"When faced with a difficult problem - and how to spend money in a way that will improve your life certainly is - it can help to work backward, reducing and excluding what doesn't work until what's left over is a decent approximation of favorable traits. Evolution works in similar ways, so thoroughly destroying what doesn't work that what's left over tends to work quite well."
"A young boy once asked Charlie Munger, "What advice do you have for someone like me to succeed in life?" Munger replied: "Don't do cocaine. Don't race trains to the track. And avoid all AIDS situations." Succeed by first knowing what to avoid. In the same way, I can't tell you how to spend money, because I'm not you. And I can't tell you what will make you happy, because I'm still trying to figure that out for myself."
People often cannot know what will make them happy but can more easily identify what will make them miserable. Solving complex problems benefits from working backward: exclude options that fail until remaining traits approximate favorable outcomes. Natural selection similarly eliminates failures so surviving solutions tend to work. Health offers a clear parallel: good diets are debated, but harms are clearer; cigarettes are definitively harmful. Practical guidance favors avoiding obvious sources of misery. Simple prohibitions reduce risk. Personal uniqueness limits prescriptive spending advice, but common causes of misery are straightforward to avoid.
Read at Big Think
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