Volume 4 · The Ledger and the Loom · Essay 152
Long-Term Selfish
Some ideas arrive wearing uniforms. Long-Term Selfish arrives in a kurta — plain, comfortable, and ready for work.
It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.
What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.
Ask the LIC agent at your door and the trader at his terminal — both will tell you the same thing in different clothes: money listens to discipline and laughs at moods.
Money is a good clerk and a terrible master; the arrangement is entirely up to us. The name is new; the wisdom stood at bus stops long before either of us.