As you get older, you start losing money and time to events you couldn't even imagine when you were young.
I don't intend to talk about my private life in a place like this, but adults in their 40s and beyond will likely nod in agreement, thinking, 'That's exactly right.'
When you actually face such situations, a state where you lack freedom in either money or time is harsher than you can imagine.
The foundations of your life are shaken, and in some cases, it even carries the risk of ruining your life itself.
This isn't a boast, but by my mid-20s, I had 'anticipated' and become convinced that such harsh environments and conditions would eventually arrive.
That's why I lived with a frantic sense of crisis, wanting to create a state as soon as possible where:
'Even if I have to temporarily stop all activities, I have the leeway to thoroughly face the problem in front of me.'
As a result of seeking this state from the bottom of my heart and taking calculated actions backward from that goal, I reached a world where I could 'completely control both money and time' by my mid-30s—much earlier than planned. Since then, my mind has remained calm.
There are people in the world who can use money freely to some extent, and similarly, there are those who can use their time freely.
However, it is considered extremely rare for someone in the working generation to satisfy 'both money and time' at a high level and be able to commit all resources without hesitation when a problem occurs.
So, why was I able to look so far into the future and aim for that world in my 20s?
There is only one reason. It was the accumulation of simulated experiences brought about by an overwhelming 'volume of reading.'
It feels a bit awkward to call it overwhelming myself, but I believe my reading volume among my peers would undoubtedly put me in the top 0.1%, even by a conservative estimate.
As I've written before, I used to spend 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, or 3.5 hours round trip, commuting to middle and high school.
It was a grueling route with three transfers each way—hard to believe looking back—but as a bookworm since childhood, in an era before smartphones existed, I devoted all that travel time to reading.
Since I wasn't in any clubs (I didn't have the time), I spent most of my time reading even after getting home.
I read widely across all genres, but I particularly liked essays by elders, newspaper columns, and interview articles.
From the mid-career generation in their 30s and 40s to the great seniors of life in their 60s, 70s, and 80s—the many vivid words they wrote.
While greedily reading and enjoying them, I began to install into my brain with vivid resolution:
- What kind of life events occur as you age
- What people struggle with at those times
- What kind of state of mind they fall into
At the same time, the mindset for avoiding ruin and the specific ways to prepare became a 'tabletop exercise (image training)' for a long-term life strategy.
That said, at the time, I was simply reading driven by the joy of knowing worlds I didn't know, so I didn't have the slightest awareness that I was reading for the sake of learning.
Therefore, it was much later that I realized the facts I've written here, but I came to strongly understand the truth through my own experience that:
'The value of all learning can only be recovered after the fact.'
'You should read a wide variety of books while you're young, following your curiosity.'
If I only state that conclusion, it might sound like a cliché moral lesson or a trite life theory.
Even so, I dare to say it.
In a life that is the height of uncertainty, reading becomes the strongest 'shield' to protect yourself and, at the same time, a 'spear' to conquer life.
Plunging into the rough seas of mid-life and beyond without reading books, without the imagination for risks that may occur in the future, and without even a hint of how to deal with them, is like going to a battlefield stark naked.
Isn't that, quite frankly, the height of recklessness?
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