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.