Today wraps up a month’s worth of playing with ideas about economics.

Throughout the exploration, the theme that has most stood out to me is that the most successful people — however wealthy they might be — are those who understand that economics is merely a means to an end. The real secret of their success, then, is properly defining their ends and then organizing their efforts to achieve them.

Only some of that has to do with money. Though it’s clearly possible to make a lot of money with no deeper or greater sense of value or purpose (examples are not hard to spot), seeking money for its own sake or as a way to keep score seems like the path to less freedom rather than more. If, as the Motley Fool says, “the value of money is opportunity,” what good is opportunity if you’re too fixated on making more money to make good use of opportunity?

Or, to go all the way back to Aristotle, economics constantly tests whether we’re able to never expect more certainty of a science than it can give. We truly cannot buy happiness, but we can learn to manage our affairs in such a way as to be able to find happiness in sufficiency (or even in surplus).

Aristotle also famously taught the concept of the mean: right conduct is always found at the midpoint between unhealthy extremes. That can be a useful principle in economics, too. Happiness is not to be found in communist idealism, nor in wanton pursuit of money under the rules of what we presently call capitalism.

Sufficiency, like happiness, is an interior condition. Paradoxically, it cannot be bought. Rather, it depends on a solid ethical foundation (we have to know what is good for us, and why), as well as attention to the political context (we must know how our pursuit of what we want affects those we live with, like it or not).

For, just as we all must manage ourselves and our households, we also must respect our political nature — a topic we’ll start exploring tomorrow.

Someone once said to me of the college experience that “the days are long but the weeks are short.”

The same seems true of life after college: days can seem very long and chocked full of activities, obligations, and opportunities — yet we’re always wondering where the last year went.

A year turns out to be a very long time, especially if you organize your days and weeks effectively.

Days spent waiting for a miracle are interminable. But a year’s worth of intention and attention can make an enormous difference.

The rent check goes out today.

That means I’m creeping up on two years of paying for flexibility without building any equity.

The connection economy makes it easier to rent than ever before. You can rent a printing press, a media channel, or even a stranger’s house or car.

But, as always, the real value goes to the asset owners. Uber used to collect some rent from helping you rent your car; now, they’ll even rent you a car (and collect more rent from you in return).

Renting can be a good short-term strategy when you’re still getting money organized and building an asset. It can also work at scale: big companies don’t need to own their own office buildings.

The trick is not to be lulled by “free” or “cheap” forever. There are reasons to rent — and building an asset is a really good one.

Just know when it’s time to move out on your own.

When I lived out West, I occasionally encountered little pockets of a modern-day barter economy.

People would trade skill for skill, work for work, item for item — or some combination that felt right. People who live on the land, especially, still have a neighborly economy going: ranchers schedule their brandings on consecutive weekends so the extra hands can help with each; everyone works the stock together, then comes in for a big dinner afterwards.

I always enjoyed things like this: broadly speaking, I grew up with the suburban model — if you wanted something, you drove out and bought it.

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in some creative barters, and it’s been another lesson in generosity and refusing to let money be a limiting factor. The price is still the price, but it’s sometimes possible to cover some of it by creating value rather than paying money.

It’s a fun and neighborly way to do business, and I’m always amazed at how such generous interactions build and broaden a community.

Everyone works.

Employment, careers, jobs, and money are different questions entirely. What’s not in question is that everyone works.

It’s worth exploring the economic questions of work — how much our work is worth, when we should expect to get paid, and how we think about the way(s) in which we earn. (Are we capturing value we create? Collecting rents? Engaged in trade? Or being compensated for something taken from us?)

But the better question — or at least the prior one — is, What is work for? Where and how are we going to direct the energies of eight billion people?

That’s a lot of work, after all, and there’s no question that it makes a difference — for better or worse, sooner or later.

I’d argue that the fundamental purpose of work is dignity. Being both social and creative by nature, people work in order to express themselves and connect with others.

That’s not a passing interest of the privileged few, but a deep human urge. And that begs a lot of important questions about outsourcing, automation, and “labor-saving.” After all, jobs might be “creatively destroyed” all the time, but the same can’t be said of the people who used to do them (thank goodness).

Most people are grateful for labor-saving innovations. But they’re not eager to do less work, or especially to have less opportunity or dignity. For some of us, the ratchet is working in the right direction: AI-assisted email allows us to reach more people and do more work that’s more meaningful.

But, for a lot of other people, the ratchet is working against them: the thing they do — their identity, their dignity, their stability — can be done cheaper and faster by someone else, something else, somewhere else.

And when the jobs go, what will they work on then?

I had a professor in college who said that the human person is distinguished by the combination of the head, the heart, and the hand.

What he meant was that people are the only animals that combine intellect, emotion, and our peculiar ability to put both into the world through our work — to make real the products of our thought, feelings, and imagination.

It’s possible to do good work with any combination of these. But it’s worth paying attention to the balance between them: each, operating in isolation from the others, has its own kind of overreach.

Today is trash day at my house. The big green trucks will spend a noisy couple of hours circling the neighborhood this morning, and then we’ll all pull our empty bins back in to fill them up again.

This has always struck me as a little bit miraculous. I grew up helping my parents take the garbage to the town disposal facility, and the weekly dump run quickly became one of my chores as soon as I could drive.

But in neither case do I know where the garbage goes after it leaves — whether by Mom’s minivan or the big green truck. We just throw it “away.”

Every economy, from the human body to a municipality to a “global” society, generates some waste as a byproduct of its function. And all of that waste has to go somewhere, to be dealt with somehow.

I once heard someone sum this up in the phrase “Away is a place.” I’d add that there are people there, too.

Out of sight, out of mind might turn out not to be a miracle at all. Or, if it is a miracle, it’s one of mindlessness — another way in which it’s easy to not see the people and places that make up The Economy beyond our own households.

In his 2012 lecture “It All Turns on Affection,” Wendell Berry said:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. . . . As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

So much of our economy is structured to stifle imagination. Whether for simple convenience or more complicated motives, food in plastic containers — at any price point — is not designed to help us imagine our relationship to the farms and farmers who produced it.

It’s easy to beat up on people who get their groceries at the corner store. But how well can “knowledge workers” imagine their place in the world as they move from offices to jets to car-shares to cafés?

Maybe that, too, is by design, and maybe it’s not. But knowledge and energy without imagination and affection have historically done real damage to real people and places.

My house just had an energy assessment. And, on his way out, the technician left us a box full of LED lightbulbs.

In my childhood, changing a lightbulb was a fairly regular event. We expected lightbulbs to burn out. Then, when the first non-incandescent bulbs showed up, they didn’t work very well and they caused a big political fuss.

Just a few years later, LED bulbs are the regular kind. They work when you flip the switch, you can put them on a dimmer, and (if you believe the packaging), you probably won’t have to think about them for 15–20 years after making the switch. Plus, they’ll only use a few dollars’ worth of electricity in that time.

All of those things are good for the consumer and the planet. And they’re a useful lesson in how technology works: something new shows up, it’s a little buggy at first, and then it’s invisible.

Of course, someone, somewhere, at some time, defined himself as a lightbulb maker. Surely he was good at his work, and took pride in it. But his paycheck was based on lightbulbs burning out every year or so, not every decade or two.

I’m thrilled with our new bulbs, and I wouldn’t want the old ones back. But I have to wonder: who made these ones, and what’s become of the people who made the old ones?

One of the most powerful — and challenging — questions I’ve ever confronted in career and financial planning is the “lottery question:” what would you do if money were no object in your consideration?

Economists sometimes insist that economics and markets are amoral, but of course that’s not true. More to the point, are we willing to tolerate a culture that insists it is all right to do wrong in the marketplace or public square?

Even if you can’t even imagine what it would be like to have a billion dollars, it’s worth imagining what you’d do with it — how you’d live, what decisions you’d make, how and with whom you’d spend it.

The answers might be slipperier than you think, since a billion dollars can go awfully far. Keep asking “and then what?” until you have a real answer. You might learn something about your values — and how you’re living them.