America of the 1920s had the same real per-capita GDP as Turkmenistan does today. - Morgan Housel

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on.48

There is an iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.

In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one — not a single person out of a thousand — said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want. No one — not a single person — said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success. No one — not a single person — said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.