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On the other hand, he's greatly limiting his freedom while providing the means for others to increase their freedom:

All the money will go into his microcredit charity, which offers small loans and advice to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

He sounds like a guy who has figured out what he wants, after a lifetime of saving for an indeterminate future need.

That's not gonna make him all that happy.

Studies have found that money can make you happy - so long as you spend it on creating great memories that are valuable for you.

If you said he went around a poor part of India and gave all the money away to people that he met there, I would see some merit to that. At least, he'll get the experience of having met all these people and changed their lives. Those memories would stay with him his whole life. Setting up $5m's worth of anonymous micro-loans might make you feel good for a few months, maybe a year or two, but the memory will soon fade. It's too distant.

Even if you decide that your calling in life is to give all your stuff away, there are much more personally fulfilling ways to do it.

I agree. He doesn't even seem to have a good idea of what he's going to do next. If he were retiring to a cabin in the Alps or a shack on the beach I could envy him a little, but living in a tiny studio apartment in Innsbruck? With a bed in the living room so he can't even experience the pleasure of having a friend around to dinner?

And I, too, would like to know what his wife has to say about this. Setting up a charity is fine, but moving from a villa to a bedsit? I'm starting to think there may be some divorce-related spite involved here.

If you're addicted to crack, getting rid of your crack supply might be a good way to help break the addiction.

You may think money and crack are completely different, but you would be wrong.

I wouldn't be so critical. We all believe the lie, in different ways, that ONCE I get funding/get famous/go public then I'll be happy. Of course it's always elusive.

People often self-destruct when their dreams come true and they suddenly realize they have spent years chasing a lie. People in the startup world are particularly susceptible -- I know I sure am.

When faced with an existential crisis some people cope by doing lines off a hooker's ass-- other people just give their money away. Neither solution deals with the underlying problem, but it's probably better than the alternative.

>Having the money available also makes things possible that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. When you see an opportunity to make a difference, having $5m in the bank allows you to make things happen that would be simply impossible otherwise.

Why, yes. In particular, having $5M enables one to donate $5M, which is what he did.

I see your point, but I think that attitude of preserving your own financial freedom is much like an adhesive bandage: If you pull it out slowly, the pain will be bigger. To keep his financial freedom he'd have to: 1) be very careful in which charity to invest (which likely would go like the joke: you are the optimal sort function, always comparing, never evaluating on an external scale), 2) invest just enough to keep it, which means some charity may get underfunded or not be as successful as it could otherwise.

You'd want him to "make things happen that would be simply impossible otherwise [if he didn't had 5 million]". My rebuttal is that he's done exactly that, but he's done so in one take, not allowing his fear of losing independence from later interfering with his ability to change things. That takes knowing oneself, and should be admired.

That's great. So what will he do next year?

Live? That seems difficult enough to me.

I think you didn't quite get the message. From his point of view he isn't limiting his freedom but expanding it. I guess you can't tell if he's right unless you have the same amount of money and feel different.

"The things you own, they own you."

> I think you didn't quite get the message.

He got it; he just disagrees.

> I wonder how he got so rich by being so misguided.

Better lucky than good.