Your human-size life

Sorry but I don't agree with this at all.

Okay, strike that. I agree with the idea that money isn't everything but ... money is a huge enabler. I rented a 2 bedroom apartment even though I can only sleep in one room. That other room? Friends from around the world visited and stayed there all the time and I got to spend far more time with them than if they had had to stay at a hotel. Heck, they probably wouldn't have even visited the area if they had to pay for a hotel.

If you're rich and doing nothing yea maybe you're bored and unhappy but there's all kinds of things I would do with money that instead I can't because someone else with money is "the decider".

It really depends on the amount of money. Most of the games I'd like to make (I'm a game dev) would probably cost in the $7-$14 million price range.

I'd love to open a gamedev co-working space. No idea how much money that would cost to run long enough to make it profitable but it's probably more than I have. And heck, if I had the money I'd consider doing it even if it didn't make a profit. If we're talking money to burn then I'd be happy to burn it. I'd also love to pay someone to run it. To make sure it had lots of events and activities.

Similarly I'd love to do giant digital art exhibitions. The kind that require several hundred thousands in equipment (projection mapping projectors good enough for large buildings are not cheap) on top of having to hire all the people to organize those types of events. Yea, I could beg others to let me but if I had the money I wouldn't have to ask I'd just do it.

And yes there would still be struggles. Even with money lots of things are still real work. Still it would be nice not to have my options limited because I know I still need to save for retirement.

When I was quite young someone I knew said to me that they didn't want to be famous, and didn't want lots of new things.

These ideas struck me profoundly and I realised that in fact I couldn't think of anything worse than being famous. I realised that many many people in our society want to be famous - I'd never questioned that as a worthwhile desire.

I'm not rich but I have given thought to what I would do if I suddenly became extremely rich - would I want it to be broadly known, outside of my close family? I don't think so.... I suspect people treat you differently when you are rich and I don't want to be treated differently - I just want to be ordinary.

I used to want to be CEO of my own company, great office, lots of employees etc etc. Now I don't want even one employee, and I certainly don't want an office.

"You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time."

This might be the most down to earth thing I have heard in a while.

The problem with those of us who make money in the tech field is that it's often pretty much binary.. all work pretty much all the time (and decent to great money) or no work (living on savings). Add to this employer's resistance to hire if you have you haven't been working lately... :/

“The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive.”

― Coco Chanel

> In the early years of this blog I wrote a lot about the personal struggles of people who had attained financial independence only to find out that it revealed that money was not what was standing in the way of happiness.

Spoken like a rich person!

For the poor and working classes who live month-to-month -- which is a large and growing chunk of Americans -- money (or the lack thereof) is a huge source of stress, fear, and -- yes -- unhappiness. It probably also shortens your life.

And probably means you're not even getting one seat at whatever MLB or NBA game you'd like to go see. Might even mean you're not sure you're going to get to keep that one single bedroom you'd like to sleep in.

Money cannot bring happiness, but lack of money can certainly bring, and most likely will bring, unhappiness.

I'm struggling just to live that middle class lifestyle. Housing ain't cheap!

Hmm, money. Just today I have thought: "If only I had $630 to buy my stepsister a decent laptop so that she can study outside her noisy home with her heavy aspie brother."

The core thesis is really only true if money can't be exchanged for some expectation value of additional years of healthy life. Up until fairly recently (say 20 years) that was the case. You couldn't really do a lot with a lot of money to swing odds, any more than you could with just a little money and some forethought. The free stuff like planning, exercise, and calorie restriction outweigh everything else, and by the time you're in late old age how far you get is a complete lottery of genes and happenstance.

It isn't true any more, however. You can outlay money to increase your life span down the line - though it isn't an individual thing, it is increasing life span for everyone. It is a collaborative effort.

How: money can be used as a lever at all levels of research and development in the science of aging to increase everyone's life expectancy by pushing forward the right lines of development. Whether that is by being an insider putting in five figures into a seed round in a useful startup, or by being a billionaire establishing a research foundation, you can move the needle. Early stage research is dirt cheap. Venture capital is overflowing the sandbags for any venture that can do something credible with its seed round. There are startups at various stages today that have means of repairing/removing some of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging, and are pushing towards human testing.

The game of life used to be limited. It used to have a line at the end, you are done. Everything in life and all of our culture is very much defined by the existence of that once-immutable endpoint. The endpoint is fading, however, in the sense that bringing aging under medical control is a research and development project that can and has been envisaged in some detail. But next to no-one has yet adapted to the new reality: the world is still full of old people playing the same old game of gathering points in politics and markets for some final score, and of young people aiming to be in the same position.

If there was sanity, the old game board would be thrown out, and immense interest and investment would be directed towards the biotechnologies of aging and longevity. There is a big difference between a world in which you can't buy time with money, and one in which you can.

You can have other goals besides personal happiness.

Human-size applies to many activities, too. You only get so much time in the day, so "someday" can be put off no matter how long you wait. You never become so exceptional that all problems are within your comfort zone as if you were an overpowered game character. Long term, you can only sustain about 4 hours of max effort on a difficult, out-of-flow mental task like a hard coding problem. You can never entirely brush aside your ordinary failings just because of your accomplishments elsewhere.

If you can speed up your brain by a factor of 10, you could read a book 10 times faster.

This is relevant because you might be reading only 1 human-sized book, but you can read 10 times as many!

Once you have a minimum income for providing your family with the bare --Baloo-- necessities (rent, food, utility bills..), the pursue of trying to get more and more money is just a way of wasting your time and health.

That getting rich is not the key of happiness is so obvious that I don't understand how this kind of articles are revealing or enlightening to anybody.

Its all about our human connections. You can be rich and still maintain these human connections. We are social beings after all.

To be frank, you could achieve immortality, anti-aging, everlasting youth, different bodies and so on. But at 800 years old, you're gonna have one wretched mind.

Nothing will excite you anymore. All those friendships over 800 years? You've had enough misunderstandings and quarrels that you're done talking to those sick bastards. You have probably exchanged a dozen partners by now and you don't want anymore. Sex? All those positions have been tried out. Now its more like a keep-fit regimen. Landing on Mars? That was like a kid trying ice-cream for the first time. Obviously with eternity we can't have everyone giving birth to immortal babies, so reproduction is strictly controlled. You saw a few grandchildren, and they're all grown up now. Everything is a blip in eternity.

No thank you. I'd rather let my mind get garbage collected whenever the time comes.