my personal, stubborn attachments

I

tyler cowen's book stubborn attachments lays out "A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals"

the book makes surprisingly simple claims: you can achieve prosperity for the whole world if you are stubbornly attached to two principles:

• economic growth
• basic human rights

as i said, this sounds simple to the point of it being redundant right? almost no one argues for the opposite, so why even argue for these principles? but tyler doubles down on these stubborn attachments in the book, hammering the point home that economic growth is the moral imperative. everything worthwhile is downstream and emerging from economic growth. it's imperative because economic growths inevitably leads to a better world, or growth is our best shot at a better world. a world where wellbeing is improved for everyone, no matter how you want to measure wellbeing.

the points he makes in the book are plentiful, philosophical and practical. a short read, i'd recommend it to everyone - especially the content around the book, like tyler cowen himself dismantling the arguments of the book

II

the kind of growth i am interested in is personal growth. being keen to religious reasoning, i consider personal growth a moral imperative. inspired by tyler cowen, the question becomes: how can i formulate my stubborn attachments so that personal prosperity becomes inevitable? of course, i could simply have two bullet point list as well, like "personal growth" and "mood maintenance". but that's boring.

not being bound by having to define a set of principles for the entire world, let me be specific about my personal stubborn attachments:

• go to sleep early
• ship something creative everyday
• rewrite something every day
• write out the question and answer to "what should i be doing right now" constantly
• never make something you tell the world become a lie
• whenever you think well of someone, immediately tell them (whether through text or thanks, never in thoughts)
• don't take any form of drugs ¹
• never wish for less time
• when falling short, simply atone for your mistakes by being stubbornly attached again

III

while the book's arguments are made through a secular and global lens, the underlying theme of the arguments are religious and american. in fact, tyler cowen's own strussian reading² of the book is a defense of mormonism and american exceptionalism: the optimism baked into the book, the faith in compounding growth, that the future will be better than the past, that actions matter in cosmological timescales. fittingly, tyler considers mormonism the most american religion.

what are your secularly-defined-but-actually-borderline-religous attachments?