I haven't written a long philosophical rambling tract in a while, have I? Well, I felt one coming on the other day, so here it is…

A lot of my most deeply felt views of the world are based around a rather nebulous concept, which I usually think of as ‘Good Stuff’ and I'll call it that here for want of a better name. It's a bit of a misnomer to call it ‘stuff’ at all, since it can manifest itself as such intangible things as happiness, free time and merely having had enough sleep; it comes in many forms, including energy, time, money, food, water, shelter, love, the list goes on; but fundamentally, I define ‘Good Stuff’ as anything which it is better to have more of.

It's noticeable that quite a lot of the forms of Good Stuff I just listed are conserved quantities, which you can redistribute but can't (easily) change the total amount of. Energy is conserved by basic physics; you can't cram more than 24 hours into a day; every time someone gets richer, someone else gets poorer; and so on. Growing up in a world like this, I'd pretty much taken for granted that many of the fundamental Good Things people need or want are things you can't get except by taking them away from someone else. A lot of competitive sorts of things (games, percentile-based exam marking and so forth) at school reinforced this impression further: every time someone wins a competition and ends up with more Good Stuff, someone else loses it and ends up with less.

Given all that – given the large number of conserved quantities which surround us from day to day, and the large number of those which are integral components of Good Stuff – when it finally came home to me that in fact Good Stuff is not conserved, it struck me as almost magical or miraculous. Energy, matter, time, effort, money, better-than-other-people-ness and all manner of other things may all be conserved, but Good Stuff as a whole is not, and it is possible to increase (or decrease) the total amount of it in the world. There are all sorts of diverse ways in which this can happen, some of which I'll mention specifically later, but for now it's enough to observe that one can increase the total amount of Good Stuff in the world. This was initially highly counter-intuitive to me, and realising it affected me deeply.

As a result of this, I now feel that increasing the world's total amount of Good Stuff is fundamentally the most wonderful thing I can imagine doing with my life. This is not to say that other activities such as redistributing Good Stuff from people with a surplus to people without enough (for example, famine relief) are not thoroughly worthy things to be doing as well, and I have nothing but the highest respect for people who dedicate themselves to causes of this type; but it just doesn't seem as magical and satisfying, to me personally, as acting directly to bring more Good Stuff into the world.

This basic concept has informed my view of all sorts of things. Take economics, for example. Whenever I hear about economics in the news, it's always to do with what the government can do to improve the economy; take a penny off income tax, put a penny on income tax, raise or lower interest rates, cancel Third World debt, or whatever else it might be this week, and always the intention is that performing these intangible manipulations of the shared illusion that is money will somehow increase the tangible quality of life for all the people living in the economy in question.

This has always seemed to me to be a weirdly roundabout way of creating a good economy. People generally seem to define a good economy as one in which everyone has plenty of money, which (in other words) means that the money they have can buy plenty of non-monetary Good Stuff. It seems clear to me that the amount of Good Stuff you can get for your buck is entirely dependent on how much Good Stuff in total there is to go round; so if I wanted the economy to be better, I'd concentrate on going out and actively doing something to create more Good Stuff, rather than shuffling figures in a shared illusion. Of course, I'm sure that at least in principle the shuffling of figures has all sorts of knock-on effects that between them do contrive to cause lots of people to somehow generate more actual Good Stuff. But it's never struck me as a natural or obvious way to try to achieve the desired goal.

This is also why I have such a dim view of the corporate jungle, in which companies in a limited market compete to have a bigger share of the available profit; particularly when companies use tactics like lock-in which have the effect of directly extracting Good Stuff from their customers, if not actually decreasing the total amount of it in the world, just so they can have more of it themselves. I can't help feeling that even if the free market has managed to be a net benefit to society, it's only managed it through sheer luck…

Friendships and relationships are another area where I feel strongly driven by my Good Stuff doctrine. In some sense, Good Stuff forms the basis of the whole concept for me: friendship is fundamentally made worthwhile by the fact that many of the ways to transfer Good Stuff to another person cause them to gain more of it than you lose. (For example, you make them happy and you're happier too because of it; you make the small effort of a phone call which can brighten their whole day; you take a ten-minute detour on your way home to run an errand which saves them far more than ten minutes. All sorts of things.) And if two (or more) people constantly impart Good Stuff to one another in these ways, they all end up better off as a result. Relationships are the same thing only more so; the distinctions between the two don't really show up at this level of detail.

One consequence of this is that friendships can be quite unbalanced and I won't think it's terribly important. If you're getting a lot more Good Stuff out of our friendship than you're putting in, but I'm only just getting out more than I'm putting in, then I won't really mind; it's only when the imbalance goes beyond the critical point and I actively start feeling drained by the friendship that I'll start to re-evaluate whether it's worthwhile. Apparently not everybody thinks this way; I've occasionally had people act horrified at how unbalanced one of my friendships was, when I really hadn't noticed it at all (if indeed it was unbalanced – of course all of these judgments are subjective in themselves). All I'd noticed was that I was happier being friends with that person than I would have been not being, and beyond that I really didn't mind.

The other consequence is that having friends, and socialising and spending time with those friends, strikes me as an intrinsically worthwhile thing to be doing, simply because it causes an increase in the total amount of Good Stuff. Whether that only benefits the people involved, or whether it benefits lots of other people too because it puts me and my friends in better moods which causes us to be that much nicer to everyone else we meet, or what, is sort of secondary and in the realm of fine detail; as long as Good Stuff shows a net increase, it's worthwhile.

Finally, of course, the Doctrine of Good Stuff is all the motivation I need for doing what I do in my spare time, writing free software. It improves the lives of the people who use it (or else they wouldn't keep using it!), so it generates Good Stuff in that way; I enjoy doing it myself (or I would have given up in disgust by now), so it's akin to a friendship activity in that it generates Good Stuff for other people without being a drain on my own; and most importantly of all, it's a terribly efficient way to generate Good Stuff, because software is so easily copyable – so a single piece of effort on my part can benefit thousands of users, so there's a huge return for the effort.

Of course, quite how much of all this is genuine first-cause motivation and how much is post-hoc rationalisation of stuff I actually do for completely different reasons, I'm not entirely sure; but these days, it all seems to fit together and largely make sense, and this framework of Good Stuff is the way in which I largely find myself viewing the world.