Near the end of his playful and provocative 2011 book Debt: The First 5000 Years, the late David Graeber repeats a joke told by his graduate school adviser, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins:
Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.
Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing?
Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it?
Samoan: And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.
Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.
Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.
If you like that, you might enjoy my appreciation of Graeber in Politico’s “Postscript” year-end roundup of significant figures who died in 2020. Writing this made me sorry I never met the man. Click here to read my essay.