August 2025
What’s the most “magical” concept in money and investing? Easy. Compounding.
It can amplify gains, make time work for you, and a number of other seemingly-magical things. What no one ever asks, though, is:
What’s the opposite of compounding? COMPRESSION.
I want to get into what I mean by that, and why spending some time thinking about compression could help you live a richer life.
The magic of analog
Have you ever wondered why new vinyl records—whether it’s Taylor Swift or the Black Keys—don’t sound quite as good as the classics? There’s a richness to original vinyls from the 60s and 70s that you don’t get in today’s recordings. That’s not just nostalgia you’re hearing, there’s a reason behind the difference in sound.
Back in the day, producers made master recordings with range—there was a big variance between the quiet sounds and loud elements, with nuance applied to each instrument or note.
With newer records, the emphasis tends to be on volume. But more than that, it’s on efficiency. Most of our master records today are heavily compressed.
You might see this even if you’re doing amateur recordings on your phone or computer—a .wav file has more nuance and clarity than an .mp3, but it’s going to be a larger file size which makes it less efficient and harder to share.
Vinyl and analog go hand and hand. These days, our compressed audio files are missing some of that richness, even when they’re pressed into a vinyl format.
That’s not necessarily bad. We’ve gained a lot with advanced digital recording—more nuanced sounds, clarity, efficiency, convenience—the list goes on. But we do lose some of that richness that makes you fall in love with an album from the first note to the last.
Decompression and pre compression
his same principle applies to life. Recently, my family and I went camping. It was a multi-day digital detox and chance to reconnect.
There’s a reason we call this decompressing; you’re removing the constraints of daily life. But the thing is, most of those constraints, or compressions, serve a purpose.
Think of the rigidity and restriction that comes with a daily schedule; then think of the chaos or confusion that would come if you suddenly trashed your schedule and just took your kids to school whenever.
As with albums, compression in real life serves a purpose.
So taking my kids camping was an interesting case study in decompressing.
While my wife and I took a few days to decompress, and were still thinking about the real world somewhere in our frame of reference, our kids were free from constraint within a few hours of the car ride.
After a few days, we might as well have lived at our campsite. The outside world faded away.
And I think it’s because they’re pre-compression. They haven’t condensed their lives for efficiency or practicality yet. Which got me thinking: Can we be intentional about which areas of our life we choose to compress? In other words:
Can we do compression on purpose?
After thinking about it, I’m confident that yes, we can. In fact, that’s a big part of what you’re doing when you have a family meeting or a weekly check-in. You’re putting guardrails in place so that you have freedom to play and explore within them.
In other words, you’re intentionally choosing an MP3 so you can enjoy music in your car, not because it’s the only option available.
Compression (and expansion) on purpose
Most of the financial professionals in our lives encourage compression. Everything gets boiled down to one goal—retirement— with rather simplistic advice supporting that goal. But this leads to forced compression.
So why is that? First, convenience (And frankly, maybe some laziness from the provider). But also, what’s the alternative? Living life with no compression can be unwieldy. You can’t put a record player in your minivan.
But as I thought about this, I realized how much it aligned with the Virtual Family Office service model we provide. We want to understand all the inputs that make up our clients’ uncompressed lives. We want the hopes AND dreams AND goals that make up a song or record or album.
From there, we can offer the convenience of all-in-one without the compression of it. We’re not trying to consolidate all of your needs into easy, digital packaging. We want to help find the providers and products that match all of your needs, then coordinate them on your behalf.
That can seem like a small difference, but it’s why an original Van Morrison sounds better than a new recording. It’s what happens when you match the inputs to the outputs, with intention.
If you feel like your financial plan is missing key details, or that your finances aren’t reflecting the full range of what you value and hope to achieve, it could be that things are getting compressed; you may need to take a step back and let things expand for a minute. That’s something we can help with.
Before I go…
I can’t talk about the ins and outs of making music (like compression) and not share some of the music we’ve been releasing. Here’s a sneak preview of a new song we’ve been adding to the set.
Follow Morgan on Purpose and Stone Arch Rivals on Instagram for more of these sneak peeks!
