
The day I became a millionaire - tbrooks
https://medium.com/@dhh/the-day-i-became-a-millionaire-55d7dc4d8293#.r3zuj348m
======
lmm
If money doesn't buy happiness, you're not spending it right (and a
Lamborghini is probably not the most effective way).

There are certainly diminishing returns, and it's much easier to appreciate a
modest amount of money when you have the experience of living on less. And the
security of having a large number in your bank account probably matters much
less to the kind of person who starts their own business in the first place
rather than working for someone else (ironically enough).

But if you spend it intelligently, and don't make the mistake of sacrificing
quality of life for it, having more money genuinely can make life
significantly more fun.

~~~
vinceguidry
The point DHH made was much subtler than that. The words he used was "First,
as long as your basic needs are met, the quality of your lived experience is
only vaguely related to the trappings of material success."

I did a lot of soul-searching during my twenties and came to the same
conclusion. Yes, more money can make a seemingly-large impact on your life.
But the relationship is vague.

A Lamborghini only makes sense to buy if you can understand the difference
between it, a Ferrari, and other similar supercars. A Tesla is only really
useful if you have a garage to park it in that has a charge plug.

Plenty of people buy things that ultimately reduce the quality of their lives
by introducing pains in the neck. They may take pride in these pains in the
neck, but then the increase in quality is coming from the pride and not the
purchase. One could almost as easily just buy something like Tesla stock if
they're not quite up to owning a Tesla.

My soul-searching ended when I realized that it was moving through life's
phases and stages smoothly and easily that was true joy in life. To take
things simply and not go nuts with planning and optimization. DHH's philosophy
really appeals to me for that reason, and it's no accident that I really like
his web framework too.

That other, very long, post in this thread illustrates the vagueness of the
money / happiness connection. Making money is almost effortless once you have
the requisite social skills. Jobs fall into your lap, when you have a
business, people fall over themselves wanting to do business with you. All you
have to do is choose how much of it you want. It's not having those skills
that will ultimately make you unhappy, not lacking the money. To make the
money, you work on those general people skills, not on any one particular
vehicle to dollars.

~~~
SneakerXZ
People want money to have a freedom to do whatever they want. Focus on their
hobbies, travel around the world, start organisations, socialize more and so
on. If you are forced to work 8-5, you are selling a lot of your time that you
could spend differently and to be able to leave 8-5 you need to have money.

------
tedmiston
> And my mother was a damn magician at making impossible ends meet without
> belaboring her tricks (like biking an extra 15 minutes to find the lowest
> price on milk).

This line really hits home for anyone growing up lower-middle class.

------
p4wnc6
I resent these kind of counter-intuitive "I made a lot of money, didn't
actually think it would make me happy because I'm just that insightful, and lo
and behold I was right all along" stories. It reminds me of an Andrew Gelman
quote I love: "Just because something is counter-intuitive doesn't make it
true."

I don't think very many people are so shallow as to believe that money will
make them happy beyond a certain threshold of satisfying basic needs and
security. Sometimes people can be depressed or sidetracked by other issues and
can go through periods of life, maybe even long periods, where they believe
certain materialistic or wealth-enabled options will make them happy. But then
again, lots of people also fool themselves into believing that religion will
do that, or getting married, or having a baby. It works out for some people;
it doesn't work out for others; and in general we all can't read too much into
how it worked for other people.

But where I get super frustrated is with a number of things that become ever
more important yet ever less accessible to non-wealthy people. Particularly:
legal protection and medical security.

Basic insurance in the U.S. is pretty shitty. My mother, for example, is a
courtroom clerk and judge's assistant in a small town in the Midwest. She's a
government employee (of the county where she lives) and she hasn't been given
a raise in over 5 years because it's either the insurance gets cut more than
it already has been or else pay freezes. She has over 25 years of experience
as a paralegal and judge's assistant and is a wizard with motions and lots of
other legal documents, in addition to being exceptionally personable and
polite to the many human beings who have to come through her office dealing
with difficult court-related circumstances. Yet per year she earns less than
$15,000 above the national poverty line in America, and even in her lower-
cost-of-living area it's extremely hard on her to make ends meet, and
especially to deal with many of the health downturns that accompany ageing.

She only has 3 weeks of vacation (and she is even so gracious as to consider
herself lucky(!) to have this). She's in her mid fifties and has worked a full
career and gets 15 days of paid time off, which must also be used for her sick
time if needed. She can't even take time off to help others in our family with
childcare or holiday travel or anything because she has so few days of her
own.

Would a million dollars magically make her happy? You damn well better believe
it would. Would it totally solve all of her problems and make the essence of
life more valuable or meaningful to her ... no, of course not, and that's
pretty irrelevant.

I also have experience with very frustrating legal issues as well. I don't
want to go on about an anecdotal situation, but my sister is tied up in a very
expensive custody battle with the biological father of her son. The father in
this situation has been arrested and convicted of many minor offenses, ranging
from drug possession charges to fraudulent checks, but the custody issue came
about because he was charged with a very significant set of crimes that place
my nephew in pretty serious danger.

Yet the particular state that I live in has some of the most antiquated laws
about child protection in these cases. Virtually 100% of the time, the state
sides with the reasoning that it's _always_ in the best interest of a child to
be with both parents, no matter what sort of crimes either parent has
committed, even to the crazy extreme that our attorney has shown us case law
in which a young girl was actually raped by her father and then later forced
to have supervised visitation with him. In some cases, even against this
state's own Department of Corrections guidelines, they will conduct supervised
visits at a jail or prison.

The custody issue has dragged on and on, and I have personally contributed a
very large amount of money to fund our legal effort to seek supervised
parenting time and potentially termination of parental rights.

If we weren't pumping a ridiculous amount of money into the legal case, it's
almost guaranteed that this would just be another run-of-the-mill case where
the court looks contemptibly upon both parties, and pre-judges them both to be
"lowlifes" merely for even having to be in court at all, and just goes by the
status quo parenting time guidelines without even spending 10 seconds to think
about the actual potential for harm to the child. Trust me, if I could give
you all of the details, it would make you scream in disbelief and frustration.

And here again, it's purely an issue of money. Do you have a spare $100,000
lying around to throw at a court case? Well, then your child gets to be
protected and supervised. But if you don't cough up the dough, your kid's
safety don't mean shit.

So do I think I'd be happier with a million dollars? You bet your ass. Not
because I want to own materialistic things or do bored billionaire shit like
create my own cryonics rocket so that aliens can unthaw me in a thousand
years, or surround myself with attractive people who will have sex with me
because of my Lorentzian money distortion field even though from a genetic
selection point of view I have zero business being with such people.

I just want to have a damn family holiday where me and my family are not
maxing out our blood pressure because we're worried about how my ageing mother
will pay the medical bills for her quite normal and expected age-related
conditions, or how my sister will come up with enough money to pay an attorney
$1500 to create a motion objecting to an inappropriate child supervision
arrangement proposed by the other party. Do you think a millionaire would have
to put up with this shit?

Yeah, my basic needs are met. I'm sitting in a warm room using the internet
right now and I have enough food. But fuck me if money wouldn't _seriously_
make me happy.

The hilarious thing: I'm very happy to work for it too. I don't expect my
parakeets-as-a-service business to disrupt everything and win me precious,
precious VC dollars. All I want is for my labor to be fairly compensated and
for employers to do simple things, like give people fair insurance and
vacation time.

~~~
pasbesoin
I agree with your points. Medical security (within the scope of reasonable
medical practices and expectations) and legal security (being able to mount a
reasonable defense to occasionally quite unreasonable circumstances).

I've experienced the medical situation first hand. And, it is a slippery
slope. Untreated or poorly treated -- or "put off" \-- one problem can lead to
second, and the next, and a spiraling decay of health. And health is the
foundation upon which all else is built. It seems ridiculous that a society
the professes to and insists upon "the best" from its members, makes so little
concerted effort to foster that foundation.

And, unfortunately, in a society that seems to be increasingly focused on the
self and attitudes centered around some sort of zero sum gain perspective,
reasonableness and compromise seems to be supplanted with legal warfare.
Where, like all warfare, (personal) resources play a primary role in
determining outcome.

There were things I wanted to achieve, but they were never focused on
financial outcome, until I fell increasingly behind these eight balls.

Simple things -- the beauty of a day and place; good company; the comfort and
well-being to fully enjoy these -- have always been the most enjoyable to me.
The creative focus and accomplishment I used to experience before the health
issues increasingly limited it -- and it used to be strongest when what I did
helped someone else.

I've had to rethink some of my early education and training -- and it has not
been an easy course. Because generosity, while still a primary force in the
world at large, is NOT always reciprocated. And these days, it is increasingly
NOT a reliable rule in areas that have a primary, profound effect upon our
lives.

And THIS, perhaps, is a real sign of decay in our society. Or, I was raised
under a delusion borne of some short-term aberration in how the world works.

Either way, I reflect more often on the adage: You can't take care of others
until you've taken care of yourself. Perhaps I still don't want to consider
that as primarily a financial dictate. Neither, however, do I any longer wish
to have financial constraints threaten my ability to take care of the basics
in this regard, for myself or for my family.

------
EvanPlaice
My father said it best...

"Once you've made enough money to cover all your basic wants and needs,
everything else is just keeping score." \- Joel Plaice Sr.

There are a lot of ways to screw it up: investing poorly; living an
unsustainable lifestyle; owning (and having to maintain) too much stuff;
losing the desire to work and/or contribute meaningfully; putting too much
emphasis on image over substance; sustaining superficial/self-serving
relationships; falling prey to legal vultures; etc...

------
pc86
OT: I understand why the dozen other submissions of this article have been
marked as duplicates, but is there really no way to link here? Half of them
have a single comment so the conversation ends up fractured. I had to scroll
to the 5th or 6th page of "new" to find this one, which I think most will not
do.

------
stevedekorte
I wonder what ratio of people who, after making it and being able do some of
the creative things they wished they had the time and resources to do,
actually go out and do them? Do most just fade away?

