I don't think you have to have Fuck You Money to get to this point. Most people eventually become disillusioned with work enough that they reevaluate what matters to them. Getting a very profitable exit is just one way to trigger that experience.
In my experience, a lot of people who get into this state start self-sabotaging hard as a way of rejecting what feels, ironically, like losing control. Sudden freedom can feel foreign and lot like your world got forcibly taken away from you. I'm not surprised the author is turning down opportunities and breaking off with his girlfriend. It's a way of taking back control.
When this happened to me, I pivoted hard from getting satisfaction out of what I built to getting satisfaction out of developing people. Now I take great pride out of the careers I've nurtured...a lot more than what I've built, in most ways. I've heard others express similar ideas in different ways, like "I now enjoy making other people rich."
No matter what, I encourage the author to use this time to build connections instead of destroying them (real connections...not work or SF acquaintances). Something I did not read in this essay is how he grew closer to anyone (in fact, I read the opposite). No path out of this valley involves traveling alone.
> No path out of this valley involves traveling alone
In my opinion, this is the big take here
When you have enough money to not work, it becomes very lonely fast
All of a sudden you have tons of time, but no one to share it with. Everyone is busy, mostly with work (also, most people probably can’t afford the same things you can)
If you could coordinate to stop working at the same time as your significant other, and a few friends, then you at least would have a group to plan and do stuff with
One of the biggest meanings we can find in life, is the feeling of belonging
OP seems to be going through a belonging crisis. Trying to figure out what group he wants to belong to
> When you have enough money to not work, it becomes very lonely fast
I haven't made enough to not work but once my US immigration was sorted out (H1B isn't very leisure compatible), I took a year off to rediscover what all passed me by when I was working.
This was a lot of alone time, but not true loneliness.
For example, I would set up lunch with a friend, they would bail due to work emergencies or something but I would go eat there anyway.
Quickly learned to go to a place where multiple people were scheduled anyway, like heading to Berkley for a tech talk on Byzantine block chains or vector search algorithms, hoping something would interest me.
> OP seems to be going through a belonging crisis. Trying to figure out what group he wants to belong to
The first three months were a strange struggle with my Ego, because a large part of my "Get up and do things" was the belief that what I had to do was very important to others and the whole world stops if I stop moving. To get through the waves in life without feeling self pity about it, I honestly felt my work was what made the sun rise and the rain fall.
Suddenly, my self importance was shot to pieces immediately.
I wasn't important anymore, what I did wasn't important to others but only to me. All the years of sacrificing my own wants (not needs) suddenly felt dissonant.
Plus a lot of activities aren't cumulative in the way work is - cooking dinner today does nothing for dinner tomorrow, there's no way to add up that to something.
Work is particularly rewarding because it checks those two boxes for me - it adds up to something, slowly every day, plus what I do is important to others in way where they want you to succeed (unlike say training for the SF marathon, where it's all "I could never" from people who could, but don't want to).
Eventually, I went back to work, but now I drink that workahol in moderation.
I read somewhere there are old money people in Europe faking that they are “working class” - not really to hide the fact that they are rich - to have people to hang out with in general.
If I ever got to the point of having fuck you money, I don't see myself stop hanging out with my friends. We all like movies and dinner and board games. That's all I need in order to hang out. My board game group as it is has a pretty broad spectrum of financial situations.
> Everyone is busy, mostly with work (also, most people probably can’t afford the same things you can)
I would think if one were rich, and you knew who you wanted to spend time with, you could simply buy their time through various means. Pay some bills, get them a more relaxed job with more time, pay for vacations for them to go with you etc.
But he was Sikh (Indian Indian), and arguing his proto-Indo-European ancestry qualified him. He was ‘acquitted’ of being ‘white’, and case thrown out. Really interesting case, actually.
Some pretty nasty stuff in there from the plaintiff about his revulsion too and not wanting to marry the ‘lower castes’ (and some argument regarding Mongoloids) to help quantify him as ‘white’ in case you get too sympathetic.
Yep. I am not even rich. In fact compared to US software engineers I am making pennies, but I am hitting above average for where I live. And at times it is hard to find meaning in every day life. I like my job, but realistically I could quit now and just about coast with my savings for the rest of my life. On other hand I could increase my spending and live more luxurious life style, but that isn't for me. I just like to code, play video games, and be alone in peace and quiet.
Almost at that point myself. Thinking about doing another year or two to save up an additional buffer, and make sure we're not right before another 2008-like event before I pull the plug. Start my own company, maybe make some money, maybe not. I'm tired of the grind. I'm tired every single day, and there's no time or energy to try to fix it. At this point I just want to be left alone, in peace and quiet...
Honestly, if I ever reach the point where my savings would keep me comfortable with a pension to look forward to pick up the slack at the end, I'd quit my job and just focus on my interests, providing a clean house and having a good meal ready in the evening for my wife and son, and develop some side gigs I can give up if they don't give me fulfilment.
As it is, I am acutely aware of my privileges as part of a household with two IT-based incomes and not too many worries, and that the world being what it is right now is giving rise to so many uncertainties that I wouldn't dream of abandoning this unless I had a really big bag of money like the author.
The big question for me has become health insurance. Yes, I know ACA plans are a thing I just <side eyes incoming administration> don't trust it not to be messed with. Protections for preexisting conditions are the only reason retirement is even an eventual possibility for me.
I worry that I don't have enough of a life outside of work to make retirement fulfilling, and actually, I don't actually mind working if I'm completely honest. I just never liked the stress of needing a job.
This was one of the main reasons I emigrated from the US. My savings constituted a couple of years runway in the US tech centres, or a decade somewhere with affordable housing and healthcare...
Ask a wage slave what he'd like to accomplish. Chances are the response will be something like "I'd start every day at the gym and work out for two hours until I was as buff as Brad Pitt. Then I'd practice the piano for three hours. I'd become fluent in Mandarin so that I could be prepared to understand the largest transformation of our time. I'd really learn how to handle a polo pony. I'd learn to fly a helicopter. I'd finish the screenplay that I've been writing and direct a production of it in HDTV."
Why hasn't he accomplished all of those things? "Because I'm chained to this desk 50 hours per week at this horrible [insurance|programming|government|administrative|whatever] job.
So he has no doubt that he would get all these things done if he didn't have to work? "Absolutely none. If I didn't have the job, I would be out there living the dream."
Suppose that the guy cashes in his investments and does retire. What do we find? He is waking up at 9:30 am, surfing the Web, sorting out the cable TV bill, watching DVDs, talking about going to the gym, eating Doritos, and maybe accomplishing one of his stated goals.
Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated.
> > but that isn't for me. I just like to code, play video games, and be alone in peace and quiet.
Lack of desires is the first canary in the coal mine of a decrease in mood.
As much as it sounds empty those who are able to distinguish between a 500$ TV and a 5000$ one have a very fine tuned sense of desire which doesn't collapse at the tail end.
Yeah. When you have to work in order to live, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that you would be happy if only you had money to quit your job and time do the things you want to do.
Once you get there, you have to face reality: while being poor leads to unhappiness, being financially independent does not lead to happiness either. Don't believe me? Look at billionaires out there; do all of them look like happy and well-adjusted people to you? Not naming names.
And that's why wealthy celebrities repeat again and again that "Money doesn't buy happiness". It's because they know from experience that it really doesn't help all that much.
I'm not sure I'm convinced. I guess I haven't had real money.
I had > 1m at one point. It was enough not to work. It wasn't enough to experiment with random things without risk. Couldn't buy a house in NYC,SF,LA,Seattle. Would just have to go back to work. Couldn't start a business for a project that required 10-20 people. Couldn't really start co-working space for 20-40 people at current rent prices without feeling like I'd probably just be throwing away a few hundred k.
What I could do is travel. Could also live anywhere for a few years.
OTOH, if I had F.U. money, I would do those things and more. I might hire people to do them. There are 5 to 10 apps I'd like to see exist. Would be happy to pay some people to make them and make them open source, if I had FU money. Would love to start a tech-interactive-art museum the size of at least most major museums in big cities. Would consider funding startups.
I have one friend, x-coworker, that picked a different path than me and made lots of $$$ (no idea how much). But, they invest in startups. Goal is to invest $1 million a year. They visit startups and pitch events once or twice a month. They also have a personal project. Otherwise they travel with their S.O. and visit their adult kids around the world.
> OTOH, if I had F.U. money, I would do those things and more
I get what you mean, but having enough not to work is the definition of FU money. It means you can just drop your things and leave when the boss demands you something you're not willing to do.
Nobody takes it literally like that though, because at least in a better job market way too many people have that money.
If you want to tie it to a single scenario I'd say it's taken on a meaning more like 'I'll do what I want to you/your business/parking because I don't care about paying to sort it out if I'm sued'. Parking where I 'can't' & paying the 100x fine seems better to me than finding where I 'can' and paying the 1x ticket sort of thing. Not to say everyone's morals would have them act like that, but illustratively.
> OTOH, if I had F.U. money, I would do those things and more
Sure, there's no lack of things that one can do with money. But would you be substantially happier? That's the issue at hand. Do you look at people with exorbitant wealth and see unlimited happiness? Do they appear to be in a permanent state of contentment and satisfaction?
What I've learned, both in terms of personal experience and from reading up on the psychology, is that to maximize happiness over time you need to optimize for ensuring you can maintain a steady upward trajectory.
Win the lottery or sell a company? Invest most of it, and allow yourself a "raise" you can permanently sustain every year.
It will do far more for you than raising your expenditure once, as you get used to it and return to near your baseline happiness very quickly.
Hah, the only time I had that kind of money was the 10 minutes my bank transferred the loan amount to my bank account so I could transfer it to the housing company. It didn't really feel like mine though, since they were both breathing over my neck to check I actually did so xD
1m is more then enough for some people to not work. You may need to be willing to be frugal and change your ideas about what comprises a good lifestyle.
I suppose it depends on a person. I am pretty sure the more money I have started to make throughout my life the happier I have become. Simply because of having more freedom over how I spend my time. I feel like there is almost infinite amount of things to do in this World, I just wish I was able to 24/7 do those things. I don't have enough to not work for rest of my life, but I have been able to buy my own apartment, house, which has given me a lot of confidence in my self and feelings of freedom. I started out with no connections or education though.
I am sure it can be different for everyone, people see the World differently.
All that sounds sadly familiar. Once you cross the threshold of not having to work for a living, the illusion fades away.
You are still you, your problems are still there, you are still bound to a slowly decaying body, there's no GAME OVER banner and credit roll proving that you have won the game of life. Because you haven't. Hah.
You can of course keep yourself entertained with all sorts of stupid stuff that doesn't actually matter. Or you can accept that there are still only a handful of things that bring people contentment, and you don't need to be financially independent to do any of them. I'm talking about bland obvious stuff like spending some time with loved ones (including pets and plants), going out for a walk in the park, etc. Unsurprisingly, a ton of retirees do just that. It's not because they are old and can't do anything else, it's because they have finally figured out what works.
And it's not like doing five times as much of that stuff is going to make you five times happier, either. Anybody with a full time job can carve out some quality time instead of arguing with strangers online.
It's also the case that having enough money not to work makes it very simple to engage in self destructive behaviour.
If you have a 9 to 5 then you're waking up at sunrise and going to bed some time after sunset. You're probably commuting, getting out in the world, chatting to people even if it's just the colleagues, Starbucks drive through, supermarket checkout clerk, that sort of thing.
If you have retirement level money and you're alone there is absolutely nothing stopping you from waking up at 2pm, sitting on your computer playing World of Warcraft ordering takeaways, not going out for a walk or seeing the sunlight, getting slightly more depressed each day in a spiral.
There's also nothing stopping you from going out drinking every day or every other of the week, shrugging off the hangover then hitting the next one. And so on and so forth.
People easily underestimate how much their sense of well-being is related to simple things like just going for a walk in the sunshine every now and then or eating properly.
I have had multiple different life routines. Healthy fit, alcoholic, depression and self pity, video games no life, productivity hacking self help guru following, career climbing, start up attempting. Considering having been through all of these and knowing how each of them feel, I would hope I have enough experience and urge to opt for the healthy fit as baseline. I think it is still much easier to go for it having no work stress in life.
I find that having a daily schedule and trying to stick to it helps. Also, going for small quality of life improvements, trying things out to see what works and what doesn't, such as a different pillow, or replacing some foods with alternatives.
Having free time forces you to deal with all the emotional baggage you have accumulated over the years and it's a bit much, too. I was obsessed with saving money so that my family wouldn't struggle if I became unable to work; as a result, I didn't process the reasons why I had that fear in the first place. My dad became severely disabled when I was in college and it was a very traumatic experience for my family.
I think having kids should help a lot. I'm spending around an hour every evening with mine and a few hours during weekends, but neither me nor they feel this is enough. I would also go skiing for 2 weeks every winter with my family and rent a cottage in the countryside for whole summer holidays, but I have neither money nor time to do it.
The irony of the situation is that by the time I earn the money my kids will grow up, leaving me a sad lonely man.
I gave it some thought and overall I'm happy my kids have happened relatively early. More than money or anything they need your energy and enthusiasm. As much as I complain about the lack of time, I think it's better than lack of energy and stamina. At least that's what I extrapolate from my experience so far.
For example, even between my two children I noticed that with the second one I've had sleeping issues, while with the first one I couldn't understand what "sleepless nights" everyone talks about. Like, a newborn kid at night sleeps 50 minutes out of every hour and so did I at the age of 25, being fresh and well rested in the morning. Didn't work as well at the age 31. Can't really imagine what it must feel after 40. And in general I would prefer healthy sleep over money and time.
> More than money or anything they need your energy and enthusiasm
> I think it's better than lack of energy and stamina. At least that's what I extrapolate from my experience so far
I had children late --essentially retired when my second was born at 40-- and I completely agree: it would have been better to have the last kid before we turned 35. You made the right choice!
Is it because of the energy? At what age did you feel you started to lose this type of energy required? I have been planning around 35, although I don't think I will be completely FI by then.
If it is sleep I guess one potential way for me to deal with it is that my partner goes to sleep earlier, e.g. 9pm and I go around 4am or later, which is what we kind of already do anyway since I am such a night owl. We also sleep in separate rooms, so we could potentially have both deal with the baby at different times. Not sure if anyone has done anything like that?
There's other things I might want to do first though, like concern free travel, or side projects, attempt at a start up, etc.
Still I feel like there's a huge difference between having to work vs having knowledge that you have enough that you can sustain a healthy and comfortable lifestyle without having to work, and therefore can opt to choose exactly what you want to work on rather than what might pay the most.
Like all things, financial independence means it's one of the things you can stop worrying about, and focus on what you think matters. It means you don't have other people telling you what you must do 8 hours of the day. Of course, some very very rich people have decided what they want to do is argue with strangers online. But that's their choice to make ;)
Decaying body might be one of the toughest arguments there, which unless we find a way to stop this, my solution would be to have kids and develop them instead of myself. Since I do like competitive sports and it is kind of hard to accept that at some point I am no longer going to be able to improve.
It may be the case that once I reach complete and comfortable financial independence it will not be all I expected it to be, but right now I don't see myself not appreciating the hell out of it, however I am sure plenty of people have thought they would be happy when reaching X goal and they either weren't or it was fleeting. I do have to say that so far I have come a long way from where I used to be from what I consider a hopeless position.
But there is a difference in my view whether you can walk in the park knowing that you don't have any potentially stressful responsibilities and problems coming up or you are walking in the park and excited about working on a hobby project of yours since you can 100 percent focus on that.
> my solution would be to have kids and develop them instead of myself
I never understood that kind of argument. Your kids will have decaying bodies just the same. You're only recreating what you're trying to escape, in somebody else.
Having/raising kids has been the most rewarding and challenging experience of my life. I cannot imagine how meaningless life would be to have all the money in the world and no kids.
I couldn't have said it better. It is an immense change for the better and for the worse, and it made us feel like that's when we truly became adults. It's one of those experiences that you can't understand until you go through it.
And I say this as somebody who really did not want the responsibility of raising children.
One (or both?) of you is coming at this from the wrong angle. Faced with limitations, you have to find ways of living with them, working around them, and still living a fulfilling life.
That might mean you cannot travel the same way in retirement that you did in your 20's. That doesn't mean you still can't enjoy it, just that you need to take things slower and be gentler with your body.
I think that is most people's experience but it only works up to a point. you will get diminishing returns the more money you have until, in some cases, maybe negative returns.
Probably diminishing returns, but sometimes I think there is also selection bias, with ultra rich getting there because of never ending satisfaction, so it is contingent on the type of the human. Satisified person would stop sooner while never satisfied would naturally become the richest.
Money doesn’t buy happiness but most people are subjected to artificial misery by this society and money does make that go away… at least, a fair share of it, probably 80 percent.
That said, a lot of people who get rich, because status is their real motivation, are shocked by how horrible society still is. At first they get hooked on the drug of high social status, but then they learn to see through the flattery and realize that nothing has truly changed, and they’re just as miserable as before. It tends to take about two years, in my observation, for the “new life energy” to wear off. Money teaches you that there isn’t some “better” society to aspire to. The people “up there” aren’t the supervillains Redditers imagine billionaires to be, but they’re not better either.
My daughter is autistic and when she started to learn how to read social cues she realized that her so-called friends didn’t actually like her, which I suspected myself but never had the chutzpah to say, and it made her angry. Getting rich has a similar “learn what people are really about” curse.
> Money doesn’t buy happiness but most people are subjected to artificial misery by this society and money does make that go away… at least, a fair share of it, probably 80 percent.
I've been the young immigrant who arrived to a foreign country with the clothes on his back and whatever fits in a suitcase; occasionally splurging by buying used clothes at a thrift shop and buying a slice of cake at the supermarket once a month. If anything, I was probably happier then: healthy and hopeful for a better future. Now I'm in significantly worse health and rather jaded.
Being young and healthy goes a long way. I was happier when I was a poor ahh college student but that doesn't mean losing all my money and possessions would be good for my mental health.
Having kept a diary/journal since 1993 and reading old entries daily, I'm struck by how we often see the past through rose-tinted glasses. The opposite is also true: I tend to forget happy moments from long ago.
>supervillains Redditers imagine billionaires to be
Sure, they are just people like you and me. Doesn't mean their mere existence isn't evidence of a major flaw in our implementation of capitalism. Our society is becoming far too stratified. Healthcare should be a right at this point in our society's development, it's a stain on our country that we still carry on with a system that works for nobody except health insurance CEOs.
"Healthcare should be a right at this point in our society's development"
A 'right' shouldn't depend on someone else's labor.
"it's a stain on our country that we still carry on with a system that works for nobody except health insurance CEOs"
I do agree that we need to get rid of the middleman. Replacing it with another one (the government) is a mistake and leads to the same inefficiencies.
Common procedures should be charge directly to the patient. These prices will be forced to go down as there will be actual competition. This won't work in cases where the surgery is rare, and insurance will work here. This will cut most of the bloat out of of health care and reduce the costs for everyone.
Lasik eye surgery is a good example of this. It's not covered by insurance. A decade ago, it was $10,000. My parents just got it a year ago and paid less than $1,000 out of pocket.
Societies have made the poor better off by preventing people from becoming too wealthy, though. Specifically, I'm thinking of the very high high-end tax rates that were common 60 years ago.
I don't know about "too rich", but if you're looking at the distribution of income and wealth, you'll find an increasing divide between poor and rich over the last decades in pretty much all western countries at least.
Not in relative terms, which is what people usually measure. And yes, the gap has been increasing in relative terms.
And I wonder what's behind that rhetoric twist in your second sentence. Was that on purpose or do you not even notice?
Because no, somebody creating more wealth than me does not hurt me by itself (I might even benefit!). Somebody accumulating and being able to command more wealth than me can hurt me, among other reasons because it gives them political power, which they can wield to hurt me and others. Inequal wealth accumulation taken to its logical extreme is undemocratic because it violates the principle of one person one vote.
(Some wealth accumulation is okay. There's room for nuance here.)
What research there is suggests money/happiness follows a log-linear relationship.[1] So it kind of does buy happiness, but the rate of increase falls off pretty fast over the range most of us experience.
> suffer in relaive comfort which is the most that anyone can realisically strive for
If you have never met a person who is content with their life you may benefit from expanding your social circle. There are sincerely happy people out there.
Yeah, if only people who chase happiness their entire lives, just because they saw it few times in others and suffer immensely in the process had this insight ...
Being unhappy because you are homeless is not the same being unhappy because some woman doesn't treat you like she would do a man who looks better than you are just two different things.
It can, if you use it wisely. It's just not that you eat the money yourself, you apply it to things you want to do. That could be buying guitars, or it could be setting up solar panels in Ghana. There's a lot of things you can do with money.
No, you cannot make the comparison between having money and not having money if you have never not had money. If you have always had money, you have never known the difficulty of living without it.
I did the same as OP. Quit my job then started distancing from everyone and removing responsibility in the pursuit of freedom to do what I want. But all I did was wallow and stay alone. Not sure what the answer is but your insights were very powerful to read.
I find this to be very familiar. I worked endlessly to be able to have no responsibility and endless freedom. My partner passed away several years ago now, and I still haven't filled that void. I'm not unhappy by any means, but money and freedom are a poor substitute for companionship.
Similar boat! I also worked hard to have freedom, and then my partner died, two and half years ago. I was left with a toddler, so don't have that much freedom. Sometimes I think perhaps it's ok this way...
I am sorry this happened to your family. I suspect your relationship with your toddler will be very special and unique in the years to come. Hope you are doing ok.
The book of Ecclesiastes is about this. It makes more sense if you s/meaningless/vapor/g, i.e. we're all chasing after something like smoke that we can see but can't 'catch'.
Fascinating that your version said "vapor". That's a much better translation. The versions I've read called it "vanity" which was even more obtuse. Once I figured out that they meant something insubstantial and fleeting, I found that particular book beautiful.
Everybody here is catching smoke
Looking for the ephemeral
Swallowing the sun in a moonlit room
Standing at the foot of a rainbow
Everybody here is catching smoke
Looking for the ephemeral
Riding on a yellow-bellied brown snake
Sipping on hedonism
Having a spouse helps, but overall I think this is a road to depression. People are social creatures and you need to be proactive with friends especially in the adulthood and also participate in communities if time allows (sports, interests etc.)
I suspect it might feel indecent to tell others you suffer when you're both free and rich, and it's difficult for them to figure what's wrong with you.
Instead, people in such position should probably go out and join associations which distribute food to those who need it. At least they'll see that they're doing something good to improve others' condition and would probably feel better.
As someone who has not been successful in life but who is relatively intelligent do you have any recommendations as to how I can get my life on track?
I am asking because you said you like developing people. My persistent experience in life for almost 20 years post college has been nobody wants to develop me.
I am not in tech but I am generally interested in the area if it can lead me to greater independence and more interesting work.
I like jobs that are intellectually engaging and ideally somewhat physically active.
Right now I am working in a mechanical role.
Sometimes I like the work but more often than not I find that good problem solving ability is not valued and the pay is dismal vs. what people earn in tech.
I have a BA in economics but unfortunately have never used it. 37 years old.
Okay but for the vast overwhelming majority of people, what they actually need is "a helping hand, a business loan or grant etc"
You talk about this like this is trivial, but it's the kind of material help that would make a difference for almost everyone who is currently not doing what they want in life
Yes, no one can teach you to self-actualize. People's material circumstances are rarely a result of inadequate self-actualization or agency, despite what the self-help industry would like you to believe.
Most "high-agency" people who succeed started out with either adequate resources to at least support themselves while they tried stuff, reliable backup plans (like living with supportive family), or help in the form of stuff like grants or startup funding. People who don't have that need that, regardless of their mindset or abilities. There are exceptions who got incredibly lucky, and they are a rounding error among rounding errors. That is the world we live in. There are ways to engineer a world where this is less the case, but at least in the US, we seem to choose not to move in this direction at every opportunity, and freak out when even minor forms of the security necessary to act with agency take hold for large numbers of people (See: The business world's hysterical reaction to COVID relief)
Double down on that last bit: everything you learn and do adds to the equity that is you. That equity pays back in multitudes throughout your life, not just professionally but also socially and spiritually.
If you figure it out, pass it on to others. I haven’t been allowed to hire Americans in quite some time, and Covid destroyed any company support of an apprenticeship type setup.
The last time I was able to hire an American with a will to learn and an adjacent degree was over a decade ago.
I’ve hired dozens of smart Americans with the right degree and willingness to learn and I was not even American myself. I worked with hundreds more. Not sure what you’re talking about.
Excellent advice. For those for whom it's appropriate, do try it. As you suggest, therein lies that special essentially private pleasure of accomplishment in small things that doesn't depend on the approbation of others.
It’s unlikely you’ll find someone who takes an interest in developing you, who isn’t a personal connection or someone you pay, in my experience. You will probably have to take the first step yourself, either to develop yourself or to find and develop a nurturing relationship.
Choose companies to work for based on who you will be working with and what they can teach you, not by how much they pay. You never want to be the smartest person in the room.
I can't speak to your specific circumstances, but perhaps this will help.
I find that people I talk to with chronic job dissatisfaction have a difficult time taking risks, because despite not liking their current circumstances, the unknown can be scary.
There are known pathways to work in tech or other fields, such as coding camps or community college. It becomes a question of what you're willing to sacrifice to make that happen. Would you move to a new city? Go back to school? Give up your evenings and weekends? Usually, some kind of risk needs to be taken, and there's always a path forward if you look.
I didn't graduate college until I was 29, and now that I'm in my mid-40s I can say that while every risk I took didn't pay off, it was in the taking of risks that has left me feeling satisfied with where I am.
> As someone who has not been successful in life but who is relatively intelligent do you have any recommendations as to how I can get my life on track?
I'm not the OP, but instead just a person who thinks they might be of help. Caveat emptor and all that :-).
Success is what we define both in and of ourselves. Some use material measurements (money, titles, assets, etc.), which are intrinsically relative and thus ephemeral.
Another definition is establishing a sustained environment of happiness. This includes addressing immediate physical needs, such as a place to live, sustenance, and the like. More than that is finding happiness in how we live each day.
> My persistent experience in life for almost 20 years post college has been nobody wants to develop me.
While some may give tips and/or pointers as to how to develop oneself, IMHO, much like happiness, development comes from within. Seeking wise counsel is always a good call, but no one can develop another. All anyone else can do is give perspective from their own journey as it relates to you - mine is you have identified options above which are appealing, so pursue them as if no one else is going to anything to make it happen.
> I have a BA in economics but unfortunately have never used it.
You still have it and one never knows when the education we have helps out until it does. ;)
>Sometimes I like the work but more often than not I find that good problem solving ability is not valued and the pay is dismal vs. what people earn in tech.
I'm not sure the high wages in tech are going to last, universities having been minting new CS graduates like there is no tomorrow. Alongside that demand appears to be flagging. I'm sure you remember enough from your BA to know what the result of that is.
> Something I did not read in this essay is how he grew closer to anyone (in fact, I read the opposite). No path out of this valley involves traveling alone.
I think he needs to get closer to himself. I think he's on the right track.
Exactly this. Also, it is difficult to find those people when you're already rich and unemployed because most of us form these kind of meaningful relationships in school, at work etc.
I am drowning in debt since I graduated from my PhD, all I get is rejections for my job applications... I want to learn how to be rich because that is the only way I can get back to the US and live with my kids and provide for them (US born, living with their mom).
I have rich and satisfying family and community life. Not having to work would mean that I can enjoy more of that. I'm confident it would be nothing short of fantastic in my case.
I don't think you have to have Fuck You Money to get to this point. Most people eventually become disillusioned with work enough that they reevaluate what matters to them. Getting a very profitable exit is just one way to trigger that experience.
I’ve seen a lot of people have random outlier success they didn’t earn and it seems to have the same effect as what most people get out of their careers: crushing failure they didn’t earn. By 50 or so, everyone figures out:
* it was almost all random.
* the things that seemed so important were not.
* working for money is a waste of time for almost everyone.
* you can count your real friends on two hands, whether you’re broke or a billionaire.
It’s surprising how the paths converge. There are differences, and the rich version of alienation is better than the poor one, but the mindset this society leaves people with is remarkably stable. No one feels like they won, which is why Musk and Trump are so full of rage at everyone. Either the gods shut you out or you are forced to find out that the gods never existed.
There's a lot of truth in what you are saying, but I also think this framing can lead to unnecessary nihilism and depression.
I think the simple reason that no one feels like they've won is because we're not biologically wired for that. Like all living things, we've evolved to struggle for survival in a harsh environment. Of course modern civilization has separated us from that harsh reality by layers upon layers of human systems and supply chains, so we apply the same instincts to games of our own devising. There's nothing actually wrong with this though. The problem comes from the belief that "winning" will make one happy. The reality is ones drive leads to engagement and perhaps accomplishment, but it can't answer the why. That is something every person with leisure time needs to work out for themselves.
> working for money is a waste of time for almost everyone
No. Chance doesn’t fall evenly. It falls more often on those who work.
Thinking that Trump is full of rage is missing the forest for the tree. It’s a forest of journalists who are full of rage that this race and gender unapologetically exists, who try to depaint Trump as full of rage. It’s a forest of selfish crowd who wants the fruit of the labor of the second half of people, who complain that Trump is selfish.
Looked at the tree. Missed the entire forest. Not surprising that you think people are struck by a lightening to become billionaire.
A world where I’ve done everything I could, that was wasted by everyone I know.
But hey, you choose what you do with the cards you’re dealt with, you still don’t choose in what kind of crossfire or revolution you were born in in. Even if you are my fellow citizen, relative or own mother, you may have chosen to commit war crimes like displacing populations, hating on whites, voting for islam, making us live under occupation, and not showing human traits. I didn’t.
My only choice was to keep doing my duties, providing wealth and safety to those around me, and explaining them the consequences of their actions.
Nothing else I can do. That was an awful life, thank you. Maybe one day you’ll wake up, look up for success measurements of your choices, and think: “Damn. We could have avoided all that. We could have saved that guy and that guy.”
> I don't think you have to have Fuck You Money to get to this point.
To add to this, the 'modern' use of the word 'millionare' started in 1850 (discounting first use in 1719 in France which was not in the context of 'rich' we know).
When you adjust for inflation, a comperable purchase power today would be an equivalent of having net worth of $250M. Anything below that and you aren't even a 'true' millionare. ($1 USD in 1850 is roughly ~$250 USD in 2024, taking 3.2% average historic inflation rate).
So, author, you are not even rich, still work to do ;)
In 1850, the US was home to 19 millionaires. But the years following the Civil War had seen a considerable increase in membership of that exclusive club. By the end of the 1890's the number of millionaires in the US had swelled to more than 4,000.
It also gives a strong impression of somebody who is afraid of asking for help. The entire post could be summarized as "I feel like an important self-made man and I'm scared of starting therapy that I clearly need to help me sort out my enormous insecurities"
How do you get to a point of developing people? What is that Job title? At work I'm the goto guy for junior engineers to ask questions to and I've been told I'm a naturally good teacher
Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything. What I’ve found is that you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation (assuming you spent a lot of your life and energy to this point focused on these, much like I did) with something else totally unconnected with being measured in that way. For me, I am focused on proving myself as a guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene. These people have no idea how much money I have and wouldn’t give a shit if they did (I didn’t really change my lifestyle after getting lucky so it’s not obvious). So it’s an area I can be creative, grow, and still feel like I’m doing something. At the same time I’m doing part time consulting, mainly for people I worked with in the past who have started companies, just to scratch the tech itch. So far so good but I can’t say yet if it will stick. Maybe for you it’s art, music, going and getting another unrelated degree, or something along those lines? If you have more money than you know what to do with, fundraising and supporting good causes can be really rewarding. Both in terms of giving back something to your local community, and having really nice social elements to it.
One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been. Everyone starts wanting to pitch you their investment idea and it can burn down friendships when their ideas are bad. Being a VC to your friends is a path to sadness for everyone.
They already know who he is, he was a public figure executive that sold his company, everyone in his social circle would know what Loom was and would read in the news how much it sold for.
in this case (given it was reportedly sold for $975m cash), that would mean your friends think you either have $877m or $97m (he reportedly net $60m, which means your most pessimistic friend thinks you have more money than you actually have?)
How many new friends would look up what Loom was, though? This blog post was the first time I heard of it, so seems very unlikely that a random person would really care.
>Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything.
Mainly though if all the purpose-giving focus was on just getting money and the related grinding to begin with.
Getting mega-rich didn't take the purpose out of Steve Jobs, for example, which was focused on building stuff with some specific twist (his idea of good design). Or Steve Wozniak for that matter, he found hobbies aplenty. Or take the Rolling Stones. Filthy rich, but did they ever give the impression they got bored? Or Dylan, equally rich, which doesn't even have the extravagant lifestyle of models and exotic vacations and high life the Stones had, but is still content to record, jam, play concerts etc. into his 80s.
If the person has other interests, from programming to mountaineering, and from politics to art, they can still be there with or without money. Like the "guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene" thing.
This is my dream. Having enough money to be able to dedicate to things I like, trying to be good at something without worrying about money, or time, or being tired after work.
Open a bookshop, being a rare book dealer, open a small museum about an author, research on a particular topic and write books...
That would be the ultimate dream, though I am sure I won't ever be near to fulfill it.
God, we use to have a street full of people running unprofitable stores. Some were deep in debt making the dream a reality.
Why not a functional bookshop? You don't need money, you need to work on the plan(s). How do museums work? Where is the crude draft for the book?
I had a chat with a guy once who had a laundry list of things he wanted to accomplish but had convinced himself non of it was possible without money. About 1/3 of the list were things one could just go do right now.I think a hundred life times worth of stuff It was mostly helping people in need. One could definitely not help anyone and convince the self it is because it always costs money????
Some non profit here was selling unwanted books for 1-2 euro. I spend an hour or so typing titles on my phone mostly stuff published long ago and bought a whole stack of 200+ euro books. I haven't looked at them and didn't try to sell any but I'm sure it was money well spend for an hour of fun.
You don't need a machine gun, fight with your bare hands.
Many people overly focus on what they want to retire FROM - work, but not what they want to retire TO - hobbies/volunteer work/etc.
Basic eating healthier, exercising more and consumption-based things like travel are not going to fill the gap left by a full-time job. One can quickly get bored and/or run out of money with that kind of mindset.
Given enough money, or whenever I do retire .. I'd spend my time making music, photographs, do even more reading, etc. Anything that occupies your time and exercises both your body & mind are important.
I once saw an article about apartments that NYC libraries used to have in the library for caretakers. My skipped a beat and I realized I'd never wanted anything more in the world than to just be able to 'pop down to the stacks' at 10pm to select my next read.
What amazes me is that between audible, kindle, libby, and a few other places, we live in a world where books are that available from the comfort of a cozy recliner. Truly the greatest wonder of the modern age.
As I recall from a similar article, some of those apartments still exist, and are no longer limited to librarians but may still allow access to the library. If living in NYC is an option for you, it's probably worth getting on their announcement list and be ready to move if they have an opening?
After you have the bookstore up and running, you could hire a few people to take care of daily operations. It would still be your bookshop, and you could drop by every now and then and just hang out in the store read some of the books, or you could even whenever you felt like getting more involved on some days tell your staff that they can take the day off if they like and they will still get their pay for the day and you’ll handle the customers and the register. I dunno, this is just how I imagine it could work. I’m not rich, and I don’t own any bookstore or any other kind of shop for that matter so maybe my idea here is off the mark.
It does? What happens if you don’t show up for a month? Or just keep it open once a week? As long as you remember to clear out the fridge every now and then, you should be fine :)
Why would you think any of those things are not a lot of tiring work, emotional drain and expensive? I don't understand why you can't do any of these as a hobby now, and need to wait until you're "rich" and won't have any real skin in the game.
> > Having enough money to be able to dedicate to things I like
Money doesn't buy time, whatever you like you'd be better off starting now then at some point in the future when you think you have enough money because you make the fallacious equation "enough money = enough time" but that is wrong because mental and physical acuity diminishes with time so a minute in your 20s is worth more than a minute in your 30s and much more than a minute in your 60s etc...also odds of mental/physical illnesses increase, life gets in the way in modalities that you don't expect yet, inflation, collapse of society...in one word entropy.
Running a bookshop is entirely possible without FU money, but it will be hard work and probably not make you much money. Read Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop for inspiration :)
People need work to be happy. That doesn't have to be, say, office work necessarily: it can be making music full time, or volunteering at a hospital, or any number of other things.
But you have to have something keeping you busy that makes you feel like you have a purpose.
You’re on the right track, but I think it’s a bit deeper than just needing something to work on or stay busy with. I effectively retired a few years ago and have spent the time since engaging in various “work” across the kinds of categories you mention. Yet, all of these efforts have carried a sense of purposelessness—a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.
This contrasts sharply with the purpose I felt when I had less money and was struggling to build my business. Back then, everything felt deeply do-or-die meaningful. Now, no amount of exercise, goodwill, or intellectual pursuits compares in terms of providing that same sense of purpose.
I don’t think humans need the pursuit of money itself to be happy, but once the foundational needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are met, the higher levels often feel less urgent—and, paradoxically, less fulfilling. There seems to be diminishing returns from “work” as a source of purpose.
As someone who kind of quasi temporarily retired early a few times this is the biggest problem I see. I learned foreign languages and programming languages out of pure necessity to survive and it was thrilling to succeed and make money with them.
So everyone (at least me) has this fantasy of how much better it would be to learn things on their own schedule for pleasure without undue pressure, but they don’t realize the pressure to survive was what made it feel so meaningful without that they soon fall into dilletantism.
For all his issues I think this is why Musk has gotten so much done, because he ups the ante enough to feel real risk if be fails.
> So everyone (at least me) has this fantasy of how much better it would be to learn things on their own schedule for pleasure without undue pressure, but they don’t realize the pressure to survive was what made it feel so meaningful without that they soon fall into dilletantism.
The trick is to find a place between dilletantism and burnout.
Our species, like all living things, has optimised towards struggling through life to the best of their ability (which was always limited). To "win" within the already apex species of humanity means you are hitting your head on the ceiling of what your body and brain was made for, hard.
This is why I stopped striving for success on that scale and returned to only work a small software job.
> a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.
A suggestion for your consideration, or that of anyone in a similar position: give enough of the money away that this stops being true, and find fulfilling paid work (not necessarily in that order). I strongly suspect, from my own experience, that there's an amount of savings that you can keep that is adequate to remove any worry about winding up on the streets (or being stuck with work that actually turns out to suck, etc), without making further earning feel pointless to your own comfort. I think there's an ethical case for doing this even if it made you less happy, but even better if it's win-win.
Totally agree. But it can be surprisingly hard to find what this is for yourself when you are used to climbing the school / corporate / startup ladder your whole life.
Anyone who has "more money than they know what to do with" is a fool. There is an unlimited set of things to do with large resource allocation. Depending on the magnitude of that resource allocation, the set increases exponentially.
It shows a total lack of introspection as well as connections with the people, the Earth, and the universe as a whole.
Go eat some psychedelics and travel inside yourself for a while. Listen to what a tree far in a forest has to say. You'll know what to do with your dragon hoard in no time, I guarantee it.
It's true that there are infinite ways to waste a fortune, but that doesn't mean you're a fool for not having decided how to spend your money. I'd actually argue that it'd be more foolish to go figure out what to spend it on "in no time"
Yes, it is foolish to hoard allocation aimlessly. Anyone who amasses resources without a vision or for the sake of amassing it is a fool.
There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others." To take on that responsibility then do nothing with it, and actually publicize you don't know what to do with it, is disgraceful. As long as there is suffering, there is more work to be done.
Move aside and let people who know what to do take over.
In the past, when people didn't know what to do with resources, the people would very loudly & painfully clawback the misallocated hoards and make better use of them. Recently, a CEO that didn't know what to do with resources & took active part in misusing them returned his misallocation to others.
This kind of misallocation is a universal crime. A life is nothing compared to the magnitude of this crime. Ideas of "ownership" and "it's my money" are irrelevant. The crime stands, and the justice of balance for this crime always comes, one way or another.
Escaping the responsibility of this duty, and the negligence of misusing funds, is easy; sell everything you own and reallocate resources to others who are better able to manage them.
Revolution is the "final" reaction to misallocated funds. It is when a mass of misaligned, foolish resource allocators who collectively lost their way and lack all vision to allocate, hoard most wealth. This misallocation chokes out the society they've hoarded from, like a blood clot, and leads to a death of the society if not addressed.
I would be very scared right now to be part of the group of people who have hoarded resources and mismanaged them, because this planet is on the cusp of a clawback.
Alternatively, if visionary resource allocators are allowed to operate, it brings wealth to everyone. It raises the standards of existence, brings about lasting peace, and makes for a prosperous existence. These visionary allocators are most definitely not in operation in these times, and it shows.
I will dream of a day when this changes. I hope that this change occurs peacefully, and with minimal suffering, even to those who has caused incomprehensible suffering due to their greed.
To be very charitable with you:
If someone puts all their funds into stocks or similar (what almost all wealthy do) isn't that them letting others decide how to allocate these resources? So they have done all they could. Or are companies outside of the "sacred responsibility" you claim? who decides which organisations or efforts are "sacred "?
To be less charitable you seem like an arrogant person at best to tell people they should always know and allocate resources aligning with your values. I am almost sure all your efforts for this cause while maybe well meaning will be in vain due to your attitude.
> As long as there is suffering, there is more work to be done.
A noble sentiment that I think resonates with most people.
> There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others."
No, it doesn't. I may 'acquire resources' and use them (or not) simply because nobody else is around who wants them more. I may spend money on something frivolous (e.g. going to the movies), even while knowing there's a possibility that donating it to some 501c3 (or some other person directly) could end up improving lives significantly more than mine was improved from watching the movie, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
> This kind of misallocation is a universal crime.
We have fundamentally different conceptions of property rights.
You seem to believe that people who come into money have a responsibility of spending it in ways that you think are important. In my mind, unless they're ill-gotten gains, they've already improved people's lives proportionally, and they can spend or not spend the value others have accrued to them as they see fit.
There are economic systems where committees get to decide the most appropriate allocation of resources, independent of the people who "amass" the resources themselves. These systems universally end up with lower levels of societal wellbeing than ones where property rights are respected.
That last point is salient. I grew very rich in the last 3 - 4 years and I funded a bunch of my friend's startup ideas. Now I cannot bear myself to reply to their happy new year wishes because how the relationships have soured.
It's never even about forgiving. I am not even angry at them. What happens is there is now suddenly a pedestal. No matter what we do, they know I gave them money. And I know they took it. The relationships don't remain the same anymore. It's weird.
I can see that. I would personally feel really bad if I lost all the money someone gave me. I'd always feel like I owe it back. Only exception would be at the very beginning, if that was a possibility that was acknowledged. However, I've noticed people who start these things are always very optimistic and probably don't seriously talk about this. To the previous poster, the only people who seem to handle this type of thing well are the extremely blunt people who are brutally honest and upfront about everything. There aren't many of them.
Yeah, I wouldn't take money from people I wanted to stay friends with for this reason. It's just a bad idea. Introduce me to your acquaintances, sure, but lets stay friends.
I think this is the best advice. If you are going to fund a friend, give them a grant, no strings attached. They can return the favour if/when they have the means on their terms. Anything else is going to kill your friendship.
It seemed obvious that it was a small gamble for me, a big gamble for my friend, but he was doing all the right things.
VCs don’t waste time with concerns over failed investments.
When you hand over some money, you are accepting the risk.
Including complications, which are likely. Treat the money like a gamble, not the friendship.
I was really glad I did. My friend created a successful business after working toward that with major ups & downs for over ten years.
Then he got cancer, and died a year later. I got no money back. But it was the best investment I ever made. His dream came true and that mattered so much to him. That he pulled it off, and his customers loved him and his business.
Don’t invest in a friend if the investment isn’t about genuinely helping them.
I had a friend who I lent money to his startup during Covid. He promised would be paid back within a year. Multiple hard conversations and it’s 4 years later and not one cent has been paid back to me. We currently don’t speak to each other. He’s delusional with his startup ideas, lives in lala fantasy land. Refuses to get a job and take any responsibility. He has zero track record of success, so it’s somewhat my fault for loaning him money.
Never loan money to friends is like “having money 101.” You can gift it or you can invest it with appropriate caveats given to any external investor, but never lend it.
This is common advice because it turns good relationships bad, that manifests as viewing former friends as shysters
I think the main issue, is that most people are reluctant to ask a friend for a loan because its considered in poor taste. If they are asking they either have no qalms about asking which is a red flag, or they are super desperate which probably means its unlikely they would have the ability to pay back.
Of course not everyone is like that. The issue is you don’t know who is ex ante, and often people aren’t that way ex ante, but one thing leads to another to a total breakdown in trust and respect.
Even in the case you describe, it’s much better to gift it: “if you want or are able to pay me back some day, go for it, but I don’t expect or need it.”
> I’m doing part time consulting, mainly for people I worked with in the past who have started companies, just to scratch the tech itch
How do you pick you hourly rate? If a friend of yours of the past came to you and asked you to consult for him, and your friend offered you say $80 USD per hour, would you find it offensively low? For someone who doesn’t have a lot and wants to hire consultants for their small projects, I think offering $80 USD per hour is not bad. But I’m curious to know how that amount feels to a potential consultant if the consultant already had a lot. Or do you prefer taking a percentage of shares in your friend’s company as pay? Or something else?
I am happy to take whatever they offer (including helping for free) depending on where they are at. I don’t need it really and I’m happy to help. But most people at least that I’ve worked with are happy to do what’s fair. I haven’t ended up in a hostile negotiation or anything close to it.
FWIW I’ve done similar for friends who are on a tight budget , consulting for 1/2, 1/3 1/5 “regular” rate. Sometimes with equity but not always.
I’m nowhere near rich, but when I was consulting full time of I had enough hours to hit my “ok” target for the year, it felt right to be flexible with some of the rest of my time …
Take the annual salary you would be paid if you were an employee, add 30% to it for overhead/profit and divide by 48 (working weeks in a year) to get your weekly rate. Divide by 40hrs to get the hourly rate.
Another one is to take your annual salary, divide by 250 (working days in a year) to get your daily rate and increase that by 30%, billing in daily units.
The above formula can and should be tweaked based on the project, client, your needs etc.
The tricky thing about formulas like this is that it is very domain dependent.
What you describe is a reasonable approach for a freelancer who expects to bill most working hours. It falls apart for a lot of consulting scenarios where you bill fewer hours and spend more time generating work. In that case you may be better off setting rates so that e.g. 1000 billed hours will reach your base target salary equivalent...
I did say the formula would need to be tweaked as needed ...
OTOH, this is more or less how clients themselves expect to be billed so if you deviate too much without any logical explanation, they will simply go elsewhere.
If you are already “FIRE” and do it for fun, or you can schedule all 40h per week on billable work this works but I would increase by 50%.
If you need to do marketing to get clients, meet clients, etc to close contracts then I guess you should expect only about 20h per week of billable work as the rest is on you. So you need to at least double the hourly rate.
> One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been.
Having lived through this arc myself, this is excellent advice. While the most enlightened/mature people have no problem just being happy for you, this still leaves a lot people for who a significant disparity in wealth/success becomes a problem. It ends up impacting the nature of your relationship with them in subtle but significant ways and it can be very hard to get past. I've found it's just better to avoid the issue by being as stealth as possible about wealth (while still being honest and true to yourself).
I'm good friends with some very rich people. Everyone knows they have money. They learned how to say no, and how to let go of people who just want to milk them for cash.
Music has been a huge discovery and joy for me too.
I left the tech world seven years ago after a "career" of five years, not super wealthy but having enough saved/invested that I could live frugally and it would grow slowly on its own. I've been doing a wide variety of things mostly outdoors, but these last three years I've been learning to play the fiddle and it's took over my life in a good way.
It's been a rich seven years and aside from occasional brief moments of doubt, I'm very glad I did what I did. I have had time to focus on:
- health (most awesomely, my eyesight has improved dramatically)
- family and community and relationships
- simply being in the real world (nature)
- learning about and changing my behaviors/habits to be more who I want to be
- passions - particularly trying to protect habitats from being destroyed, which is very rewarding even if they might still get destroyed someday, they've gotten to exist for years longer than they would have.
- each thing that's caught my curiosity: gardening, forest conservation, foraging and cooking, building and carpentry, learning various skills and now most of all, the fiddle.
I won't say it's all been easy. I've wrestled with a lot of questioning of what matters and what to give myself to - because I have the choice and there is no obvious default path anymore. But I always feel my way into an answer - even if it has shifted around over time.
I don't have kids, I want to, and I think about how I'll find someone to do that with. I bet it will happen, I live in a rural area though so I pretty much have to travel to meet someone. Meanwhile, I have a sweet nephew and I get to spend a lot of time actively being his uncle.
The world is far more interesting and wild and beautiful than I think most of us have been led to believe.
Children are giver of immense sense of satisfaction that’s totally disconnected to wealth (though being wealthy certainly helps). Just remember - no short cuts.
I'm fairly certain children are a much greater giver of satisfaction without wealth, because when you have money you suddenly feel like you need to provide them all the best, whereas if you have none, you only feel like you need to keep them alive.
Like most things in life the need grows to just beyond the level you can supply. Maybe someone with nothing starts with "keep them alive" but once that's covered you move up the hierarchy.
Children are the best. The highs in life are orders of magnitude higher, and the lows are _so_ much lower. But the baseline is incalculably higher. My children have made me feel so much more fulfilled. And they have also made me better.
love to hear it! In that case, branching out to other peoples' children can bring great satisfaction. For example, volunteering to teach a class at a local high school
There's something off about the post that I'm not sure I can pin point, but it's there.
What are these oft referenced insecurities? It's hard to get a read on this without details, but dumping your girlfriend to do random selfish shit (climb mountain, go to Hawaii, etc.) - it's not a surprise he's unfulfilled (though working on doge would be exciting).
This trap of 'working on yourself' that leads to endless mindfulness and narcissism leads you to become aloof. People tend to derive purpose from community, friends, and family. This is what religion used to give people independent of the pseudoscience.
Being financially independent is great, but it doesn't bring fulfillment.
A long way to say spend time with friends, work on a relationship, get married, have kids. People can do what they want, but most people will likely be the most content doing this. If you can find something to work on you're also excited about great, can do that too.
You can only dick around traveling and 'finding yourself' for so long, it gets old and repetitive.
Not the OP, but after a certain
age (mid 30s in my case) traveling just becomes cumbersome, i.e. when you realize that there are no big insights about oneself that can be gained via traveling that can’t also be gotten back at home, surrounded by friends/family and a couple of good books.
This sounds an awful lot like you're generalising from your experiences to other people's.
I'm also in my mid 30s and I still find travelling eye opening in a way that books are not (and I do read a lot, including when I travel). And on my last trip I met a retired couple who spent three weeks traveling in their car and they told me they used to have a boat with which they'd sail around the world.
Well, i beg to differ. And i'm older than that. In my view, we have a very limited time to live, and experiencing the amazing planet we're on in all its variety is one of the best things one can do.
You're just scratching the surface of said amazing planet, you're not experiencing anything of value that you couldn't have experienced back home. There's a real good essay on the emptiness of tourism written by Siegfried Kracauer back in the 1930s, just as mass tourism was beginning to take off, Travel and Dance [1] is called, it is still highly relevant almost 100 years later.
Amen! Travelling is just virtue signalling and social posturing. I've travelled the world, way too much for both business and "pleasure" and there's nothing new, no hidden insights, that I couldn't have gotten at home.
I advice all people I meet to stop travelling, and to spend more time with themselves and explore their inside, instead of being captivated by the outside, like a child by a new shiny toy.
The world would truly be a better place if that ever happened.
> you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation
Kind of ironic, but that kind of sounds like the people who've been saying those things aren't the most important in life might have been right all along?
we'd have to come to am agreement on what constitutes a need for therapy, but accidents/mistakes happen, and people die in countries that aren't America, people commit crimes of all sorts; theft, rape, murder, etc. people have childhoods that are less than perfect. PTSD isn't a uniqely American military problem either, nor is it limited to the military of America. Neither is depression. So chances are the need for therapy is universal. Not that therapy necessarily precludes such actions, but it helps in the aftermath.
Therapy requires there to be therapists, and for them to be recognized as a need, and for their expertise to be valued, and it's only in America, with it's patchwork of healthcare insurance, that therapy, as paid for by patients, could really take hold. Other counties have no such system, that individuals are used to paying $x00/session four times a month out of pocket. But in America, since other healthcare's expensive to access, paying for one out of pocket seems like par for the course.
Most countries then simply don't spend the money on therapy, hence fewer therapists. That's not to say those country are poor, just that they have other priorities.
One thing you could do is give me 20k no strings attached so I can stop paying for my parents screw ups from when I was 20 :)) that will make me a lot less resentful towards life's stupid dice.
Seems weird that you have to advice people that they should hide their success from people they're befriending.
Living a double life like that doesn't seem right to me. It has something to do, perhaps, with the type of people you're surrounding yourself with. If someone can't be friends with you without asking you for money why are you keeping such people around in the first place.
Using discretion or being modest isn't necessarily living a double life. I'm sure there are plenty of things you're not open about; that doesn't necessarily make you fake, does it?
I thought we were talking about friends? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the meaning of the word.
I wouldn't imagine being friends with someone and not trusting them with knowing how successful I am.
I think maybe, and this might be a cultural thing, a lot of people tend to use the word lightly. I simply wouldn't get to a stage of being friends with someone I am not able to trust in such a way that I have to hide how much money I have from them.
I think the issue here is that with retirement levels of money existing friendships can become strained.
If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you earn 100 then I mean sure, you have different toys, bigger house, whatever, but you're both existing in the same universe with similar constraints.
If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you suddenly have 60 million like the guy in the post then it's more of a test because your lifestyle can just differ hugely.
Some people can handle it but with others there will be an underlying resentment. There are lots of layers to it. They look for work - you look for suitable employees.
Having said that, in my experience there are only really a few major cut-offs, one between homeless/terminally skint and working, one between working and being able to live off of investment income, _maybe_ one at the sort of bodyguard required super famous level. Inside those it's just sort of like, yeah ok, your car/yacht/jet/whatever is better than mine, cool.
It doesn't have to be super drastic - When I graduated college and got a decent job, most of my social group was making less than a full time minimum wage salary, bouncing around couches, or staying with parents - with no hope of it improving. I felt the resentment a lot, even though it was subtle, and constantly felt obligated to pick up checks if we did anything I wanted to do, because what I could afford to spend on an outing was significantly different. Then that builds resentment over time, etc. People don't like seeing people with more "stuff" than they have at a really deep level. Looking back I am not sure that I could have done much to salvage it, the only friends that survived out of that era were the ones that were able to bring themselves out of their situation as well.
My friends can accurately assess my net worth within a factor of +/- 5, but where exactly in that range isn't necessary for them to know. Even my closest friends probably can't reliably put it within +/- a factor of 2 (nor do they need to for any valid purpose).
I’ve never shared my specific financial details with any friend, before or after, so perhaps a different definition of what it means to be a friend. I haven’t bought a bunch of expensive crap that would give it away.
It’s not about living a double life. I don’t secretly blow cash on hookers and blow, I just live a pretty modest normal life and don’t talk about the details of my investments or means. Mainly I don’t have to worry about anything really.
I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared.
Now he needs to develop a new identity.
This is especially difficult for single founders without kids (in the sense that people with spouse/kids already derive much of their identity from those 2 things).
Selling a company isn’t all that different from going through a divorce (in the sense that your identity needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch)
William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.
> humans hard wired for status within their social group.
Not always "status". Humans benefit from cooperative behaviour but may have many reasons for joining and adhering or leaving.
Having varied interests means different networks. The important point is to see meaning and value. This is where ostracism and rejection can be most painful.
To put a finer point on it, Storr’s thesis is there are three main domains that humans try to achieve status: dominance, competence, and virtue. Same end goal, but different means to get esteem. Put differently, people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe.
Thanks for clarifying. There must be more subtlety in the "end goal" of membership.
> people ultimately need to feel valued by their tribe
To the extent that people want to remain in a group ("tribe"), I agree.
But this holds only when people feel that they gain value from the group (or tribe). For some members, the sense of gain may be conspicuous prestige, but for other members it may be a humble gain or an unnoticed (inconspicuous) gain.
The quieter members (in O.P.'s narcissistic terminology, the "NPCs" in his company) may have insights that completely escape the O.P. and other prestige-seekers.
I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
Thoughtful approach in theory but, in practice, I've found people can be very intentional about trying to measure your value to the tribe (i.e., it's not only something we measure for ourselves). If the initial answers don't provide enough data, people will very often dig in.
> Oh yeah, for who?
$GitProjectName
> Oh, I'm not familiar. How big is that company?
It's an independent project, I'm just getting it off the ground.
> Do you have any customers?
... and so on.
Yes, it's easiest to change the subject but that also becomes an obvious signal. Repeating this dance a few times is enough to dampen one's sense of self worth.
I don't necessarily think this value-measuring is conscious or necessarily reflective of the person's character. It felt more like it's simply the habitual conversational pattern for a lot of people - we've been trained to quickly assess if someone is "like us" (based on very shallow criteria and heuristics).
There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.
if the first person to notice a correlation between alcoholism and cirrhosis was an alcoholic, you'd dismiss what he said out of hand and keep drinking?
The dude also dumped his long time girlfriend right after coming into a large chunk of money (and thinks she cares enough to read his blog!), and truly thinks he was going to "save our government". Also, the mountain climbing (IYKYK).
He sounds pretty full of himself and seems to struggle making personal connections with people. Being the founder of a startup gave people a reason to care about him, and now that he's lost that along everyone around him. He beat the game and now the characters in the story have nothing left to say to him.
The guy should put down the physics book and go learn to be a person that others enjoy being around. Go get a job waiting tables and hang out with coworkers after work, learn to surf, etc.
100% this! Calling one's colleague an NPC is not only demeaning but also shows a lack of awareness and empathy. Does the author even understand that by his logic, he is a NPC in his colleague's world?
You are misinterpreting. He’s talking about how at big companies, you always have people who don’t seem to bring any actual value. They're in every meeting, but don't say anything, don't set any direction, don't produce any documents or any code, don't exhibit any sense of urgency or even involvement, and don't contribute in any noticeable way. "NPCs." They are completely passive as far as you can tell -- or worse, they actively slow others down when they happen to be on some critical approval path.
I'm sure they are lovely people outside work, and loving parents and good citizens. But when the rest of us are busting our butts to get work done, they're unfortunately useless.
The guy who started a video conferencing app called Loom (2 years after Zoom came out) then miraculously sold it for almost a billion dollars has no business calling anyone an "NPC".
I goes to show that being 2nd to market or even 4th or 5th isn't a big barrier. Competitors have the advantage of an existing market, whereas the innovator has to explain to the customer what their product is.
It’s a very easy trap to think that all of these idiots aren’t doing anything. However, the more you talk to them, the more you realize that not only are they doing something, they’re definitely not idiots, and many of them are doing the best they can with what they’ve been given.
You get some leeches in there. You get some jerks. They’re the exception, not the rule, even in ur big globocorps.
They're still people. Just because the company doesn't motivate them or they have a bad manager or are on a bad team or a million other reasons they don't feel empowered to "participate" (specious since clearly they're employed) doesn't mean you can act like they're soulless bots ffs.
This whole mindset has got to go. You and OP going around like this, it's gross for the world and it's a bad look on you.
What matters is relative to one's perspective. Nothing objectively matters.
Nobody's saying everyone is of equal value, they're saying that reducing your perception of somebody into a 2-dimensional caricature because you don't perceive value in them is the type of disgusting mental habit of somebody who either has no real friends or soon will have none.
Have you ever said about someone, "that guy's an asshole"?
If so, you reduced them into a caricature, and you should have instead said "that guy behaved in the manner of an asshole, though I trust that he is otherwise a fully-actualized individual with a life of his own, and with factors outside my visibility that impact his decisions and behaviors."
Was this intended to be a "gotcha"? I might be giving people more credit than they deserve but I'm pretty sure most people don't relegate folks to "simply an asshole and nothing more". It's just a quick way to say "that guy was being an asshole just then."
Also, it's not apples and oranges comparing a spoken remark in the heat of the moment to a thoughtful, written out blog post.
>and don't contribute in any noticeable way.
>They are completely passive as far as you can tell
Fundamental attribution error strikes again?
Reminds me of the apocryphal/anecdotal tale of the management conultant who wanted to fire a "secretary" who he could only find taking coffee breaks and long lunches with lots of different people, only to be told (or finding out after the firing) that the person in question was critical to inter-team dynamics and functioning.
More generally, if you cultivate yourself you will get more pleasure from your activities. If you take time to learn an instrument, or listen to classical, or gardening (you can grow exotic plants for example), learn a new language, or anything else. The more you put into refining your appreciation and knowledge, the more value you can get back from your activities. It's a self cultivation problem.
Calling people NPCs is one of my biggest pet peeves and a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist. It is dehumanizing in the extreme, the same way Nazis characterized Jews as rats in propaganda. When people say eat the rich… this is who they mean
>a dead giveaway that someone is a soulless narcissist
You're engaging in the exact same behavior, are you not? NPC and soulless are the same fundamental concept, that there is a certain threshold of humanity people can fall below to be considered lesser. They're soulless, they're NPCs, they're untermenschen... whatever the word for it, there are "dead giveaways" that a person can lack that hidden quality that separates man from animal. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but from a certain reading, it seems like what you're saying isn't really all that far off from "calls people NPCs = is the real NPC".
I often see people decry specific terminology associated with dehumanizing beliefs without refuting the actual premise behind them.
Disagree. NPC carries a connotation that you are not even real. You do not have free will. You are there purely to serve their whims. You are an ephemeral nothing that does not exist when they look away. It is exactly what Andrew Tate preaches with his whole “matrix” schtick. It is the mindset billionaires use to excuse their bottomless greed.
Soulless was just a heavy handing way of saying it demonstrates a disturbing lack of empathy. Whether or not souls exist is debatable in the first place, so no I wouldn’t equate it with calling someone subhuman.
Yep. I don't understand why the technological community accepts essentially sociopathic tendencies as long as your idea (regardless of what that idea is) is rewarded by the capital system. It's pathetic.
In 2022, according to Forbes, the firm was valued at $1.5 billion, having secured $200 million in funding from venture funds such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins.[1][2] It is remote, but is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an office in New York.
Why would such a seemingly simple product need so much money? It seems like the business was already done. Web video recording or facetime has been around a long time, but somehow this company carved a niche in a crowded market.
They slapped the word AI on it and took advantage of temporary market conditions (wfh due to covid and AI hype), nothing more, nothing less. Unless I'm missing something, there is nothing special about this product and probably no one will remember it in ~15 years time.
Meanwhile OP seems to think he should have expected the same sense of fulfillment one might get from an actually meaningful contribution to human society, for some reason.
>Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity
This is the first thing you see when visiting the website. Ctrl+F finds "AI" 10 times in the page. Like the other commenter said, it probably has nothing to do with AI, but this is what sells at the moment
It catered to the specific niche of screencasts and thus needed a lot of custom software written that doesn't already exist in Zoom/Teams. After development costs there's marketing/CAC costs to be considered. For those that don't "get it" upon seeing the product, you need to spend money on salespeople to convince them they do. After those expenses, their AWS bill surely wasn't cheap.
Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years. that's 20 million a year. say half on developers, that's 10-40 software developers all-in (meaning after HR and health care for them and everything). 10-40 people isn't all that many, though clearly enough to build the product.
Since the author of the blog post walked away with $60 million, it's possible they could have developed the product for less, but it's hard to argue with the results he got. Spending less money would have been penny-wise, pound foolish.
> Finally though, you hope not to raise too many times, so that $200 million needs to last years. Let's say they planned for a round 10 years
You had me until this. Nobody is raising money to last ten years. You would be growing and want to raise in future years at higher valuations that incorporate all the growth.
True, i would still argue that your identity might be fogged by these things and come out clearer after lifting roles you may stumbled into more than you chose them.
So sure hope for him and others they survive their 7 years of catharsis!
The vast majority of men develop depression at retirement. So you can say this with scorn if it pleases you, but the group you’re talking about is massive and doesn’t deserve this derision.
This is straight up false, you are wildly overexaggerating with zero evidence to back it up.
Incidence of depression in retirement age populations are around 6 - 8%, and the correlation between retirement and depression is more pronounced in women.
There’s no need to make false claims about a real disorder just so you can feel persecuted as a man
My inaccuracy not withstanding, you supply the data to prove my point, that it is common for men to experience depression in retirement. And my suggestion that they should be considered seems just as true.
Your suggestion about my motives makes no sense, I made no comparison to women. It sounds like that may have something to do with you, not me.
Perhaps ask yourself: why does a suggestion that these men deserve some sympathy or at least consideration provoke you into harshly criticizing me?
To be fair you are the first person in this thread to bring up gender, as if women don’t also feel depression in retirement, and indeed at higher rates. Why would you only mention men?
If there is evidence my guess is that it’s likely due to the previous generation’s attitude towards work. My guess is that the previous generation (like my parents and their parents before them) lived to work, it was their whole identity, thus when they retired they had no idea what to do with themselves (like the Loom founder) and depression was common.
There has been a shift over the last decade or two likely in millennials who just work to live. They look forward to not working and living a life full of hobbies and social activities.
And when you consider that most people retire late in life when they are likely to face health issues, start losing family and friends, and that most people don't retire rich...
I think it is more that people who were married to their job find themselves suddenly divorced.
Without other activities to give them a reason to get up in the morning it is easy to fall into depression. There was even a movie that explores this situation: About Schmidt.
Retirement might be, in a way, a clear point in life when you get to actually think about your own mortality and life coming to an end in the next few decades. That alone could have a major impact in people developing depression at retirement.
What the poster says might still be true, people are being defined by their work and when that's over there's a huge gap they don't know how to fill. This might very well be a criticism on the role of work in society.
Ultimately though, you're right, there's no need to insult people when thinking critically about this issue.
- Most people who make a lot of money all at once blow it within seven years. Check out what happens to lottery winners, jocks, and rappers. As a rule of thumb, you can safely spend 4% of your net worth per year. Pay yourself some fixed amount each quarter.
- You don't have to get into complex investments. Half in some bond funds, half in some diversified stock funds will work out OK.
- Any investment where they call you is probably not very good.
Useful reading, although dated: "The Challenges of Wealth", by Domini et. al.
What to do with your life? No idea. What are you good at?
- I was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a while. But it was the "AI Winter" and not much was happening. Did robotics in the 1990s. Held patents on legged running on rough terrain, ragdoll physics. Ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. Didn't really lead anywhere. Too early. Still programming. A metaverse client I'm writing in Rust is running on another screen.
- Horses have been good for me. Every day, I go out and spend time with a pushy alpha mare who keeps me in shape.
"Riding is the only art which princes learn truly". Horses are not impressed by money. Neither are most riders.
- I've known a few ex-CEOs. One did a lot of reasonable little stuff but never did anything with much impact again.
One founded a charity. Another was really into sailboats, and he just kept on with sailboats, crossing the Atlantic and such. He's lucky in having a wife who is also very into sailboats. One guy bought a nightclub, but it loses money year after year.
There's a legendary Reddit comment that lays out the many, many other ways winning the lottery (or, more importantly, letting people know you won the lottery) is bad for you. Can you debunk its claims as well?
That comment makes untrue claims and cites no sources. The claim about multi-million dollar jackpot winners is a viral meme that keeps making the rounds despite the people with the actual stats repeatedly trying to debunk it. It is not true that a huge percentage of winners go bankrupt.
I imagine that it's perpetuated by the myth that people who make a shitton of money "legitimately" (ie getting insanely lucky by inheritance, investing in a moonshot, or both) are somehow magically blessed with the wisdom to handle money in a way that commoners are not. Plus a dash of cope for all the people who will never touch that amount of money. Assurance that even those who gain a lot will be no better off (or worse off) than them.
The Reddit comment is interesting, and I think the advice that starts in the reply is sound. But this person's list of lottery winner failures is a small list of people versus a very large group of winners. Surely it's not hard to cherry pick a bunch of worst case scenarios.
Haha I read the article - not surprisingly they pick lottery winners in countries that provide anonymity to winners (unlike the US where you will have a target painted on your back).
> 2019 by researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Zurich, used a considerable dataset — fifteen years of the “German Socio-Economic Panel” (or SOEP). The SOEP has been surveying 15,000 German households since 1984.
> The second study, from 2020 by researchers from Stockholm University, Stockholm School of Economics, and New York University, surveyed 3,000 Swedish lottery winners
>EuroJackpot Countries (Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands*, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden): 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner.
Compare it to:
>California: Not Anonymous/Only individuals can claim. “ The name and location of the retailer who sold you the winning ticket, the date you won and the amount of your winnings are also matters of public record and are subject to disclosure. You can form a trust prior to claiming your prize, but our regulations do not allow a trust to claim a prize. Understand that your name is still public and reportable”.
(routing through refhide because otherwise you'll get a testicle in an egg cup; jwz is a principled man of strong opinions and one of many things he loathes is HN)
One did a lot of reasonable little stuff but never did anything with much impact again
This always stymies me. If I were to make it big, I’d want to go on to do other very useful things. But so commonly that doesn’t happen. Is it because they lost the fire? Because they were really lucky exactly once? Or perhaps their talents were suited only to that one thing?
Personally I get immense enjoyment out of not doing anything useful, especially not on a big scale. So if I were to accidentally "make it big", I'd most likely not do it again and keep enjoying the small inconsequential things.
This paper shows people winning less than $150k having bankruptcy rates drop for the first 2 years, and then return to normal 3-5 years later. Like, duh, a small amount of money will run out. This paper has been widely and wildly mis-quoted as bankruptcy rates going up after a few years, but everyone seems to leave out the part where bankruptcy rates went down first.
The percent of people in this study who had declared bankruptcy after 5 years was slightly over 5%, which is the same bankruptcy rate as the study cohort had 2 years before winning money. 95% of lottery winners did not go bankrupt, and no multi-million dollar jackpot winners are involved in this study.
If you were rich enough then having the new business lose money isn't that big of a problem, so long as it's not driving you to ruin.
"Sure it costs me a few hundred every month to keep the lights on, but it makes me happy."
Honestly, I wish more rich people did stuff like this instead of obsessing over making more money on the stock market or speculating on homes or whatnot. Learn to say enough is enough and switch to adding back to the world instead of leeching off of it.
They say a sailboat is a hole in the water you throw money into, so having too much of it and not knowing what to do with it does indeed sound like a match made in heaven.
As a way to rid yourself of excess funds, it probably works? Likely more effective than a sailing habit, unless you get into racing.
But there's no need for it in your investment portfolio. Pick a mixture between 20/80 and 80/20 stocks/bonds, buy index funds and you're good. Easy and scalable... This works for normal money too, but you probably want a meaningful amount of cash and you may want to more carefully choose your stock/bond ratio. Maybe if you've got tens of billions you might need something else, but it'll probably work for that too.
Probably not gonna get upvoted but I’m pretty surprised none of the the top comments mentions volunteering or philanthropy. I believe people who get lucky should land a hand in making the world a better place. We are facing huge crises (climate change to name one) and as a wealthy individual you have both the time to spend helping to fix that and the fortune to donate. Being a smart wealthy individual just makes everything more valuable
Right. There's no rule that if you get a hold of $XX million that you need to keep it. I'd argue, in fact, that there's a pretty good case you're obligated to give most of it away; you can keep single-digit millions and have total financial security for all practical purposes while sacrificing only a few luxuries that, as the author of this essay appears to have noticed, won't actually give your life meaning. Meanwhile, each $1M donated to insecticide-treated bednets (for one well-quantified example) could save hundreds of lives: https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf#What_do_you_get_for_y...
If there's a moral case for keeping the cash, it's the leverage it could provide to do something that (at least has a chance of being) even bigger. But few are the people who have legitimate reason to believe the expected value calculation comes out positively. People who feel directionless or jump on the latest Elon thing on a whim seem especially unlikely to be among those few.
(I'm not going to provide documentation, so take this for what little it's worth, but I myself gave away the majority of the several million I received for being a sufficiently early employee at the right startup. And I do not regret it.)
I don't think it was particularly brave, even. I mentioned it just to try to normalize it. I'm not exactly living like an ascetic and I don't understand why people feel they need so much more.
Half to GiveDirectly and half to a variety of local organizations near where I live (tbh, not all ones I would have selected, but it was a shared decision with my spouse).
I recently read "The Life You Can Save" by Peter Singer, and it really does a great job of making the case for generosity even amongst middle class 1st world individuals.
I'm amazed he didn't even seem to entertain it as an option. It's quite unusual because even a total narcissist would eventually land on philanthropy as an ego-trip
Came here to say this. Money is a tool to make the world a better place. He could be funding schools, scholarships, research projects, new start ups, and so much more. This is what I have been doing, and it has given my life so much more meaning than anything else I have done. I work to donate because that is how I have the biggest impact.
As a young(ish) man with retirement level wealth personally I don't understand this primarily I suppose because my main passions in life are not profitable.
Great, so now I don't have to profitmax every single thing and can rely on my investments. That means I can study pottery, languages, learn about cars, guns, travel, spend time with my old mum, family, start a small business, whatever it is, without care for whether it contributes to the bottom line.
It kind of seems to me as if the poster here has some sort of savior complex - like they can't just be well off and enjoy it, they have to somehow change the world. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but at some point why not take time for you and yours?
I do however identify with the "it's not relatable" thing. If you live off of investments then suddenly you are, well, seperate, from people who can't, in a way that you can try to hide but it leaks out, you can't explain away being able to travel wherever whenever you want, etc.
tbh it sounds much more like he wants to be viewed as a saviour than actually improve anything significant to me.
"what I actually wanted was to look like Elon" feels like he's getting very close to grasping something fundamental about himself in a way that many similar dudes are incapable of doing.
This is how interpreted the post. Listing “throwing parties” as one of your hobbies shows they don’t really have deep passion curiosities like the things you listed can be.
Your parties must not be any good. People have entire careers just organizing events like weddings and corporate conferences. You can or as little or as much effort into throwing parties as you can pottery or any of the other things listed.
> you can't explain away being able to travel wherever whenever you want
Just lie and say you work for an AI startup that's in stealth mode and that they're sending you there for a work retreat to bond with your coworkers. Few people in your life care that much about your job to dig deeper.
Sure, you can do that. That's what I mean by being unable to relate.
It's not like it's a one off "I took a couple of days off to build a table" or "I used my X weeks holiday to go to Thailand", all of your hobbies, interests, travel, museum visits, etc etc happen all of the time when most people around you are doing a 9 to 5.
"How was work today?" It wasn't, I don't work, I haven't worked for years, I can tell you about my entrepreneurship or my studying or whatever but then again, now you know I don't work.
That's at a lower level. If you have 50 million like the author then you may well have multiple homes or just live out of hotels if you choose to, it's constant.
Sure, why don't I pop down to the spouse shop and pick one out from their extensive range?
There are almost no marriageable women around these days. Having $ does make getting laid very easy, but I'm not interested in that. Unfortunately it doesn't help at all in finding one of the good ones (perhaps it makes it even harder).
If I guess his views correctly and mix them with mine: women with an exemplary life hygiene - maintaining a near perfect body, no addiction or unhealthy obsession of any sort (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, TV, social medias, smartphones, travels, pets, etc...), chaste compared to nowadays' standard libertinage - intelligent and cultured (and I'm not talking about pop culture).
I can't imagine a world where I wouldn't know what to do.
There is diarrhea on my building, trash in the street, people needing medical help in the alley, and potholes in the street.
Just walk out your front door and start doing things.
My recent triumph was getting a building owner on my street to finally repair the hole in front of their building. Imagine what I could do with a backhoe.
Start small, think big. Help people who deserve it in real, honest (typically not through the computer) ways.
I'd much rather be less wealthy in that way to be rich in this way.
Author doesn't look like he cares much about other people. Dude left a job making 60 mil because of "NPCs and politics"... You could fund a school with that kind of many and still have enough to brag about your gaming setup
I always think if I won the lottery, I'd love to just make my local town awesome. Fund the schools, pay for parks, buy empty retail units and make them community spaces for artists. That sort of thing.
I took about a year and a half off because I could afford it and I did so much and had such a good time I could do it forever. Freedom is wasted on this guy.
The author seems to wear their support of capitalism "on their sleeve", so acting in their self-interest is endemic. At the risk of sounding bitter, I imagine these problems aren't trendy enough to solve yet, or maybe they just had something akin to blinkers on en route to their hike.
Therapy. Wealth and success is one of the most massive crutches there is. It can make it almost impossible to be truly in touch with your insecurities and pain because its simply too easy to hide in your victory. Your toughest challenge now is to, despite your wealth, find a way to contact the pain that drove you to your hunger for success. As the bible said, it's easier for a camel to get through the head of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. I interpret that metaphorically.
Therapy = Exactly. He thinks he has freedom and agency but he's just being puppeteered by conflicting subconscious forces he doesn't understand and seems to have no insight into. This is a man who's in a self-driving car turning a steering wheel that's connected to nothing.
"eye of the needle" refers to a small gate or passage in ancient city walls, used after the main gates were closed at night. A camel could only pass through this narrow opening if it was unloaded of its baggage and possibly crawled through on its knees.
Not as hard or impossible as it first appears but still harder.
From what I understand, this is actually highly debated among biblical scholars.
This idea that he meant "it's hard but not impossible" seems to generally be pushed by wealthy religions and "prosperity gospel" types.
Reading everything else Jesus said, I find it more likely that he literally meant the "eye of an actual needle". He did not seem to be a fan of the rich or powerful in any way.
It's not impossible for a rich person to develop spiritually and attain heaven. They just have to give up all their riches. So functionally it is easier for a camel to do this other equivalent nearly-impossible thing.
In a Catholic and the way those verses are interpreted is that it’s not that you have to give up all your money but give up greed, it basically means that you should not worship your wealth but place your highest of high towards God, then and only then you can use your wealth towards the Good as you have no more attachments.
I think Protestant have similar interpretations but I could be wrong as they have many denominations.
To be fair, needles at the time probably weren't as fine as they are these days, so you may still have a gap a millimeter across instead of a fraction of that.
A common myth! No, no gate or passage was ever referred to as "the eye of the needle" in antiquity. [1] That verse is intended to be taken literally. Jesus Christ was quite outspoken on his feelings about the wealthy, but of course, wealthy Christians need a way for him to have meant something figurative when he told them to surrender their worldly riches.
Jesus literally told his followers to give up their worldly possessions, but… sure. He intended to give a free pass to those who came after, that hinged on a quirk of city planning that would not exist until centuries later.
Oh yeah, I just clicked the link and it's Dan McClellan. Maybe TikTok isn't the best place to cite, but he's highly credible in terms of Biblical scholarship and history.
It's just an unsuitable, attention-zapping, toxic format for sharing information. It would be best to link to an article that can convey the full message. not a 15 second jolt which is what TT is all about.
Tiktok is particularly dangerous. And not because of the oft-repeated Chinese FUD (some of which may be true), but (my opinion here) it's the "crack" version of cocaine, or the "heroin" version of opium. Everything TT does goes straight to our psychological weaknesses.
Matters of religion (as well as philosophy) simply can't be covered in bite-size 2-minute "shorts".
If you prefer, he does a long form podcast called Data Over Dogma that is skeptical and informative. He uses TikTok because there are loads of people on the platform spewing misinformation about the Bible. He's meeting people where they are with empirical information
It's not true though (and no evidence that such a gate existed with that name).
It's more likely exaggeration referring to actual camel (the large animal of the area) and the eye of a needle (an example of the smallest hole one would be readily familiar with at the time).
If it was reffering to a named place, the very capable in both Jewish and Greek authors of the New Testament wouldn't have translated it as "τρυπήματος ῥαφίδος" (needle's opening) or "τρυμαλιᾶς ῥαφίδος" (needle's hole), as opposed to something like "narrow gate" or similar that would convey to people unfamiliar with Jerusalem the point.
A rich man won't be attracted to heaven in the first place, for it's a place for people who enjoy giving something to others and rarely think about themselves. Hell, on the other hand, would mesmerize a typical man of ambition for it's a world of selfish might and power.
This is pretty close to ancient eastern christian views on heaven and hell. In that view heaven and hell are the same situation: full exposure to the unattenuated light of god. A righteous & repentant person will experience that as love and mercy, and an unjust person will experience it as fear, shame & torture. But all get the same "treatment" so to speak.
This one was originally used to mock scholars who debated such seemingly obscure minutae at the expense of more pressing issues, the canonical example being theological debate during the fall of Constantinople. But I remember reading somewhere that this debate was actually for a good reason since Constantinople were looking for help from fellow Christians against the Ottomans but needed to convince the potential helpers that their beliefs were closely enough aligned enough to warrant them giving aid. Hoping someone here might know more (and apologies for derailing the thread even further...)
> it's easier for a camel to get through the head of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. I interpret that metaphorically.
I agree that there's a parallel between what Jesus meant and your comment—in both cases, wealth is dangerous because it distracts from what's important. To my understanding, Jesus meant that one's heart will be focused on money rather than wanting to follow God. And, like you said, it's really easy to be distracted by material success (money, degrees, fame, etc.). But, none of these things will follow us to the grave. IMO this sort of tunnel vision is really pernicious, because it's so, so easy to fall into.
If you'll allow a personal rant: I recently heard someone say that failure is—somewhat paradoxically—a crucial part of finding happiness, because it loosens our grip on things that are ultimately unimportant. I've been thinking about all this a lot recently myself. Last year I hit a bump in the road w.r.t. my career, due to factors outside of my control. So, for the first time, I was suddenly failing my subconscious goal to climb the ladder of achievement. I started feeling adrift and demotivated, and the obvious solutions (therapy, medication, more regular exercise) didn't help.
It eventually forced me to really sit down and take a hard look at my priorities in life. Speaking concretely, this meant 1) accepting that I might not get what I had wanted out of my career, and because I'm a Christian, 2) focusing instead on how I can serve God every day (love others more, be much more open about my faith, volunteer at church and elsewhere, etc.). That's much easier said than done, of course, but I've just gotta take the baby steps that I can and trust God with the rest.
It's only been a few months since I came to this conclusion, but I feel like it's changed my life. I've become much less stressed, and I feel much more fulfilled. Honestly, it's like I have hope again in my future.
Naïvely I want to say something like "therefore, everyone should try to find whatever brings them this fulfillment." But this might be too weak of a statement, because I really think there's only one true answer to this question.
P.S. As for the verse you quoted (Matthew 19:24), I'd be remiss not to point out what Jesus says a few verses later: "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." :-)
I'm not Christian but I definitely resonate with what you're saying about failure sometimes being a gift, if you can make use of it.
I wish I could be more religious, in a sense, but I just can't get my head around the concept of "serving" or "fearing" god. It's not how I relate to "the divine" at all. Power to you, though.
I can definitely sympathize with this guy. I imagine selling your company, coming into immense wealth, and losing your identity of ~10 years can really mess up an individual.
But at the same time... this seems rich coming from the dude who co-founded Loom. Calling his ex-coworkers NPCs and believing he's qualified to streamline the US government - all because he built a glorified screen recorder? Have some humility LOL.
After repeatedly mentioning talking/recruiting the "smartest people" around DOGE, that was enough to know this person's opinion isn't very important. Or more to the point, it's not an honest objective take.
Sort of like a TV or movie award show, with everyone praising everyone else's "genius".
Reads more like in-group flattery to establish position within the group.
Despite his best channeling of Russ Hanneman, he is one comma short of the tres comma club. Maybe his new passion in life will be getting his net worth to a billion dollars.
> Calling his ex-coworkers NPCs and believing he's qualified to streamline the US government - all because he built a glorified screen recorder? Have some humility LOL.
This is basically Elon Musk's MO. Except it was shiny cars and not a screen recorder.
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water"
You do what you were enjoying before, just now you don't need to get paid in money for it. May be you will get paid in fame, noble prize, smiles of people whose life you impact etc. The money you have can't buy those directly but only when you put effort.
It was only when I had kids that I understood what this means.
My children are not "my purpose." I mean, that would be a lovely sentiment, but it's not the actual truth.
But having kids (and being a hopefully-good father), means that no matter what else sucks at work, all the projects that didn't land, my boss's daily kicks to the crotch, and every multi-million job opportunity I stupidly turned down... I did right with those kids. If I had made any different choice in life --no matter how tiny-- those wonderful kids would not exist. And that satisfies my sense of Purpose.
SO true. I am having a midlife sort of crisis myself (lost as a founder a bit) but my kids keep me going with a purpose. When you have kids, you don't have the luxury of not doing anything.
One is some grandiose ill-defined thing. The other is housework.
I am certainly in the housework side right now with two kids under 5.
I am a dad, but I still derive quite a lot of identity from what I do for work. If anything, now that I am meeting more parents from nursery & school etc it feels it is almost more important for me now to be able to implicitly assert status through my work/wealth/house-in-desireable-location/car/etc than it was before kids.
I assumed those sort of feelings would dissolve with kids ("Purpose") but if anything the kids have magnified them. Potentially I am just a shallow prick, but I wonder if it is a "provider instinct" thing or perhaps just mini dopamine hits from feeling like I've got something desirable and meeting these other parents just reasserts that over and over.
“Two kids under five” is a tough stage, though (I can’t believe I’ve reached the point where I can say that retrospectively). Things come into focus a little more once your longest conversations with them aren’t about why they actually do need to wear shoes to school. You get hit with those moments where you realize the long term impact you’re having on their personalities and worldviews, and what an awesome responsibility that is.
Not totally unlike—and I get that this is peak hn, but since we’re talking work—building something and then seeing it run in the real world and having to live with your design decisions over the long term, etc etc etc.
Thank you for this, I'm glad to hear you acknowledge that having kids isn't a constant philosophical bliss. I have two under 5 as well and don't relate to the dozens of comments gushing about their kids, wanting to spend more time with them. A few hours a day with my 4 year old is plenty (and most days, too much).
No, the act of raising a kid itself gives people purpose, so it's not a pyramid scheme by any means, but let's not let facts come in the way of a zinger of a one-liner I guess?
It is perhaps a pyramid scheme if you look at it in a certain way. Which doesn’t mean it is bad (unless you are anti-natalist). It’s just funny that it can be conceptualized like that.
You spend 20–40 years trying various things, living for yourself, finding nothing that sticks. Apparently being an idiot, but you’re just inexperienced. There’s some hole in your life. Then you have kids. Aha! It makes sense. Living for others! This is it! The irony being that now those people-you-live-for have to go through the same process, where 1/3 to half their life they spend in that apparently meaningless phase where they haven’t found their purpose yet.
This is totally void if you are the kind of person who cruised by and was happy without children but then the transition to having children made total sense as well.
it is, just like everything else, a manufactured purpose used to paper over the normal state of existential dread. just happens to be the one that most people default on.
NGL, still sounds like a pyramid scheme to me. I mean I like kids and I might have kids in the future. But I'd rather have purpose and joy and share that with future generations and keep it alive. I wanna be proud of humanity and what we are accomplishing and progressing into, not fix my own misery by bringing someone else into a world to distract me from existential dread.
I personally don't want to have a kid of my own blood. But I want to adopt one or two and maybe foster a few IF I become financially capable, which is probably a decade or so away.
I do believe that having a kid of your own in this day and age (esp. when you are working day job and depending on that job for healthcare, housing, etc.) is unfair for the kid who will join you in your life. Sure you'll love him/her, but the reality is the kid will have to grind (again, assuming that you are not a multi-millionaire) when s/he reaches certain age. The best use of our resources, when we accumulate a good amount of wealth to sustain ourselves and have a bit more extra to spare, is to adopt/foster or do something philanthropic entirely (so many homeless, sick, hungry people that you can help).
"The point" for me would not be spreading my genes. It would be to spread my parenting and resources.
Possibly an easier idea for me because several of my many siblings already have multiple children that could be swapped in to my childhood photos without anyone noticing. My genes are pretty well established.
What point does it defeat and why? I’m assuming that you’re talking about evolution here, where having your own kids rather than taking care of someone else’s have been adaptive, but that’s just like saying that the point of a large rock on a beach is to be so large as to not be swept into sea by the waves.
You can start by taking out the trash, and if you are going to sit on your arse all day tomorrow then here is a list of stuff that needs doing around the house.
I suppose "the author can go fuck himself" is a frowned-upon response on Hacker News
Like what an incredibly egocentric, condescending, deplorable way to talk about other human beings with their own rich inner lives, desires, needs, relationships, etc.
"No, they're just pre-programmed, unthinking bots following basic algorithms."
Thank you for writing this. Not gonna cry for this guy, he clearly appears to be a POS who happened to sell a screen recording software company at an obscene price.
Same with Musk, same with Zuckerberg, these entitled twats then use their money to try and convince the world that they are enlightened prophets, all while contributing nothing to the happiness and beauty of the world.
Musk has contributed towards a more sustainable future with electric cars, fueled the dream of being an interplanetary species with reusable rockets, and defended free speech in the western world via Twitter.
I’ve long been of the opinion that you can’t love others until you love yourself. Between the NPC comment and breaking up with his girlfriend, I’d say he has a long way to go, if he ever gets there at all. Hope he does.
Hard to stomach but you can't deny honesty. I wouldn't be surprised that more business high brass people think that way about the workers but are smart enough not to be open about it.
Otherwise the guy doesn't seem to be having a crisis at all. The problem is he's been doing business for the past 10 years. Likely put in a lot more hours than needed. Now business is all he knows and catching up to doing something more meaningful is hard.
There's a lot of anger at this choice in wording here, but it seems very clear to me his mindset. He lacks empathy. There's a scale from sociopath to "I need to sit on all the cushions in my house an equal amount of time so they don't get sad", and it's clear he's further to one end.
If you can't empathise with someone and understand (to some extent) their world view, it would be very easy to see them as alien, programmed NPCs. Not everyone can easily train their empathy muscle.
It reminds me of the Sheeple comic from xkcd. It's common for people to fall into the mental pattern of thinking everyone else is a mindless drone.
Our brains are not evolved for the scale of human civilisation. The mind rebels trying to accept that 8 billion people have as much going on (or more) than you do.
"NPC coworkers" is a provocative way of phrasing it, but yesterday I saw another HN commenter say "We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value". This is mostly the same mindset.
I disagree completely with the implication of last paragraph. For one thing, if an employee has only busywork to do, that is the fault of the elites running the company, not the employee.
To jump from "managers don't know how to allocate tasks" to "the employee being managed is an unthinking, fungible automaton" is enormous.
The disdain of this shithead toward coworkers is misplaced. He accuses his coworkers who are being mismanaged of being NPCs when it's more apt to accuse the managers of being bad "game designers," to carry the analogy further.
It's also a weird analogy to make in 2025, when co-op games exist. What mental deficiency, what arrogance must you suffer from to analogize coworkers to pre-programmed non-humans when actual humans play the games with you these days?
Edit: His entire line of thinking reminds me so much of the stupid geeks in high school who looked at athletically-gifted classmates and said "they aren't deep like I am." Give me a break. The shallow ones are the ones incapable of identifying the spark of the divine in people different from themselves.
we're reading a lot into a two word phrase. NPC coworkers could mean a lot of things. For instance, in a world of gamers, it could just mean none of them are on an actual quest and only have menial tasks.
Exactly this. I’m of the option that you have to spend at least a couple of hours in deep conversation with most people in order to even think about calling them an asshole, despite them writing what to you feels like obnoxious texts. It’s not intellectually honest to throw around the asshole judgement whenever you read a sentence that upsets you.
Perhaps I missed something, but from what I saw none of his attempts to do something new seemed to involve any kind of genuine efforts to improve the lives of others...
Bit amazing that wasn't even something he would consider.
sounds more like he would to fire everyone (DOGE "efficiency") and let the robots do the work (transfer of wealth from workers to corporations); not sure where that leaves humans ...
Yeah, I was going to comment that doing volunteer work in some form could go a long way towards curing what ills him. Surprised that that wasn't even mentioned in TFA.
I get the impression his past ideology looked down on that kind of volunteering, this is someone who thinks working for DOGE (department of government efficiency) is a humanitarian action.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.
I'm not sure if Mary Schmich (who did write it) takes pride in her words being frequently credited to an esteemed writer, or if it rankles. Later Baz Luhrmann made the words into a #1.
Anyway, I agree. You don't need to know where to go next, just be curious and find things as you investigate. Sometimes a project will call to you. Don't be concerned if it hasn't yet.
Your project does not have to be a business. If you wanted to embark on a Dwarf Fortress kind of project you could happily work at it for the rest of your life without needing it to be a money making venture. Your Dwarf Fortress might be A database of the world's cheese or a castle built entirely from synthetic diamonds you produce one at a time from your own machine. It doesn't have to be easy or even possible to complete. I don't think you can decide on something and go do it. I think your thing will tell you when it is ready.
Thanks for writing this. It reminds me of Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford.
> Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
He had an inoperable cancer and wanted to spend his remaining time doing what he wanted rather than sitting in a hospital getting ultimately fruitless treatments. Pancreatic cancer doesn't fuck around. It's not like he died of pneumonia because he loved sleeping outdoors in the rain.
What? That's not at all the case. The type of cancer that Jobs has could be surgically removed. He spent time receiving alternative treatments and delayed his surgery.
> Jobs had a rare form of the cancer, known as neuroendocrine cancer, which grows more slowly and is easier to treat
> GEP-NETs are slow growing tumors that have the potential to be cured surgically if the tumor is removed prior to metastasis.
> Many journalists mentioned and even focused on Jobs’ initial decision to forego conventional treatments and instead use complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies, including acupuncture, botanicals, and dietary changes.
Agreed, but it’s remarkable how well this approach worked for him till then. No approach can solve every problem. I wonder if this one, on balance, was the right one for him, or for others.
Sounds a lot like the guy who said I have 23 gold medals and have no idea what to do (Michael Phelps). Although it isn't a DSM recognized condition, psychologists often refer to the depression of people who obtain the pinnacle of success as “post-gold medal depression.” Here is an article about it. [0]
"What shall we ever do?" -- T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland
"What SHOULD we do?" -- Dr. Seuss - The Cat in the Hat
Serious question, but how exactly does Atlassian hope to recoup that billion dollars?
Loom is useful, but given that Atlassian's investors are expecting a large return, do they really hope a screen recorder to eventually add 2B+ dollars to their value? The AI features will eventually be commoditized, so that can't act as a moat.
It will integrate with their other products and add value through lock in. Same as all of their other acquisitions. Atlassian is all about building an ecosystem so valuable you don't even want to escape.
it's not just the screen recorder: it's also the large userbase, the corporate connections, and the IP. if the stock goes up a few percent that alone covers the purchase
Regarding the part of breaking up with girlfriend shortly after a winning startup exit, I'm reminded of a friend. (Different situation, but something to think about.)
She saw her bf through the difficult process of a developing a creative work, and eventually he completed it, won a prestigious reward... and he broke up with her.
He got invited to the White House because of the award, and I think missing out on that recognition and experience, where she could've attended as the partner, was symbolic for her.
It wasn't that he was upgrading, since she was an all-around catch, including probably being fabulous at whatever kind of cocktail party circles he entered.
It did seem like awkward timing, to decide that a relationship wasn't going to work out, after all.
(Don't worry, she's OK now: highly accomplished in her own career and creative side, and is also raising a family with a better match.)
When a relationship fails you can be certain about one thing: something wasn't working. Many bad relationships continue, but no good relationships end. There are many factors that can make a relationship bad that people will not talk about, like sex. You just have to give people the benefit of the doubt really.
> And suddenly wanting to "find yourself" when you don't need the support any more.
It's like you took away the literal opposite meaning of what OP wrote. The entire post is him sharing his personal crisis and total lack of purpose and motivation. He is literally saying he does not know what he needs to find his way out of that.
But he decided he needed to not be in a relationship (or in that specific relationship) at this time. How does that make him a shitty person?
Surely you're not suggesting he should stick with her so she can partake in the financial gains.
Life doesn't always play out with clean narratives. People change in unexpected ways and sometimes getting through a tough time is specifically what prompts growth.
Not surprising for someone who describes post-acquisition colleagues as NPCs. They do have a modicum of self-awareness around wanting to be Elon, so perhaps there's hope. I'm only realizing now how empathy goes a long way in giving a sense of purpose.
It reads like the first act for a movie that can go in one of many directions: a drama about a middle-aged, coke-fiend Miami "baller"; a tragedy about a bad Ayahuasca trip that leads to a psychotic break; or a heartwarming romantic comedy about an asshole with a heart of gold who finds themself (and true love) in Hawaii, with a quirky, doe-eyed British tourist as the love interest.
Edit: curious to know that the DOGE has ramped up and staffed with SV geniuses to be set loose on complex systems with long feedback loops. The next four^w few years will be interesting.
The whole post is Hannemanesque, isn't it? It could easily be a flashback episode (or prequel spin-off) of Russ' struggles after selling his Radio on Internet startup. For timeline purposes, he'd briefly work for VP Cheney's task Force on Iraq, until he gets bored.
I stopped working over twenty years ago and it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I spent thousands of days with my children, paid off my house, we drove brand new cars for the first time ever.
Over time, I’ve just found things to do with my time. I try project Euler problems and I’m pretty interested in meteorology. The rest of the time, I just participate in things my kids are interested in or involved in, though it’s not as easy as when I was young.
Routine is key, and being honestly and wholeheartedly engaged is key. You gotta do the time, don’t let the time do you.
Did you feel like this before having kids as well?
I am vehemently against the concept of getting kids (that is, when it comes to myself; you do you) and sometimes hear people say that they reasoned the same way until they actually had kids. My only question then is how they ended up having kids? Sure, mistakes can happen, but for someone like me to have kids would be like someone who said they really, really never wanted to go to India to somehow end up there.
What I’m trying to say is that there probably is a self-selection bias going on here: People who says that getting children gives you purpose are probably people who were quite positive towards the idea of getting them in the first place. But does that mean it is good advice for people in general, including people who are very skeptical? What other activity/life goal works this way? Lifting weights at the gym? Going on a trip around the world? Trying BDSM?
If it weren’t for my kids and my wife, I would’ve blown the money and ended up in poverty or something.
My heart goes out to people raising young ones in today’s world. Seems like things have only gotten harder and more confusing for young parents compared when my babies were young. We didn’t even HAVE smartphones when they were small.
Yeah; I have 2 kids in their 20s and 2 in elementary school, and can attest that all the "shiny tech" has made it so much more difficult for parents to raise kids. And their future is so much more uncertain and _not_ in a good way. I look around and don't see much effort into building a better world for our children. There's global issues like "how will climate change affect my kids when they're in their 40s trying to raise kids of their own", but closer to home there's more personal questions like "what should I encourage my child to learn or study when AI could plausibly take over many careers that seemed solid", not to mention that unless you are rich (which we're not), the cost of college is frightening (you want your kid to be able to go to a good college if they can get in, but not be saddled with debt on the way out; my elder daughter got a full academic ride in engineering but not everyone has those capabilities), and just the competition to get in is so much greater than it was. No regrets as my youngest are wonderful human beings, but so much more anxiety as a parent than 20-25 years ago :/
"Working at DOGE" for 4 weeks reminds be of "Teach for America"... maybe it's fairly smart people with decent intentions [1] but not what's needed - not people taking a break from getting rich to do some charity work - rather what's needed is dedicated professionals devoting their careers to teaching / governance.
[1] for the record, I don't think that DOGE has good intentions. A lot of the tweets are nonsensical and I think just a rebranding for typical Republican cuts to health and retirement spending in exchange for more tax breaks at the top.
Yes, this bothered be as well - the department of government efficiency is, as with all government agencies, is working for the public good in the public interest. This means everything must default to being open, unless there is a good reason not to be (military, CIA etc).
I don't trust Elon, and don't see why DOGE should (or could) be secret - unless it's a cover to acquire more power, which seems to be his true objective. (recently, at least)
Signal is widely used among high-ranking and/or appointed officials in the bureaucracy. From what I have observed, this is true on both sides of the aisle.
also we already know what Elon efficiency looks like: firing a bunch of people
I'd honestly prefer my tax dollars be spent creating jobs than going into the pockets of the billionnaires providing the "efficiency" (i.e., large corps offering AI/automation).
Not just rebranding, but it's going to provides useful decision-laundering political cover, similar to what McKinsey and other consultants offer management. They were going to do it anyway, but the public reason becomes "It's not our idea, but DOGE (or the consultants) recommended it."
I think that a lot of people with money need to be reminded that having wealth is a social responsibility in itself. If you can live just from passive income maybe you should just gift interesting people the excess money and have them accomplish their goals.
Talk to a bunch of people and realize what you want to support. If some of them need 10k to start a business just give it to them. Or, if you want some equity, put it in a non-profit that reinvest its earnings. Go to a film school, organize a contest and fund the movie of the most promising students.
I was never rich like the author, yet I once gave a bookbinder that I had hired to make a cool leather-bound book the starting capital he needed to make his own shop just because it turned out so well and he was so passionate about it. Looking back, it still feels great to have helped someone like this.
Humans need activities that produce meaningful outcomes, they don't need careers or work.
Really beautifully said. Wealth does indeed carry the responsibility of giving back to your community the same way the community gave to you to gain the wealth to begin with.
Bettering your community not only benefits the receiver but also, I strongly believe, one’s own conscious and sense of belonging to said community.
> Humans need activities that produce meaningful outcomes, they don't need careers or work.
Human needs purpose in life, does not matter whether it activities for meaningful outcomes, careers, work, family or God, it's in our very nature.
The blog post appeared to me of someone who have achieved mostly what they have aspired to become (rich and freedom from jobs) and at their top apex from their own perspective, however the main dilemma is that after achieving the goals still something important is missing i.e. purpose.
Not sure if I agree with it in this form, as I think people can get by quite well without an explicit purpose. My grandparents were farmers, and I've never pictured them to feel any specific purpose. They were still content with their lives, as they simply didn't even considered the question of what their purpose was.
Modern success is all about fixating on a single measurable goal, and grinding that out. What if there is no single purpose but rather a diffuse set of meanings? Even worse, half the battle is you figuring out what this set of meaningful goals is, where before the goal was given to you (make lots of money).
Sorry, as a farmer you have a very clearly defined purpose (and it might be more implicit than explicitly said out loud, but it's very clear nevertheless). And that's to make sure that you have enough to eat for your family and your animals, and enough to sell, and enough seed for next year.
That's why there's no ruminating for a purpose - it never comes up, because it's so clear. And that's why we're often quite rudderless once the basics are secured.
Can’t you say this for every activity that humans undertake? As a cleaner, you have a very clear purpose: to clean toilets so that you can make money to provide for your family. People can feel a sense of purpose for almost anything, but the fact the you theoretically could come up with a purpose for an activity doesn’t mean they automatically have the sense of it.
My grandmother lacked vocabulary that can be used to describe 'purpose' -- or mental issues. One word she would very rarely use was 'dharma' i.e. duty. Though I am not sure if she used it in this way.
There were only a few things she really cared about: the health and general well-being of her children and grandchildren and when her grandchildren will have children. It seems to me it was her 'purpose', at least she values these things so much that can be easily confused as purpose.
Why do we need purpose beyond existence? We're here to experience a unique life that nobody else will experience, no matter how many commonalities are shared. Yet people are never content with that, and feel they must have a "greater" purpose, when reality is that there is no greater purpose than mere existence.
> having wealth is a social responsibility in itself
We even have a word for this, noblesse oblige. It used to refer to the aristocracy, but I don't see much difference between the aristocracy of old and the moneyed classes of today.
If you're smart you regularly walk through life seeing people hurt each other by letting screwed-up systems fester.
Even if you're really callous and rational about opportunity cost, you can only walk by so many systemic-equivalents of burning buildings before you're eventually like, "damn it, okay I'm going to save this kid but just this once".
Being smart and systems-aware in today's world is like walking by a burning building every day with very long, fireproof arms. "Noblesse" is the wrong word but something like this is a thing. Mathiness oblige?
No. He wanted to help DOGE dismantle the US government. People like that should just blow their money on themselves and the people they like and leave the rest of us alone.
Honestly for some people, just getting debt paid off might be enough of a life changer, in some cases the debt isn't substantial but the income / debt ratio is just not in the best spot. Heck having one or more less bills to worry about could be a tide changer with immense impact.
I know if I could worry less about my mortgage even for a few months, it would have major impacts on my family's life. I cannot imagine others on similar situations, or with way more debt but the income isn't enough.
>need to be reminded that having wealth is a social responsibility in itself
read up on the "is-ought problem": from whatever is, you cannot get an ought nor a should. You simply have to adopt them as beliefs, just like belief in a diety (though some might argue that's an "is" :) and others may not share your beliefs, nor... should... they
I'm not sure what you mean. I do believe this is essentially a value judgement, but one which I think is essential for any well functioning society, at least based on my personal interpretation.
> having wealth is a social responsibility in itself
Warren Buffet has said that every dollar he owns is an IOU that he owes to society - somebody worked hard, produced value, he is in custody of it for the time being, but it has to be paid back by him.
"Having wealth makes you responsible to others, therefore you should do arson."
If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff and whatever responsibility you have to others includes using that alongside the liquid value.
And worse, it's not just on you to do what people say they want. You're also actually responsible for trying to figure out what they would find most valuable. ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)
You're making a strong implication that the companies that make money are the things that people need. The correlation seems to be growing weaker every year as far as I've seen.
Is your point that the money should go to companies that make things that people need as opposed to want? Or is your point that the money somehow flows to companies that make things that people neither need nor want?
Try to think about it in less capitalist terms. Say you built the world's first bicycle and can now move faster / more efficiently than anyone else.
What is the most likely thing that will happen if you give the bicycle away to the person who appears to need it the most and go do something else? (One broken bicycle.)
On the flip side, isn't the most important thing you can work on something like, "figure out how to make a bicycle—and maintenance supply chain—for everyone who wants one"?
The OP's whole point is that he has money, not ideas. Plus, in your example, you could literally do both. Plus, money is not the same thing as IP or creativity. Plus, the post you were responding to was literally advocating giving the money to the people with ideas of how to do good for the world.
There may or may not be a moral imperative to give away excess wealth, but there damn sure isn't any moral imperative to keep it.
If we take the post at face value, OP is saying that he has too many ideas (robots! DOGE!) to have conviction around any, which is a pretty normal predicament for founders.
He also has a track record of having an idea, figuring out how to make the idea useful to others, and turning that into a self-sustaining machine.
All of these are much more important than an idea alone.
As everybody here knows, just having an idea for, say, an app is of very limited value. The trick is being able to mold the idea into what people actually want it to be, and find some model that lets you and them split the value, so the work can continue. The same is true in any kind of political or social activity. Ideas are almost worthless.
As in software, people who are capable of actually executing on their ideas for making the world better are almost always also capable of getting the funding they need, one way or another. People are always the bottleneck, not funding. (Ask anyone who runs a grant program about how hard it is to find effective people to give to.)
Sure, if OP runs into an extremely skilled world-changer with a great track record he should donate 10-50k and introduce the person to some other post-exit friends. But will that skilled and effective person find funding whether he donates or not? Definitely.
The post I was responding to was advocating for giving money to people with an idea for how to make the world better who would otherwise never be able to do it.
The existence of such people is almost a myth.
They do exist, but they're impossible to find in the haystack of people who are guaranteed to fail at executing their idea. If you look for people with ideas for making the world better who aren't doing them because they don't have the money, and give them money, nothing will happen. That's arson.
Also, in my example, you can't really do both. The most efficient system for getting a bicycle to everyone who needs one will involve selling the bicycles. Without capturing some of the value of the bicycles you're making, you'll never be able to make as many.
> If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff
Not at all. Nobody is "good at stuff" in general. People have particular areas of competence at best. Disasters arise when someone who has achieved success off the back of one particular skill set assumes they have general competence at everything and then makes leadership decisions from a position of blind arrogance.
If you manage to help make a powerful machine, you are probably a good machinist. This does not mean you should become a CEO or a venture capitalist or some other sort of "value decider." Your skill is in making powerful machines. If you want to move into a new field, you have to do so as a beginner.
I read the blog post and many of the comments and can’t help but think… how is it you guys are so smart you can create enormous amounts of wealth with no idea what to use it on?
There are millions of people struggling to survive and you have amassed a pile of resources you’ve determined the best thing to do with is bury?
There is a lot of luck involved in striking it rich and naiveté helps pave the way. Look at the section of the blog post on DOGE.
Doesn't it seem pretty childish and immature to think one is going to change the US with an organization that 1) isn't an official government agency and 2) has no political power. If Elon drops dead or falls out of favor with Trump the project is basically dead.
I felt similar when I finished my PhD. It was the singular “thing” in my life to the exclusion of all others. Luckily I was 150k in debt so I didn’t have the luxury of acting like a buffoon for months.
Man if I was rich I’d donate half, invest half, and go back to stocking a small family owned grocery store like when I was in high school. I really enjoyed that job.
It’s a weird post. Part cry for help, part not-so-humble brag, and 100% not something any close friend, significant other, or therapist would recommend you hit send on. Feels a little strung-out, to be honest.
“Rich guy is bored, you’ll never believe what happens next”
despite the title..i read this post as an exhaustion with SV culture. everything starting with the personality types that are elevated (ie some flavor of antisocial personality disorder) and ending with the activities that earn you social capital (ie identifying the next anti-consensus big industry).
i've seen this happen with people that have had much much smaller financial success in the industry..or even ones that haven't had any at all. you are either naturally inclined to identify with the culture or you trick yourselves into it so that you may belong.
<insert paragraph about social desire to be connected and how we construct an image of ourselves through others>
the culture of SV today is an amalgamation of Taylorist ideas, Randian objectivism, Utilitarianism etc etc. there is a lot of social capital to be earned by embodying the values of these currents. DOGE is a quintessential representation of this. it is not surprising at all that author had such a visceral reaction to it.
its important to emphasize that there have been very successful companies that have gone against the current (ie Apple), with an emphasis on craftsmanship, obsession with the process, taste-driven vs data-driven decisions and appreciation for things that are outside of profit maximization.
My take is the opposite of yours. The guy loves SV culture. Most of the article is a humble-brag about it.
His problem is that $60m is not enough to be an important player in that world. He was just a cog in the DOGE machine which wasn't enough after being number 1 at Loom.
He has now decided to study physics to try and be like the tech bro messiah Elon.
> with all the mounting insecurities I had stuffed down over the past several years. I didn’t feel like I could work on them with her. So I broke things off after almost 2 years of unconditional love. It was extremely painful, but it was the right call. I needed to fully face myself.
You had something really special. You obviously miss her. I am not saying that anything will come from it, but why not try some therapy and see if you guys can work things out? What you had was harder to find than the dollar amounts in your blog post. A lot of people just don't find that at all.
Yeah it’s always interesting to me when people get rid of stabilizing social forces in their life to “work on themselves”. Changing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, in fact, it’s usually DUE TO those social forces that we learn, grow, and improve.
Gutting an otherwise healthy relationship to navel-gaze seems like a bad choice.
Source: My wife has absolutely pushed me to address hard things in my life and I’m better for it.
That's such a thoughtful thing to say! thank you for sharing that Adam. I hope you've told her this too, it would mean a lot for her to hear you say so. I find that a good encouragement as I seek to one day be married again :)
In my experience, a lot of people who get into this state start self-sabotaging hard as a way of rejecting what feels, ironically, like losing control. Sudden freedom can feel foreign and lot like your world got forcibly taken away from you. I'm not surprised the author is turning down opportunities and breaking off with his girlfriend. It's a way of taking back control.
When this happened to me, I pivoted hard from getting satisfaction out of what I built to getting satisfaction out of developing people. Now I take great pride out of the careers I've nurtured...a lot more than what I've built, in most ways. I've heard others express similar ideas in different ways, like "I now enjoy making other people rich."
No matter what, I encourage the author to use this time to build connections instead of destroying them (real connections...not work or SF acquaintances). Something I did not read in this essay is how he grew closer to anyone (in fact, I read the opposite). No path out of this valley involves traveling alone.
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