a purely practical one. They were large, heavily calloused, stained with oil that never quite washed out from the creases around his knuckles. They were the hands of a man who had spent forty years solving problems that existed in three-dimensional space, under cars, inside engines, in the particular smell of heated metal and hydraulic fluid. When he shook your hand, you felt the weight of something built rather than performed.
When he was dying — slowly, over several months, from something that began in his lungs — there were people in that hospital room almost constantly. Not out of obligation. Out of what I can only describe as a kind of gravitational pull. He had spent his life doing small things for people without keeping account: fixing a neighbour's car for nothing, helping someone move furniture, sitting with a man from the neighbourhood whose wife had left him and who needed someone to talk to about nothing in particular. He had never thought of these as investments. He would have found the word insulting. He simply believed, in some inarticulate and fundamental way, that this was what people were for.
The people in that hospital room were the return on forty years of that belief. Not a return he had calculated. Not one he was aware of having earned. But there it was — the accumulated presence of people who had been touched by him and who came, not from duty but from something closer to love.
I think about this when I read about the loneliness epidemic that epidemiologists now treat as a genuine public health crisis. The United States Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on it in 2023. The United Kingdom appointed a Minister for Loneliness. The data is extraordinary: a significant proportion of adults in wealthy, connected, technologically sophisticated societies report having no one they could call in a genuine crisis, no one who knows them well enough to notice if something essential had changed. This is not poverty. This is the specific poverty of a life organised around the wrong metrics.
Gretchen Rubin's Small Mundane Interventions
Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project is sometimes dismissed as popular self-help, but there is something in it worth taking seriously. Rubin's central finding — that happiness is less often the result of dramatic transformation than of the patient accumulation of small, mundane practices — applies directly to the question of love and connection. She found that the relationships in her life did not deteriorate or flourish based on grand gestures. They were sustained or eroded by daily, almost invisible choices: whether to be present or distracted during a conversation, whether to respond with interest or with half-attention, whether to extend the small generosities — a remembered detail, an unsolicited kindness, the willingness to be inconvenienced — that constitute the daily maintenance of genuine intimacy.
This is, in its way, the most demanding version of the argument. It would be easier if connection could be achieved through occasional significant investment — a holiday, a major act of generosity, a heartfelt conversation once a year. But the evidence suggests that the quality of relationships depends primarily on the quality of ordinary time. Who are you when nothing important is happening? Are you present? Are you interested? Are you capable of tolerating the ordinary texture of another person's experience without reaching for your phone?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the actual questions that determine whether, at the end of a life, there are people in the room.
The Limits of the Argument: What This Essay Does Not Say
I am aware that this argument has blind spots, and intellectual honesty requires naming them.
The first is the problem of material precondition. The kind of life I am describing — one that prioritises relationship over accumulation, presence over productivity, love over achievement — is genuinely easier to live when certain basic material conditions are met. Viktor Frankl found meaning in extremity, but he also noted that hunger and cold and the constant proximity of death degraded people's capacity for the finer registers of human connection. The advice to prioritise love over money has a different character when addressed to someone with a secure home and a reliable income than when addressed to someone who cannot meet their basic needs. This essay is primarily written for the former, and it should say so.
The second is the question of what counts as love. The Buffett metric — the number of people who genuinely love you — is presented as self-evident, but genuine love is itself a contested category. There are people who mistake dependency for love, obligation for love, habit for love. There are family configurations in which the presence of relatives in a hospital room represents not affection but complex networks of guilt and duty. The quality of connection matters as much as its quantity, and quality is not always easy to assess from the inside.
The third — and this is the subjective error I am most aware of making — is a kind of retrospective romanticism about simplicity. My father's life, as I have narrated it, risks becoming a parable: the simple man who understood the deepest truth, the mechanic as philosopher-king. This is probably not entirely accurate. Memory is selective. I remember his wisdom and his warmth and the people in that hospital room. I am less clear about the difficulties and frustrations and compromises that are part of any actual life. Memoir, even when it aspires to honesty, tends toward coherence.
The Șopârlă: What the Argument Is Also Saying
There is a tradition in Romanian political and literary culture — running from the Aesopic fables through the oblique strategies of writers under censorship — of embedding the real argument inside a more acceptable one. The șopârlă (literally, the lizard) is the embedded thought, the argument that slips through the gate because it appears to be something else.
This essay is, on the surface, about love and money and what matters at the end of life. But it is also, underneath that surface, an argument about what kind of society we are building and whether it is compatible with the conditions that make genuine human connection possible.
The technofeudal infrastructure — the platforms, the attention economy, the algorithmic curation of social experience — does not merely compete with genuine connection for our time. It actively degrades our capacity for it. It shortens our attention spans, raises our threshold for stimulation, makes the slow, unremarkable, generative texture of real intimacy feel insufficient by comparison with the perpetual novelty of the feed. It sells us simulations of community while hollowing out the conditions for real community to form.
When Doctorow talks about enshittification, he is talking about a process that applies not only to search engines and social networks but to something harder to name: the gradual degradation of the social fabric itself, the progressive replacement of genuine human relationship with its profitable simulation. And when Varoufakis talks about technofeudalism, he is pointing to a system of rent extraction that operates not only on our economic activity but on our attention, our identity, and our capacity for the kind of sustained, present, generous engagement with other people that constitutes a good life.
The șopârlă, then, is this: the essay about love and money is also an argument for political and economic arrangements that make genuine human flourishing possible — that do not require us to route all of our social life through systems designed to monetise our loneliness. This is not merely a personal question. It is a structural one.
What Remains
There is a photograph I think about sometimes. I did not take it; I only saw it once, in someone else's house, on a wall in a corridor. It showed an old man sitting in a garden, surrounded by a large, evidently chaotic group of people of various ages — children climbing on him, adults leaning toward him in conversation, someone just visible at the edge of the frame bringing something from the kitchen. The old man was not looking at the camera. He was looking at something just outside the frame, and he was smiling — not a posed smile, not a smile for the record, but the involuntary smile of someone who has, in that moment, everything they need.
I do not know who that man was. I do not know if he was wealthy or poor, successful or unsuccessful in any of the conventional senses. What I know is that the photograph communicated, with the quiet authority of a really well-observed fact, the particular quality of a life that has been well-lived: not triumphant, not spectacular, but genuinely inhabited, genuinely connected, genuinely warm.
Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, documents the consistent and systematic errors that people make when they try to predict what will make them happy. They overestimate the impact of positive events — a promotion, a new house, a windfall — and underestimate the speed with which their baseline happiness reasserts itself afterward. They underestimate the importance of the social dimension of experience — the degree to which the same event, the same meal, the same piece of music, is more pleasurable in company than alone. They are, in short, reliably poor judges of their own future happiness, and they tend to err in a consistent direction: toward the overvaluation of individual achievement and the undervaluation of connection.
This is not stupidity. It is the predictable result of living inside a culture that loudly and insistently tells one story about what matters while quietly and insistently arranging experience in ways that undermine the conditions for a different kind of life. We do not fail to invest in relationships because we lack the wisdom to value them. We fail, often, because the structures of modern life — the working hours, the commuting distances, the attention economy's relentless colonisation of spare time, the ideological emphasis on individual achievement — make it genuinely difficult to prioritise them.
A Conclusion That Does Not Close
I am writing this from Botoșani, on an afternoon when the light has that particular quality it gets in autumn here — golden and slightly lateral, the kind of light that makes everything look as if it has been under consideration for a long time. My son is somewhere in the flat. The cat, Gri, is asleep on the chair near the window with the settled conviction of a being that has resolved all relevant questions.
I do not know if I am getting this right. I do not know if I am investing sufficient time and presence in the people who might, one day, choose to be in a room with me for reasons other than obligation. I know that the question matters, and I know that knowing it matters is not the same as acting on it consistently.
What I believe, with the kind of belief that does not require proof because it has been confirmed by everything I have observed — in my father's hands, in the Harvard data, in Frankl's testimony, in the tired wisdom of men and women at the end of their lives — is that the Buffett metric is the right one. Not because Warren Buffett said it, but because it is true, and true in the particular way that things are true when they have been tested against experience rather than merely deduced.
When you are old, you will not count the money in your account. You will count the faces of the people who chose to be there — who came not because they had to but because somewhere, at some point, in some ordinary moment that did not seem significant at the time, something genuine passed between you, and they remember it, and so do you.
That is the whole of the argument. Everything else is footnote.
Bibliografie / Selected Bibliography
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz — The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (2023). The empirical foundation of the essay's central claim: relationship quality is the strongest predictor of late-life wellbeing.
Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money (2020). On the emotional and relational dimensions of financial decision-making; the distinction between wealth as security and wealth as identity.
Brené Brown — Daring Greatly (2012) and The Gifts of Imperfection (2010). On vulnerability as the precondition for genuine connection; the difference between performed and authentic relationship.
Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning (1946). On meaning, love, and psychological survival; the primacy of relational orientation in sustaining human dignity under extremity.
Cory Doctorow — The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023) and his writing on enshittification. On the structural degradation of digital social infrastructure.
Yanis Varoufakis — Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023). On platform capitalism as rent-extraction system; the political economy of attention and connection.
Daniel Gilbert — Stumbling on Happiness (2006). On systematic errors in predicting what will make us happy; the consistent undervaluation of social experience.
Ken Honda — Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money (2019). On "money trauma" and the concept of ikigai as relational and experiential rather than financial.
Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics (c. 350 BC). On eudaimonia, perfect friendship, and the conditions for a genuinely flourishing human life.
Bronnie Ware — The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011). Observational data from palliative care on the actual content of late-life regret; the consistent absence of financial regret, the consistent presence of relational regret.
Ten Questions Worth Keeping
1. What does Warren Buffett's claim that "the measure of a life is love, not money" actually mean in practice, and why is it harder to operationalise than any financial metric?
It means that the quality of one's life is ultimately determined by whether other people choose to remain present in it when under no obligation to do so. This is harder to operationalise than a financial metric because it cannot be gamed, accelerated, or achieved through effort alone. It requires consistent presence, genuine interest in others, and the willingness to be vulnerable — qualities that resist the productivity-optimisation framework.
2. What did the Harvard Study of Adult Development find, and why does its conclusion remain counterintuitive despite eighty years of evidence?
It found that relationship quality is the single strongest predictor of late-life health and happiness — stronger than wealth, professional achievement, or physical fitness. It remains counterintuitive because it contradicts the dominant cultural narrative of individual achievement, and because the practices it implies (sustained, unhurried attention to other people) are structurally penalised in an economy that rewards productivity and output.
3. How does Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification apply to human connection, beyond its more obvious application to digital platforms?
Enshittification describes the progressive degradation of a service as a platform prioritises its own financial interests over user value. Applied to human connection, it describes the way in which platforms route all social interaction through systems that have a financial interest in making connection feel permanently insufficient — keeping users engaged not by facilitating genuine connection but by manufacturing the anxiety of its absence.
4. What is the difference between genuine friendship, as Aristotle describes it, and the forms of relationship that the attention economy rewards?
Aristotle's perfect friendship — philia between people who genuinely wish each other well for no reason other than mutual appreciation of character — requires time, mutual knowledge, and a willingness to engage with another person's actual life rather than their curated presentation of it. The attention economy rewards the opposite: frequent, brief, public, quantifiable interactions that generate data and engagement metrics but do not accumulate into genuine mutual knowledge.
5. Why do people consistently underestimate the importance of relationships to their own future happiness?
Daniel Gilbert's research on "affective forecasting" suggests that people are structurally poor at predicting their future emotional states, and that they err in a consistent direction: overvaluing individual achievement and undervaluing social experience. This is partly cultural (we are surrounded by narratives that celebrate individual success) and partly cognitive (social experience is diffuse and hard to imagine vividly, while concrete achievements are easy to picture).
6. What is the "social fitness" concept that Robert Waldinger uses, and why does it suggest that relationship maintenance is an ongoing practice rather than a state one achieves?
Social fitness is the ongoing, active maintenance of meaningful relationships — checking in, showing up, tolerating the ordinary texture of another person's life without becoming bored or distracted. It is a practice rather than a state because relationships, like physical fitness, degrade without active investment. People who assume their important relationships will sustain themselves without effort tend to discover, too late, that they have not.
7. How does Viktor Frankl's concept of meaning-orientation relate to the Buffett metric, and what does it suggest about the role of love in psychological resilience?
Frankl observed that the ability to orient oneself toward something or someone beyond oneself — to maintain a sense that one's suffering is connected to a larger meaning — was the primary determinant of psychological survival under extreme conditions. Love, in his framework, is not merely an emotion but an orientation of consciousness: the capacity to be genuinely present to another person's existence. This is precisely what sustains people through difficulty and what, at the end of life, constitutes the felt quality of having lived well.
8. What is the șopârlă (Aesopic embedded argument) in this essay, and what does it imply beyond the surface argument about love and money?
The surface argument is personal and philosophical: choose love over money, invest in relationships rather than accumulation. The embedded argument is political and structural: the conditions for genuine human connection are being systematically degraded by the technofeudal attention economy, and this is not a personal failing but a structural problem that requires structural responses. The essay's advocacy for relational investment is also, implicitly, an advocacy for the political and economic arrangements that make such investment possible.
9. What are the genuine limits of the essay's argument, and where does it risk becoming romanticised?
The primary limits are: (a) material precondition — the ability to prioritise love over money presupposes a degree of financial security that not everyone has; (b) the contested nature of "genuine" love — not all relational presence reflects authentic connection; and (c) retrospective romanticism — the essay's portrait of the author's father risks being a parable rather than a person, selecting for wisdom and warmth while eliding complexity and difficulty.
10. What practical implication follows most directly from the essay's central argument — not as inspiration but as actual behavioural change?
The most direct implication is this: audit how you actually spend your discretionary time and attention, and notice the gap between your stated values (connection, love, family) and your revealed preferences (screen time, professional ambition, solitary consumption). The gap, for most people in high-connectivity modern environments, is significant. Closing it does not require grand gestures but daily, unremarkable choices: being present in conversations, responding to messages that require no response but that signal "I thought of you," choosing slower forms of connection over faster ones.
Author's Note: The Evolution of an Idea
This essay began, as many things do, with a newspaper. Not the abstract idea of a newspaper but a specific one — an article about a Warren Buffett interview that I read some years ago, in which the billionaire said, approximately, that the true measure of a life was not financial but relational. At the time, I noted the idea and moved on. It felt like wisdom of the kind that is easy to agree with and easier to ignore.
What returned me to it was not a philosophical development but a biographical one: watching someone die, and observing who came, and understanding — with the particular clarity that proximity to death provides — that the accumulation in that hospital room was not accidental. It was the residue of forty years of a certain kind of attention to other people.
From that biographical encounter, the essay moved, somewhat unexpectedly, into the territory of Cory Doctorow and Yanis Varoufakis and the technofeudal critique. This movement was not arbitrary. The question that the Buffett insight raises — why, if we know that relationships are the most important thing, do we consistently fail to prioritise them? — seems to me to require a structural answer, not merely a personal one. The attention economy's systematic colonisation of the time and cognitive bandwidth that genuine connection requires is not a temptation to be resisted by individual willpower. It is a designed feature of an economic system that benefits from our distraction and our loneliness.
The tensions in this essay are real. Between the personal and the structural. Between the romanticised portrait of my father and the more complicated person he must have been. Between the argument that love is the only metric that matters and the acknowledgement that making that argument from a position of material security is easier than making it from poverty. I have tried to name these tensions rather than resolve them, because I think the honest intellectual position is to hold them in suspension.
The rhetorical tools the essay employs are: the concrete scene as portal into abstraction (the kitchen table, the morning light, my father's hands); the accumulation of evidence from multiple disciplines to create a sense of convergent validity; the șopârlă of the embedded political argument; and the deliberately inconclusive ending, which refuses the false comfort of resolution in favour of the more honest gesture of remaining in the question.
I am not certain I have got the balance right. Essays, in my experience, are always attempts — approaches toward a truth that recedes as you approach it. The best one can hope for is that the approach itself illuminates something, and that the reader leaves not with certainty but with a more refined sense of what is actually at stake.
What Can You Do Tomorrow?
Five concrete suggestions, not inspirational gestures but actual actions:
1. Send one message that requires nothing in return. Identify someone in your life whom you value but have not contacted in a while — not because you need something from them, not because an occasion demands it, but simply because you thought of them. Send a brief message that says so. Expect nothing back. This is the smallest possible unit of relational investment.
2. Have one conversation without your phone on the table. Not hidden in your pocket — genuinely absent. For the duration of one meal, one coffee, one walk with another person, allow yourself to be fully present to that person's actual experience. Notice what becomes possible in the conversation when neither of you is half-elsewhere.
3. Write down the names of three people whose presence in your life you have been taking for granted. For each name, write one sentence about what specifically you value about them. Do not show them what you wrote. The exercise is not about gesture — it is about training the attention toward what actually matters.
4. Audit one hour of your typical day. Not dramatically — just observe, with genuine curiosity, how one specific hour of your time is actually spent. Note the gap, if one exists, between what you were hoping to do with that hour and what you actually did with it. The gap is where the work is.
5. Decline one commitment that does not serve either your genuine obligations or your genuine relationships. Professional and social life tend to fill with commitments that serve neither well — attendance at events that matter to no one, participation in conversations that produce nothing, the performance of availability rather than its reality. Identifying and declining one such commitment creates space for something more actual.
What to Avoid
The mirror of what to do is sometimes more instructive.
Do not treat relationship maintenance as a project to be optimised. The managerial impulse — to schedule "quality time," to implement "relationship systems," to treat connection as a KPI — tends to produce exactly the kind of managed, curated, performance-adjacent interaction that genuine connection is distinguished from. Relationships require presence, not management.
Do not mistake digital engagement for relational investment. Liking a post, watching a story, reacting to an update — these are not nothing, but they are not the same as attention. They register your existence in someone's peripheral awareness without creating the conditions for genuine mutual knowledge.
Do not wait for the significant moment. The evidence from Waldinger's research and from Ware's observations from palliative care is consistent: what people regret is not the absence of grand gestures but the accumulation of small absences — the conversations not had, the visits not made, the presence not offered in the ordinary moments that constitute the actual texture of a relationship.
Do not confuse busyness with importance. The most common rationalisation for neglecting relationships is that one is too occupied with important things. This is usually an inversion: the things that feel most urgent are rarely the most important, and the things that matter most — the conversation with the child, the visit to the friend, the evening spent in genuine presence — rarely announce themselves as urgent.
Methodological Note
This essay belongs to the tradition of literary non-fiction essay-writing that draws on autobiography, intellectual history, and cultural criticism without fully submitting to the conventions of any one genre. Its methodology is, at heart, the methodology of essai in Montaigne's original sense: an attempt, a trial, a provisional approach toward a question that cannot be definitively answered.
The autobiographical material is used instrumentally — not as evidence in itself but as a textural anchor that makes abstract argument emotionally legible. The empirical sources (Waldinger, Gilbert, Ware) are cited with the intention of grounding the argument in evidence rather than merely in assertion, while acknowledging that the human sciences deal in probabilities and tendencies rather than certainties.
The essay is written for the audience of petrucojocaru.ro: readers who are comfortable with complexity, interested in the intersection of technology, culture, and philosophy, and who expect their reading to require something from them rather than delivering comfortable conclusions. It is written in British English with the deliberate deployment of subordinate clauses, unhurried syntax, and a vocabulary that prefers precision to simplicity.
The șopârlă is, as noted above, the embedded structural argument: that the conditions for genuine human connection are being degraded by the attention economy, and that this is a political and economic problem as much as a personal one. The essay uses the more culturally acceptable argument (love matters more than money) as a gate through which to deliver the less comfortable argument (the economy is structured to prevent you from living as if love matters more than money).
The rhetorical choice to end without resolution is intentional. Essays that close too neatly tend to discharge the intellectual and emotional charge they have built, releasing the reader from engagement rather than sustaining it. The open ending is an invitation to continue thinking, which is the only honest conclusion an essay of this kind can offer.