原文 (Source): http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
2010年07月 (July 2010)
When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn’t had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I’d spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.
当我们在1998年卖掉自己的初创公司时，我突然得到了很多钱。现在我不得不去思考那些我从未思考过的事情：怎样才能不失去这笔钱。我晓得由富返贫是可能的，正如从贫致富那样，都是可能的。但是，过去我花了很多年去学习从贫致富，而从实践上我并不晓得如何由富返贫。现在，为了避免这些，我不得不去学习。
So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you’d asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I’d have said by spending all their money. That’s how it happens in books and movies, because that’s the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.
我开始留意财富是如何流失的。如果你像乜娃娃那样问我富人怎么变穷，我会给你说花掉它们的所有钱财就行了。在书里，在电影里，都是这么发生的，因为那是最光鲜靓丽的方式了。但实际上，财富的损失大多数情况并非因为过度消费，而是因为不良投资。
It’s hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking “wow, I’m spending a lot of money.” Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.
很难在不关注的情况下花掉钱。一些有正常感知的人会发现很难赚到大钱，但他们不去想：“阿，我正在花很多钱！”而如果你开始交易衍生品，你能闭上眼睛损失一百万（你想多少就多少，真的）。// 这段无论英文还是中文，都感觉很奇怪。
In most people’s minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn’t. Luxuries seem self-indulgent. And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery, you’ve already been thoroughly trained that self-indulgence leads to trouble. Investing bypasses those alarms. You’re not spending the money; you’re just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say “it’s an investment.”
在大多数人的头脑里，在奢侈品上消费会触发警报，而去做投资却不会。奢侈品看来是自我放纵的。除非你继承了一笔钱，或买彩票赚了钱，你早已被植入这样的意识：“自我放纵会引来麻烦”。投资会略过这些警报——你没有花钱，你只是把资产从一个地方挪到另一个地方。这就是人们向你推销昂贵的东西时为啥会说：“这是一项投资。”
The solution is to develop new alarms. This can be a tricky business, because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive.
解决办法是开发新的警报。这会是很棘手的一件事，因为阻止你超支的警报如此之基本，甚至可能已经在我们的DNA中，但你必须了解那些阻止你进行不良投资的警报，有时这是相当违反直觉的。
A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I’d start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.
几天前我意识到一些让人惊奇的事情：时间所处的境况和金钱非常相似。失去时间最大的危险不是花时间娱乐，而是花时间去假装工作。当你花时间娱乐时，你晓得你正在自我放纵。警报很快响起。如果早上醒来，坐在沙发上看一整天电视，我会感到非常糟糕。想到这些就让我愁眉苦脸。在沙发上看两个小时电视，我就会感到不适，让我一整天不舒服。
And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.
如果真的有一些糟糕的日子，我整天坐在电视前，如果那天结束时我问自己一天得到啥子，答案大概是：根本的，是个空。这些天过去了，我感到很差，没有任何东西让我感到比“我意识到我花了一整天蜗在沙发上看电视”更差。如果我整天看电视，我会感到正在走向灭亡。但是我这些天啥也没做，警报并没有响起，因为我在做哪些表面上看起来像真的在工作的事情。比如，处理电子邮件。你坐在办公桌前处理。这莫趣，但是可行的。
With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they’re not even fun.
无论时间还是金钱，避免享乐不再足以保护你了。它可能足以保护猎人，甚至所有前工业化社会。因此，自然与养育相结合，使我们避免了自我放纵。但是，世界变得更加复杂：现在，最危险的陷阱是通过模仿更多有道德的人而绕过我们关于自我放纵的警报的新行为。最糟糕的是，它们甚至比较莫意思。
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
感谢 Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, 和 Robert Morris 阅读本文的草稿.