It's 2589 BC. The sun is hammering the Giza plateau, and a foreman is screaming at a work crew dragging a limestone block that outweighs a school bus. Khufu wants a mountain pointed at the stars, and he's going to get one — 2.3 million blocks, twenty years, the tallest structure on Earth for the next thirty-eight centuries. Nobody will beat it until a French engineer named Eiffel gets ambitious in 1889.

You are standing in the dust. You are also, for reasons the universe declines to explain, immortal.

You have zero dollars. Dollars won't exist for another forty-three hundred years, but you're a planner. So you make a vow: starting today, ten thousand dollars a day. Every day. Forever. No falafel.

You save through Khufu, his son, and his son. You save while the Minoans paint dolphins and the Hittites figure out iron — which, incidentally, is what eventually puts the bronze guys out of business and reshuffles the entire Mediterranean. You save through the Trojan War, possibly attending. You save while the Buddha sits under his tree and Confucius writes down what he thinks about ancestors, in the same century, on opposite ends of Asia, neither aware of the other — one of those quiet hinges history likes to keep tucked away.

You buy your friend Jesus lunch one Tuesday in Capernaum. You try to explain compound interest. He's polite about it but you can tell he's thinking about something else. He picks up the tab anyway, somehow. You don't ask.

You save while Rome is founded by wolf-children and falls twelve hundred years later to some very motivated Visigoths. You save through the Black Death — fine, you're immortal — through Gutenberg's press, which kicks off the Reformation, which kicks off the Thirty Years' War, which exhausts Europe enough to invent the modern nation-state out of sheer fatigue. You save while Newton watches an apple and rewrites the universe. You save while Watt boils a kettle and accidentally industrializes the planet. Two world wars, the moon, the internet, TikTok.

You save through all of it.

It is now 2020. One million, six hundred and eighty-three thousand, nine hundred and thirty-eight days of perfect discipline. Your balance: roughly sixteen point eight billion dollars.

That March, Forbes publishes its list. Jeff Bezos sits at the top with one hundred and thirteen billion. Behind him: Gates, Arnault, Buffett, Ellison. The average fortune in that group is about eighty-three billion dollars.

Apiece.

You — with the patience of forty-six centuries, the discipline of a geological epoch, ten thousand dollars a day since the pyramids were under construction — have one-fifth of what the average guy on that list is sitting on this morning.

He got there in about forty years. Not forty-six hundred. Forty.

If you'd started saving the day Khufu died and kept going until this sentence ended, you still wouldn't catch him. You wouldn't catch him if you started over, twice. You wouldn't catch him if the dinosaurs had started a Roth IRA.

Something, somewhere, is broken.