Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

You will make more money by investing your money than you ever could working. Which is fine, because I don’t think you’re doing what you’re doing to make money. Except for the times when you are. I’d suggest stopping that. Though don’t lose that business card.

I thought about this and realized the book probably meant the card the guy had given me in Cannes.

In the next three weeks, you need to think more than you act, and listen more than you talk. There are big things happening, and you are uniquely positioned to see them. Call Bex, introduce her to Jason. Hang out. See where it goes!

As I read, I could tell it was coming to an end, and without a single word about April.

Give yourself time to think. Don’t fill it all up with podcasts and TV shows. Talk it out, think it out, be present. And maybe call Maya—she’s thinking a lot these days too. Actually, you should reach out to all the old friends. Just ask how they’re doing. You’ve got a few weeks before this story starts up again. You can move to the next page two weeks from today. But remember, tell no one about me. It will ruin the Good Times.

The urge to turn to the next page was overwhelming. Where was April? What was going on?

I turned the page.

Andy, I told you not to turn the page. April will be OK. But sometimes you have to wait.

I threw the book across the room, and it slammed into the wall, knocking a couple plastic cups off my shelf.

“You OK in there?” Jason said, half laughing.

“I’m fine, just trying to kill a roach.”

I went over to grab the book and stuffed it between my bed and the box spring. Jason didn’t ever come in my room, so I wasn’t hiding it from him as much as I was hiding it from myself.

And thus, in secret, I had to live all by myself in a world in which April was alive and books could predict the future. It took gargantuan strength for me not to tell Robin about it. It wasn’t just that I wanted to tell anyone , though I did; it’s more that it seemed so cruel to let him just suffer while I had this new hope. But then again maybe it was cruel to tell him when it could still all be a lie.

It was one thing to let a supernatural garbage book give you hope that your dead friend was alive; it was another thing entirely to force that ambiguity on someone else.

I tried to take the book’s advice, to give myself space to think, but I was nervous and skittish and addicted to content.

Jason definitely noticed something was up.

“Dude, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you have been weird since you met Subway Girl.”

“Don’t call her Subway Girl,” I told him.

“That’s what I’ve always called her, though.”

“Yeah, but she’s going to come over tonight, and if you call her ‘Subway Girl’ in front of her, she is going to stab you, and then me. You can call her Becky or Rebecca or Bex.”

“OK,” he said before repeating, “Dude, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you’ve been weird since you met Becky .”

“It’s not her, it’s …” I decided to do a half lie: “It’s money. Money is so freaking weird, man.”

“Like, the part where you’re filthy rich and never have to worry about it again?” Jason didn’t really have to worry about money either. The podcast was making tons of ad revenue now, and he still had a full-time job doing database design for an e-commerce company.

“You totally have to worry about money when you have it, just in a different way.”

This was, in fairness, something I never would have said to anyone but Jason, who I was sharing about $30,000 in podcast revenue with every month. Still, he rolled his eyes pretty hard.

“You could buy a penthouse apartment in Midtown and not have a mortgage.”

“Right, so should I do that? Or should I start a business? Or should I invest in the stock market or in bonds? Like, why do you think I still live here with you?”

“Are you saying that you still live with me just because you don’t know how to make a decision?”

“Jason, I still live here because I want to. I don’t want to live in a penthouse apartment in Midtown. I don’t want a boat. Robin keeps making me all this money, but what’s the point of it? I can’t even take a girl to a fancy restaurant because it just feels like bragging. So, like, why have money? Should I just give it away?”

“Jesus, Andy. Not everything’s a crusade. Just make the money while you can, buy some cool sneakers, and then you can do good with it when you aren’t so busy making it. The trick is to not spend it all on dumb shit and, like, you’re clearly physically incapable of that. You can’t even find a girlfriend who wants you for your money.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” I was being defensive because I was hoping maybe she would be someday.

“I wasn’t talking about Bex, I was talking about your inability to find a girlfriend.”

“Ah, well, I concede. But I’m still worried I’m not doing the right thing with the untapped energy in my savings account.”

“Well, I’ll keep my eyes open for weird or good shit you can do with your money. But you’re fucking lucky I’m so understanding because most people would not sit here and listen to you complain about how hard it is to be so ludicrously rich.”

“I am ludicrously rich,” I said, smiling.

“Isn’t it nice?”

“Yeah, I guess it is. Sometimes I feel like I must have earned it. Sometimes I feel like I must be worth it, like I won life. But that’s bullshit. April earned this money, I’m just making it.”

“OH MY GOD YOU ARE THE WORST.”

“OK, sorry, sometimes I feel like April earned this money and I’m just making it.”

“Better, but still bad.”

I think I’m good at looking like I have things together on the outside, but that’s only because I spend an immense amount of time worrying about it.

The book seemed to know what I should do—well, isn’t that what we all want to know? Free will is stressful . I invited Bex over to play games, just like the book said I should, and it was actually fun. I was worried that she and Jason wouldn’t get along, but it turns out she was used to people who don’t share a lot of the same experiences as her.

We played a game that my parents and I used to play when I was a kid. You pick a long word that you can divide into three different words and describe it using definitions of its three different parts.

That was probably really confusing. Example: If you pick “dictionary,” you say, “At first I am a penis, then I ostracize, and finally I’m light and free.” The first person to guess “dick shun airy” wins.

Bex had just bent the rules a little with “First I am an explanation, then a vocal performance, then I weep, and finally I am an abbreviated sibling,” but we all agreed that she was a genius when the answer was “how sing cry sis.” And that led us into talking about the reasons why housing had become so unaffordable, which devolved mostly into me and Jason repeating stuff we’d learned from one of The Thread’s videos.

“I mean, you two sound really smart, but really you just watch The Thread,” Bex said after we’d gone on for five or six minutes.

“Oh! You just got called out so hard!” Jason said to me.

“So did you!”

“Yeah, but Bex isn’t my friend! She knows nothing about me, so I am free from the deeper ramifications of this callout! Also, I told you not only white dudes watch The Thread.”

“I didn’t say only white dudes,” I said, thankful that the subject was moving away from my intellectual plagiarism, but apprehensive that it was moving toward race. “I said mostly white dudes.”