“But here’s something curious: if I drop down further—if I ‘overshoot’ by another order of magnitude and ask you to think about the difference between two hundred fifty dollars and two hundred dollars—it turns out that we’re closer to our aforementioned sweet spot. Because now we’re in cigarette territory. I remember you were already a pretty heavy smoker when we were young, and since you’re still smoking, I bet you’re up to, what? two packs a day? What’s a pack of cigarettes cost around here? Ten bucks? I haven’t noticed. In Manhattan it’s like fourteenish, but that’s Manhattan. So let’s call it ten. Ten bucks a pack. So now the difference between two hundred fifty dollars and two hundred dollars: let’s think of that difference as five packs of cigarettes. Half a carton, right? The difference is between having two and a half cartons of cigarettes and two cartons of cigarettes. It’s conceivable, isn’t it? Palpable. It’s twelve and a half days of cigarettes versus ten days of cigarettes. If you have only ten days of cigarettes, but you know you can’t get to the store to buy more for even just twelve-and-a-half days, you’re a little stressed-out. You’ve got to cut down. You have to make a conscientious effort to cut down by twenty-five percent a day—that’s ten cigarettes a day.
“Except when does that ever happen? That you can’t get to the store for twelve-and-a-half days, which is nearly half a month? It’s in the realm of the imaginable, but it doesn’t really happen. To be clear, here, Belt: I’m not shitting on this order of magnitude. It’s the most useful one we’ve examined so far. I mean, thinking about cigarettes certainly gets us closer to our aforementioned sweet spot than does thinking about cars—which, again, does, itself, curiously get us closer to the sweet spot than thinking about apartment rental. But I think we can do one better, Belt. I’m not saying we should abandon cigarettes, but I think we should go down one more order of magnitude.
“Twenty-five dollars versus twenty dollars. That’s fifty cigarettes versus forty cigarettes. Wake up in the morning with fifty cigarettes, you can smoke your usual two packs without thinking—doesn’t matter if you go over a little, you’ve got a ten-cigarette cushion. But wake up with forty cigarettes—no cushion. You wake up with forty cigarettes, you have to spend the day being conscientious about how much you’re smoking, how much you’ve smoked, how much you’ll want to smoke. You can’t have a heavier-than-average day, not even one cigarette heavier-than-average. You have to be conscientious about something that conscientiousness interferes with the pleasure of a little. You have to be conscientious about it, or you have to go through the trouble of going out to buy more cigarettes.
“So your having fifty cigarettes for the day versus your having forty cigarettes for the day: I think that’s as close as we can get to your being able to understand the difference between my being worth twenty-five billion dollars and my being worth twenty billion dollars. And still it feels a little false, right? Something seems off. I think it’s this: when I had twenty billion dollars, I didn’t feel at all conscientious about running out of money. That would be stupid. It’s twenty billion dollars. It’s twenty thousand million dollars. What even just half-sane person would ever spend, let alone lose, that kind of money in, I don’t know, ten lifetimes? And yet, what’s amazing—what’s almost mystical to contemplate—is that now that I’m worth twenty-five billion dollars, I somehow feel even less conscientious about my running out of money than I did when I had just twenty. But how can that be, Belt? How can I honestly say that I felt entirely unconscientious at twenty billion, and even less conscientious than that at twenty-five billion? How can one feel less than nothing about something? See what I mean by ‘almost mystical’? Yet that’s how it is. That’s how it’s been. I came to feel less than not-at-all conscientious. And furthermore, I can’t help but imagine that, as my net worth grows, I’ll continue to feel even more less-than-not-at-all conscientious. What a riddle.
“Anyway, I’m not satisfied with the comparison. Let’s scratch it. We took a wrong turn somewhere. I sidetracked us. I think I tried to make it all too simple. Let’s take a different approach. In fact, let’s take two different approaches, as we’re two different people, one trying to understand the other, while the other, trying to help the one understand, realizes he himself needs to understand—or at the very least demonstrate understanding—of the one. We’re gonna meet in the middle, try to at least. Your point of view and mine. Let’s see if we can find the convergence.
“You’re worth a hundred thousand dollars now, right? We’ll keep it simple and round—forget about taxes, Social Security. Let’s just leave it at a hundred k. That’s a thousand cartons of cigarettes. That’s ten thousand packs of cigarettes. That’s two hundred thousand cigarettes. Now picture it. Two hundred thousand cigarettes. Don’t picture them in cartons. Don’t picture them in packs. Picture two hundred thousand cigarettes filling up a room, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. Really. Take a moment and picture it as best you can.
“Now imagine forty thousand cigarettes go missing from that room. Picture that. It looks different, right? There’s a big gap. A two-hundred-thousand-cigarette capacity room holding only a hundred sixty thousand cigarettes. It’s a lot of cigarettes, still, a hundred sixty thousand, but you can see the ceiling, see some walls—perhaps an edge or two of window if your room has high windows. The difference between those pictures: that’s one way to understand the difference between having twenty-five billion dollars and having twenty billion dollars. Let’s call that Jonboat Way1. Or the Belt-trying-to-empathize-with-Jonboat’s-understanding-of-the-difference-between-having-twenty-five-billion-and-twenty-billion-dollars Way1.
“There’s a Jonboat Way2, as well. A Belt-trying-to-empathize-with-Jonboat’s-understanding-of-the-difference-between-having-twenty-five-billion-and-twenty-billion-dollars Way2. You picture that first room again, jammed floor-to-ceiling with two hundred thousand cigarettes. And now instead of picturing that forty thousand cigarettes go missing, picture the room becoming twenty-five percent higher, creating a gap at the top, and then fill that gap with cigarettes, with fifty thousand cigarettes, so now the room is packed floor-to-ceiling with two hundred fifty thousand cigarettes. The difference between these pictures: that’s another way to understand the difference between having twenty-five billion dollars and having twenty billion dollars. The difference between Jonboat Way1 and Jonboat Way2 is a matter of stress, really. Emphasis. Jonboat Way1 is my 2013 perspective on my 2009 net worth. Jonboat Way2 is my 2009 perspective on my 2013 net worth, which, although I no longer have that perspective, and admit I can’t quite remember having it, I do believe I’m able to reliably derive by imagining what my perspective on my 2013 net worth would become, were my 2013 net worth to suddenly go from twenty-five billion to thirty-one-point-two-five billion.
“As you’ve probably guessed by now, it’s the synthesis of these two perspectives—Jonboat Way1 and Jonboat Way2—that makes, at last, The Jonboat Way of understanding the difference between having twenty-five billion dollars and twenty billion dollars, aka The Belt-trying-to-empathize-with-Jonboat’s-understanding-of-the-difference-between-having-twenty-five-billion-and-twenty-billion-dollars Way.