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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
- 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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
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 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Is that really possible? I have often thought that the only person that can develop you, is you.
Sure you might get some good advice from some people, maybe a helping hand, a business loan or grant etc. but I don't view that as development.
Your biggest asset is you. Don't be reluctant to use it.
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 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.
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. ;)
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.
I think he needs to get closer to himself. I think he's on the right track.
Thanks in anticipation.
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.
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.
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.
Chop chop chop, back to work, quit being jealous.
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 ;)
Yeah. The entire blog post (to me) gives the strong impression that the author is an extremely self centred, selfish... er... prick.
Maybe they'll learn to be less that way over time, and hopefully their ex-girlfriend learns to avoid ungrateful people.
Just wanted to let you know, for unknown reasons this statement really resonated with me, thank you.
Unless you have a schizoid personality.
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.
The time to do that was _before_ writing a blog post titled "I am rich" and submitting it to HN
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.
It often gets described as washed up rather than bored, but yes.
Dylan is a good contrast.
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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.
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.
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.
At a certain level of wealth, any job you can do can be done by someone else better and cheaper
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.
Money cannot beat entropy or slow it down
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c9fb361a-30ef-45d5-b777-...
But you have to have something keeping you busy that makes you feel like you have a purpose.
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.
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.
Personally I've found the problematic ones to be those who feel like they're obliged to act deferrentially once money is involved.
The blunt/honest ones that don't change their personality like that still seem ok.
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’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 …
A fair formula that i was given years ago is;
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.
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.
Might seem counterproductive or even "toxic" but it's sure better than the nihlism that the author is expressing.
Dead Comment
So you’re Dickey from The Talented Mr. Ripely?
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.
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.
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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?
Heck even for good therapy, you need to have those.
That sounds awesome - tell us more.
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.
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)
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.
NPCs don’t actually exist outside of video games, those are real human beings.
Not sure what to do with all that wealth? Try asking one of those NPCs… spend a day with each one of them, learn what being human actually is
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.
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.
cf. Mean Girls
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.
This is spot on. And I think it’s probably the biggest thing he’s going through
However, the money is definitely a big factor as well. Not because of the amount of money, but because of the suddenness that it happened with
In a very short amount of time, he found himself not needing (and realizing also not wanting), to maintain his identity at the time
The money and the suddenness also put him in a situation that is pretty hard to relate to for the vast majority of people
So not only he lost his identity, he also found himself alone (and made it even worse, by pushing people away or ending some relationships)
I think his problem is he might not be a very good person.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/YHIZ0Rb7lv0?si=TG_SIi-XUuP1iHYf
So sure hope for him and others they survive their 7 years of catharsis!
Dead Comment
General comments:
- 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.
This is a commonly recited myth about lottery winners[1].
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnjennings/2023/08/29/debunki...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c...
> 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
See this comprehensive list:
https://old.reddit.com/r/LotteryLaws/comments/v78hhy/anonymi...
>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”.
I expected something like a Snopes link. Ah well.
https://refhide.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/
(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)
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?
This is most often a problem with traders and investors who made a good bet. Less so with something that took a lot of effort to make work.
I know a married couple who blew through an amount in eight figures and had to get low level jobs. Lost their house.
Few people achieve something big. Even fewer can achieve another big thing. Even less can continue achieving.
I have looked into this and found out that lottery winners are fine, that the viral meme about two thirds of them going bankrupt is not true.
https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-fina...
Most of the claims about lottery winners going bankrupt are uncited and unsourced. A few claims I was able to find pointed at this paper: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf
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.
As far as I know, jwz was never a CEO, but he did the same thing.
"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.
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.
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 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.
ebook/audiobook are free from their website: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org.au/the-book/
> i invest in companies and am willing to offer help to founders i vibe with for free and for no allocation
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Are you hiding all of that?
It seems to be a problem with motivation and meaningfulness, not necessarily that he wants to save anyone. Or anything.
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.
I hope I'm never such a loser that I actually believe what I just wrote.
Not as hard or impossible as it first appears but still harder.
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.
There's a lot of discussion on this verse. Apparently, the gate interpretation didn't exist until the 11 century.
It was rethought to be Rope for a while but this blog post discredits that. https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html
[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studie...
Arabic word for camel and rope are same in a similar verse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle
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Also it just doesn’t make sense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on...
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 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.