An attack on nihilist 'Die With Zero' philosophy

Don't spend it all before you go

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns.

― Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir

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Bill Perkins is charming and upbeat. After a lucrative career in energy trading, he devised a system for ensuring that his wealth is entirely spent within his lifetime, which he turned into a bestselling book, ‘Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life’.

His philosophy is simple: many wealthy people work far longer than they need to and never get a chance to fully spend their money, and this irrationality should be corrected. By expanding spending earlier in life, these affluent individuals could have more joyous experiences while they are young and healthy, resulting in happy memories that will stay with them as they age. The number and intensity of these happy memories can, of course, be maximized by ensuring no money is wasted.

If you spend hours and hours of your life acquiring money and then die without spending all of that money, then you’ve needlessly wasted too many precious hours of your life. There is just no way to get those hours back. If you die with $1 million left, that’s $1 million of experiences you didn’t have. And if you die with $50,000 left, well, that’s $50,000 of experiences you didn’t have. No way is that optimal.

— Bill Perkins, Die With Zero

He asks his readers to assign a point score to various experiences that they would like to have, and by comparing the costs of these experiences and pursuing them at the correct stage in life, he hopes to help his readers achieve an optimum point of happiness. He even has an app which helps readers get as close to that theoretical optimum as possible.

Let me say that again: We are solving for your total life enjoyment. That is, the premise of this book is that you should be focusing on maximizing your life enjoyment rather than on maximizing your wealth… So always keep this end goal in mind. Make “maximize total life enjoyment” your mantra, using it to guide every decision…

— Bill Perkins, Die With Zero

I have chosen to focus on this book because it’s a useful codification of an impulse I wish to attack. This ‘spend it all’ philosophy, as exemplified by celebrities like Marie Osmond and Sting, is a growing stereotype of the successful baby boomer.

I just think all an inheritance does is breed laziness and entitlement. I worked hard and I'm gonna spend it all and have fun with my husband.

— Marie Osmond (net worth ~$20m)

There won't be much money left because we are spending it! We have a lot of commitments. What comes in we spend, and there isn't much left…

— Sting (net worth ~$550m)

On the one hand, I’m sure my attack on Perkins’ book will seem to him very unfair - it is, after all, exactly as advertised: an instructional book for wealthy individuals who wish to be given the courage to spend as much of their wealth as possible before they die, and to enjoy their lives more as a result. 

On the other hand, this work, which I believe was earnestly undertaken by a good-natured man, is deeply naive of the nihilism of the philosophical project which is necessary to support it. This is a book entirely without a concept of the higher things - and this is all the more dangerous because its target audience is the rich and powerful. If we truly follow his path, our civilization collapses.