B'chasdei Hashem, over the past almost 20 years, Beis Mevakesh Lev has produced over 13,300 audio shiurim and over 31,000 written posts, unmatched by any one-person website - all completely free of charge. There are no paywalls or anything else. Now we are turning to you for help so we can continue - any amount will help. Even 99 cents! Thank you to my sweetest and most beloved friends!!!:-)!!
alchehrm@gmail.com
----
Hard Signal Substack
Love. Health. Optionality.
“True wealth is not a number. It’s the structural capacity to live well, choose freely, and connect deeply.”
In complex systems - society, the economy, our bodies, our minds - outcomes are emergent. And emergence is the product of a few simple rules followed iteratively in such systems.
We live in an era obsessed with artificial metrics: follower counts, portfolio balances, likes, yield, income. But real wealth isn’t found in a ledger. It’s structural, not superficial. It’s stored not in digits but in dynamism—in the resilience of our relationships, the integrity of our biology, and the architecture of our decision space.
Strip away the noise and you’re left with three assets that compound across every domain:
Love. Health. Optionality.
The real wealth. The core elements. The holy triumvirate. Everything else is leverage, illusion, or liability.
❤️ Love: The Emotional Infrastructure of Resilience
We are not rugged individualists, no matter how much our culture postures that way. We are ultra-social beings whose survival—emotional, economic, even biological—relies on tribes, families, partnerships, reputations, and today especially, networks of trust.
Love is not soft. It is anti-fragile. It holds when markets collapse. It shows up in the hospital. It is the immune system of the soul. Even one or two high-quality bonds—people who would help bury a body or cross a desert for you—make life bearable in the worst conditions.
Love also amplifies the upside. The joy of building, of succeeding, of simply sharing a joke at the end of a long day—these only mean something when someone is there to witness them.
Without love, success feels hollow.
Without love, wealth is just insulation.
Without love, there’s no “why.”
馃Health: The Energy System of Human Autonomy
Wealth without health is like owning a Gulfstream VI with no fuel and failing engines. And it’s not just physical—mental, emotional, and spiritual health are multiplicative force vectors. Regular maintenance, thus becomes a dominant strategy.
Health is freedom:
To act without pain.
To think without fog.
To wake up energized and face the world without dread.
In a complex world, your state is your operating system. If your health collapses, all your plans are corrupted. No amount of success can substitute for being able to think clearly, move freely, and sleep deeply.
Health is the foundation layer.
It’s not the goal of life, but it makes life winnable.
Guard and maintain it as such.
馃Л Optionality: The Architecture of Leverage in a Complex World
Optionality is freedom embedded in structure.
It’s the ability to say yes, or no, or not yet. To walk away. To pivot. To escape. To adapt. To preserve judgment until reality clarifies itself.
In complex systems, prediction fails. But adaptation wins. That makes optionality the dominant strategy in an unpredictable world.
Optionality gives you leverage over time.
It compounds your capacity to benefit from uncertainty.
It lets you harvest upside without exposing yourself to totalizing downside.
Optionality is the geometry of resilience.
It means you’re not trapped by your past, your job, your ideology, or your sunk costs.
馃幆 Interlude: A Word for the Enemies of Optionality
Of course, there are always the credentialed priesthood of anti-choice psychology and value-subtracting “economics” departments ready to tell you that “too many options are bad for you.” This is, in fact, the core thesis of Barry Schwartz’ book The Paradox of Choice.
According to Schwartz et al, if capitalism offers too many salad dressings or streaming services, your fragile mind short-circuits and you cry into your kombucha. Their solution? Curb your freedom. Centralize your menu. Let someone wiser—maybe with tenure and no skin in the game—limit your possibilities for your own good.
This isn't just infantilizing. It’s strategically illiterate.
Yes, too many irrelevant options can overwhelm a poorly structured mind (so: structure you mind better). That’s not a problem with optionality—it’s a problem with training, framing, and a refusal to develop judgment. The solution is not to limit the options, but to upgrade the chooser.
Optionality isn't overwhelming. It's empowering.
If you’re trying to navigate a chaotic world, the last thing you want is to reduce the degrees of freedom available to you. You want range. You want asymmetry. You want adaptability.
馃П Why These Three?
These aren’t just “feel-good” categories. They’re foundational structures that support everything else.
Each compounds the other:
Love makes health and optionality worth it.
Health makes love and optionality possible.
Optionality protects and extends both love and health.
This triad is anti-fragile, non-zero-sum, and universally accessible—at least in fragments. Unlike wealth as traditionally defined, they do not depend on zero-sum extraction, centralized institutions, or games of status.
馃攧 The Inversion Test
If you want to know what’s not true wealth, invert:
Status can vanish.
Money without meaning is hollow.
Fame is a brittle social illusion.
Even legacy is downstream of the systems that carry it forward.
Only love, health, and optionality are durable across:
Personal tragedy
Economic collapse
Political disruption
Capitalism’s ongoing (but intellectually vacant) identity crisis
馃弫 Closing Thought:
In a chaotic world, wealth is not about control.
It’s about the capacity to adapt, connect, and stay in the game.
Love gives you meaning.
Health gives you capacity.
Optionality gives you leverage.
Everything else is either an amplifier—or a distraction.
馃憞 Call to Action:
If you’re optimizing for anything else, it might be time to ask:
What game are you playing? And who wrote the rules?
