Yanwen’s blog

Since July 15, I’ve been reflecting on The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. The five types—Time, Social, Mental, Physical, and Financial—invite us to rethink what it means to live richly. Today, I’ll focus on the second: Social Wealth.

Once again, Bloom opens this chapter with a question that cuts straight to the heart:
“Who will be sitting in the front row at your funeral?” Picture their faces. These are the people who truly matter.

Now ask yourself: What are you doing to cherish those people while they’re still here? How do they know they matter to you?

Your answers form the foundation of your social wealth. It’s not about how many contacts you have, but about how deeply you’re connected to those who will show up in life’s most important moments—and its final ones.

Social wealth matters because humans are inherently social creatures. We thrive in connection and suffer in isolation. Loneliness and social isolation aren’t just unpleasant; they’re dangerous. Studies show they increase the risk of depression, anxiety, and even physical and mental illness. A lack of social connection can be more harmful than heavy smoking or drinking.

Our brains evolved for interaction. In fact, we are human because we are social—and we are social because we are human.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted, confirms this. After tracking 724 participants and over 1,300 of their descendants for more than 86 years, researchers arrived at a conclusion:

“The single most important factor for a happy life is relationships.”

Good relationships make us healthier, happier, and longer-lived. One former director put it bluntly:

“The key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”

In his TED talk—viewed over 50 million times—Dr. Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, said:

“The best predictor of your physical health at age 80 isn’t your cholesterol levels at 50, but how satisfied you are with your relationships.”

Another insight that stopped me in my tracks was Bloom’s mention of “the magic years”—the first decade of a child’s life. During this time, you’re their most favorite person in the world. If you miss that window, no amount of later success will fill the hole. Bloom urges parents to prioritize time with their children during these years. A strong foundation, once built, can last a lifetime.

So how do we build and protect social wealth? Bloom identifies three pillars:

1. Depth

These are the deep, meaningful bonds with the people you turn to in a crisis—your closest friends and family. The ones who would sit in the front row at your funeral.

Deep relationships rest on three qualities:

• Honesty

• Support

• Shared experience

Bloom suggests using a matrix to assess them:

• Green zone: High frequency + supportive → protect and nurture

• Red zone: High frequency + demeaning → avoid if possible

• Opportunity zone: Low frequency + supportive → invest in

• Danger zone: High frequency + mixed attitudes → monitor carefully

2. Breadth

The second pillar refers to your broader community—people who share your values or interests. These relationships provide spiritual and cultural support and a sense of belonging. Join a group, show up, and contribute.

Three key elements of breadth:

• Shared values

• Active listening and thoughtful questioning

• Consistent follow-up

3. Earned Status

This is the respect and trust you gain from others—not due to wealth or position, but because of your character and actions. It cannot be bought. It must be earned.

Reflection

We tend to chase financial wealth because it’s measurable. But social wealth is what gives life its meaning—and gives us the strength to carry on when everything else falters.
You won’t regret spending time with your children during their magic years. You won’t regret calling an old friend just to say, “You matter.”
Because at the end of life, another measure of your wealth is who’s sitting in the front row—and why they’re there.

To be continued...

Since July 15, I’ve been writing about Sahil Bloom’s The 5 Types of Wealth: Time, Social, Mental, Physical, and Financial. Of the five, Bloom begins with what he considers most foundational—Time Wealth.

He opens with a gut-punching question:
“How many moments do you have remaining with your loved ones?”
His message is: everyone you love will be gone someday. When you allocate time, put your loved ones first, because one day you might wish you had.

Bloom believes that raising children is one of the best ways to reflect on the passage of time. Their presence, growth, and milestones mark time in the most vivid and heart-tugging ways. The laughter, chaos, and tenderness become time-stamped memories—reminders of how fast it all goes.

At the heart of Time Wealth are three pillars: Awareness, Attention, and Control.

1. Awareness

Awareness means realizing how finite time truly is. Without this awareness, we squander it. One simple question puts it into perspective:

Would you trade places with Warren Buffett?

Despite his unimaginable wealth and influence, most people would say no—because Buffett is 94. You may not be rich, but if you’re young, you have what he doesn’t: time. And that, ironically, is what someone like Buffett might trade his fortune for.

Investor Graham Duncan once coined the term “Time Billionaire.” At age 20, with about two billion seconds left if you live to 80, you are richer in time than any billionaire is in dollars.

Still, we often live as if we have unlimited time. As Seneca wrote,

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”

2. Attention

Attention is where time gets spent. It is the true currency of life.

A practical tool here is the Eisenhower Matrix, a framework for organizing tasks based on importance and urgency:

1. Important and urgent → Do now

2. Important but not urgent → Focus here

3. Not important but urgent → Minimize

4. Not important and not urgent → Eliminate

Most of us live reacting to the urgent, not tending to the important. Yet if you ignore the non-urgent but important—like relationships, health, and learning—they eventually become urgent.

This is why Bloom stresses the idea of “slack”—built-in margins of time and energy. Just like investors want a “margin of safety,” people need buffers to stay sane and resilient. Don’t run at 100% all the time. Leave room for life to surprise you without snapping.

Nassim Taleb echoes this in Antifragile: without slack, life becomes a tightly stretched string—tense, fragile, and always on the brink of breaking.

Another helpful tool is time blocking. At the start of your day, assign fixed time slots for your most important tasks. Guard them like sacred appointments.

3. Control

The third pillar is about taking back control by saying no—to distractions, unnecessary obligations, and energy-draining noise. Don't ever lose control of your time.

If you can’t say no to a task, delegate. If you can’t delegate, use AI. If you must do it yourself, aim for “good enough” and quickly move on.

Time control isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less—but better.

To help readers anchor all this, Bloom turns to a practice from Ancient Rome:
When a victorious general returned from battle in a golden chariot, the Romans placed a man beside him, whispering:

“Memento Mori—Remember you will die.”

It wasn’t meant to depress but to humble, center, and clarify. Remembering our mortality can help us live with greater purpose, clarity, and urgency.

Final Reflection

In a world obsessed with financial wealth, it's crucial not to forget Time Wealth. As Bloom and Romans remind us, time is the only currency you can never earn back. You can't deposit it in a bank, or pass it to your children. You can only live it, moment by moment.

The challenge isn’t to optimize every second, but to spend it on what truly matters to you.

Yesterday I wrote about The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. At the beginning of the book, Bloom shares a moment that changed how he saw his life—and his time.

A few years ago, he was catching up with an old friend over drinks. When asked how he was doing, he gave the standard answer:

“Good. Very busy!” He said it proudly, as if being busy were a sign of success.

But his friend replied that he was “making time for important things” because his father had been ill the year before. This unexpected honesty made the author admit that living in California left him feeling increasingly drained because his parents were growing old living far away on the East Coast.

Then came the conversation that truly shook him:

“How often do you see your parents?”
“About once a year,” Bloom answered.
“And how old are they?”
“Sixty-something.”

His friend paused. Then he said:

“So if they live up to 80, you’ll see them about fifteen more times before they pass away.”

Fifteen. Not fifteen years. Not decades of time ahead. Just fifteen visits. Not the simple truth—but the sudden realization was profound.

Bloom writes that this moment woke him up. It made him think not just about how he was spending his time, but what kind of wealth really mattered.

It reminded me of something Sam Harris once said:

“No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time.”

There will be a last bedtime story with your child. A last walk with your sibling. A last hug with your parents at a family gathering.

There's a touch of sadness but the real cruel part is: When those “last times” happen, we rarely realize it.
It’s only later—sometimes years later—that a moment returns to you, and you think: That was the last time.

This, Bloom says, is when he began to think more deeply about the true wealth of life:
Time. Relationships. Purpose. Health. And only then—money. 

To be continued...

Quote from the book:

"You're going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die."

All of what follows is the story of how those simple words changed my life--and how they may change yours.

On a warm California evening in May 2021, I sat down for a drink with an old friend. As we settled in at our table, he asked how I was doing. At first, I gave him the standard response that we've all grown so accustomed to: "I'm good. Busy!" I said with all the unintended irony of the modern era, where busy is a badge of honor, as if being more stressed is something to be proud of. When I asked the same of him, instead of replying with typical busyness one-upmanship he replied that he was "making time for the important things," since his father had gotten sick the prior year. The unexpected vulnerability in his words knocked me off the typical conversation track that defines these "catch-up" encounters. He had opened a new track, and rather than resist, I walked down it, adding that living in California had begun to wear on me, it being so far from my aging parents on the East Coast.

...

FRIEND: How often do you see your parents?

ME: Maybe once a year right now.

FRIEND: And how old are they?

ME: Mid-sixties.

FRIEND: Okay, so you're going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die.

...

Gut punch.

I had to take a deep breath to avoid an instinctively angry response.

...

I recently picked up The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom at the library. The book opens with what might seem like a trite message: money and happiness are not the same thing. The assumption that money alone leads to a fulfilling life is flawed, and chasing material things will never bring true happiness. Instead, other areas—like time with loved ones—matter just as much, if not more.

You might ask: If there's nothing new in his message, why bother reading or writing about it?

First, many of the stories and examples were new to me. Second, we need to be reminded again and again things that are important in life. Third, the author offers a valuable lens: he makes the intangible measurable. As the management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” And that’s where Bloom’s framework becomes practical.

Sahil Bloom, now age 34, writes:

“I was born of an unlikely collision of two worlds. My mother, born and raised in Bangalore, India, and my father, an American born and raised in the Bronx, New York. The impact of growing up with a mix of cultures, religions, and beliefs was profound. My parents, sister, and family mean the world to me.”

I found this background revealing. While reading, I sensed a thread of Eastern wisdom in his ideas—such as his advice to seek guidance not from the richest people, but from the wisest. After learning more about his roots, I understood where that depth of perspective might come from.

In his conversations with others, Bloom invites people to try a simple exercise:
Close your eyes and imagine your ideal day at age 80.
What are you doing?
Who are you with?
Where are you?
How do you feel?

The responses he gathered were striking. Across all ages, professions, and economic backgrounds, people described almost exactly the same things. Their ideal day typically included: spending time with loved ones, doing meaningful work that contributes to their growth, and feeling physically and mentally well.

From these conversations, Bloom discovers four recurring values:
Time, Relationships, Purpose, and Health.
These, he says, make up four of the five types of wealth in life.

And the fifth? Financial wealth? But here’s the most surprising part: Not a single person mentioned money when imagining their ideal day.

The Five Types of Wealth

1. Time Wealth  how you spend your time, who you spend it with, and where you spend it.

2. Social Wealth your connections to others.

3. Mental Wealth this provides purpose and meaning and determines your decisions.

4. Physical Wealth your health, fitness, and vitality.

5. Financial Wealth your net worth.

Bloom’s core message is that we need to look at life as a whole, not chasing one at the cost of others. After all, you can chase money for decades and never feel wealthy. But if you wake up one morning and see meanings in what you are doing, surrounded by people you love, with energy in your body and peace in your mind—that’s a true wealth.

To be continued...

This is how I wasted over two hours today trying to resolve an issue that should have taken 5 minutes.

I had renewed my car registration online on July 3rd. But then I realized the DMV still had my old mailing address on file. I needed to update it so the new registration card would be sent to the right place. I thought it was a simple task. But not even close.

When I tried to update my address, the DMV system told me I needed to create an account at my.dmv.ny.gov. That I did. But within my account, under the “My Vehicles” tab, it said:

“You do not have any registered vehicles to display... If you have questions or feel that you have a registered vehicle that is not being shown, contact us.”

So I clicked the “contact us” link, which took me to a page that told me—again—to do everything online. I clicked on “Change Address” again, and it sent me back to my DMV account page. I was stuck in a digital loop, no escape, no solution. A perfect bureaucratic ouroboros.

I searched for a phone number and called. I waited 40 minutes... and was cut off by them. I called again. More time lost, more nothing. It honestly felt like the system was designed to discourage human contact.

I tried the chatbot. To its credit, when it couldn't resolve my issue, it suggested Live Chat. I tried. No luck. "All agents are currently busy."

I refreshed and retried—over and over—until finally, someone named Michelle came online.

I explained the problem: I had a DMV account, and I had a registered vehicle, but the two weren’t linked. That’s why I couldn’t change my address. She submitted a request to link my vehicle to my account. Once that’s done, I’ll be able to update my address online.

But since the new registration card was already mailed to the old address on July 7, I’ll now have to request—and pay for—a replacement.

What I Learned

This experience revealed two systemic problems:

1. The online system is broken.
It promises self-service but can’t deliver. It sends users in circles, provides no meaningful support, and fails to connect obvious information—like your car and your name.

2. There’s no fallback when the system fails.
Phone support is nonfunctional. You wait endlessly, and often there’s no one on the other end.  We all know hiring actual humans is prohibitively expensive. That’s why government agencies rely so heavily on automation. But when that fails and there’s no one behind the screen to help, the cost is shifted to us: in wasted time, frustration, and more.

The Bigger Picture

We hear a lot about "automating” public services in order to save money. But that shouldn’t mean totally replacing people with digital iron walls. A well-functioning public system needs both: efficient technology and real human beings when things go wrong.

I got my issue resolved only because it's me who refused to give up and who's determined to try and try. But it shouldn’t take that much determination just to change an address. And not everyone has the time or patience to navigate these broken systems.

The real cost is measured in how many people simply give up and rush to the office in order to meet a live human!