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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

The assumption here is that everyone sees the accumulation of wealth as the most important goal in life. I don't think that's accurate.

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I see money as freedom. My ultimate goal is to save enough so that I don't have to work. Eventually, that will be the case, hopefully not on my deathbed.

If the majority of the population thought that way, we'd have an economic collapse though, so forget what I said.

Not having to work meaning you will stop working or not having to work giving you freedom to stop but you most likely will not? If the former, what is the thing you will do that you cannot start doing today? I am not rich (in the US sense) and my goals when I was young were to not leave anything until 'pension' (as that is kind of what you decribe but probably at a younger age than typical) so I set up everything so I could do all I want (and those things are modest anyway) before I turn 50. By 42 I did mostly all of them without being rich and while working at the same time (which is also a hobby) and while developing other hobbies and side projects.

But I enjoy work. I'm happy that I'm well compensated for the work I do, but even without that I fundamentally enjoy my work.

In fact work is preferable to how I spend a lot of my free time. Would I like to work more flexible hours and get paid the same to work 30 hours instead of 37.5 a week then sure, but otherwise what would money be buying freedom from?

I suppose owning a house out-right would be freedom from worrying about security of housing, and having a large cash reserve in a few currencies would be security from political instability.

Perhaps that I only have to worry about these "big" things means I already qualify as rich from my existing income, but "not working" is definitely not a goal I align to (yet).

Holding cash on purpose is a pretty terrible idea in just about every political environment. Nobody who's rich actually does this, unless is specifically earmarked for an upcoming purchase or an emergency fund. You're better off with stocks and metals.

How is holding large amounts of cash bad? I don't understand, could you elaborate on that?

You are losing them to inflation.

At a very slow rate, at very low risk. There are always tradeoffs. I think bad about cash.

There's enough of compound effect to make your cash worth a lot less by the time you retire. E.g. here in Norway you'd lose 50% value of your savings over 20 year period.

If you stuff the cash in a mattress and sit around for 20 years. But if you do that, inflation isn't your biggest risk.

Cash doesn't grow and is generally devalued through inflation.

A diverse portfolio is better protected against inflation, cash ought to make up some of a diverse portfolio but not a large proportion of it. Bonds are a better way of having cash-denominated assets since they still have returns while not being particularly risky (in the general case).

Cash is still useful however because it is easy to access quickly without losing value to having to sell quickly and doesn't incur fees.

And Bitcoin.

I enjoy work as well. Eventually you will work at a job that was great, but through acquisition or whatever, it turns terrible and you will feel trapped because it pays well but the people you work for are less than ideal for many reasons.

Most of the work we have to do is not life changing or world changing, or even makes the world a slightly better place for anyone other than the ownership.

One day you might want to fully explore a new technology or framework, but your current work environment isn't interested and you aren't well versed enough, or there aren't any jobs in your area related to that technology. Spending time after work is an option, but when you get older and have a family, the harder that is.

To me money is freedom to not have to work, or be able to work on what I want to work on, explore what I want to explore, etc.

A friend of mine told me the same thing. He considers money as freedom, and he will retire next year at the age of 42. I agree that money is freedom, but for the last 15 years or so he worked his ass off getting up at 5am in the morning working for other people. 15 years of your most productive time as an adult is a lot, and there is something to be said for just doing what you want to do during that time instead of earning money for afterwards.

> If the majority of the population thought that way, we'd have an economic collapse though

...or a much better society.

I don't believe economic collapse will yield a better society. If we can get from the consumeristic society we have now to a much less consumeristic one without the economic collapse, perhaps.

Accumulation of wealth may not be the ultimate goal, but it shortcuts your way to achieve the goals of other pursuits.

But at what cost? Certainly you could work at a Biglaw firm in NYC (or whatever) and get rich if you're willing to trade your youth and your health. But is that smart?

You're making several very large assumptions.

1) That you have to trade your health. I wonder if lawyers at Biglaw live longer than the bottom 75% of income earners. My opinion is that they very likely do.

2) Smart isn't applicable to the context you set up. It's dependent on what you want out of life, these are personal life choices. If I prioritize money over life expectancy, and I get rich but die at 63 years of age (due to the work lifestyle I undertook to get rich), that was my subjective choice - smart doesn't enter into it.

3) Most people with careers trade their youth for work to some substantial degree. The exceptions are extremely few, and extremely far between. Just working 35 to 60 hours per week, from the age of 20 to 67 (the soon to be social security retirement age), is heavily trading your youth for work.

There is a difference between healthiness and life expectancy.

1) You very much do in some jobs. You can't work 70 or 80 hours every week for long stretches and maintain your physical and mental well being. People really do that, and the ones that can maintain the pace for a few years make boatloads of money. A guy I knew like that was able to afford the best medical care when he had his first heart attack at 43. He may in fact live longer than the bottom 75% of income earners. I doubt it.

2) The article makes the assumption that because wealth doesn't correlate to IQ very strongly it must mean IQ doesn't help you become rich. My point is that doesn't necessarily follow and it may be that smart does enter into it - maybe nearly every smart person could get rich and decides there are better ways to live.

3) There's trading your youth and then there's trading your youth. I would say a guy who works 40 hours a week and has other interests does a lot less of it than a guy who works 60-70 hours a week and does nothing else.

Your point 2) is not correct, I think. The article does not really say that: it says that high IQ is one of the drivers of wealth, but it is not a sufficient condition to determine wealth, because other factors are at play in a meaningful way.

Yes, the article says that, but offers no evidence.

Let's not pretend that many folks in startups aren't doing just that.

The person working at a concreting factory for 60 hours a week to try and save is in the exact same position.

My biggest concern isn't that you can work away your youth and health like that, it's that a lot of people of my generation have no idea that's what they are doing and were gently coerced from a young age to imagine the house/car/work triad as the three ticks of success in life.

Except the Startup is "glamorous" and the concrete labour is not. And the concrete worker doesn't think about making concrete after he clocks out.

almost everyone is doing that.

I think you will find that, in general, it does not. Often it actually detracts from your ability to pursue other goals. People think, "I need money" to do X. They put off X until they "have money". All along the way they intend to do X, but the prerequisite of getting money consumes their time and energy. The funny thing about money is that it's a bit like computer memory. No matter how much you have, you can always find use for more. I'm not going to tell you that nobody needs more than $640, but there is a point at which you have "enough money" and "enough" is usually a lot less than people imagine. Probably you have "enough money" to start now. In that way money is not a short cut -- it's a long cut.

I think for a lot of people, they don't want to compromise. So if you are thinking "I need X so I can live in the wilderness and write books without having to worry about a job", then they put off writing books until they are rich. And by the time it happens (if it ever does -- which is rare), they find that they don't like writing books, and their spouse, who was attracted to them because they are rich, refuses to live in the wilderness.

Compromise is the true short cut. It allows you to start now, with less resources than you would like. It then allows you to build your life so that the thing you wanted is part of it. Even if you need a lot of money to achieve your ultimate goal, remember that it needn't be your money that you spend.

P.S. Even if your dream is to sit on the beach every day and get drunk, I assure you that this is very common amongst the poor ;-)

For most of my twenties, I lived in Hawaii for some years pursuing exactly this agenda. I was very poor, but by the beard of Zeus I had a mighty fine time.

Money is just a trading medium. There are an awful lot of things that it can be traded for so there's an awful lot of people with different wants and values where "acquire money" is a necessary step. Those things can then make other things, that money couldn't buy directly, easier.

I agree, the underlying assumption is faulty (and common).

this so much. I never cared about aquiring wealth, i want to be able to enjoy most of my life which is usually a different path than the one that brings in most money.

I think that smart or smarts and your definition of wealthy play into it; smart I find being able to do what you set out to do all the time without money holding you back. For some people that means you need to be rich for others (like me) it does not.

Could be the case yeah. For me wealth means just to have enough so i dont have to care. Which IMO is rather easy as software engineer in switzerland, or digital nomad in south east asia.

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