Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

This is so contrastingly similar (yup, that's a phrase) with an equally thought provoking set of tweets notch put up a couple of months after selling minecraft:

"The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.

In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor

When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.

Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead.

I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of assholes that made me sell minecraft again

People who made sudden success are telling me this is normal and will pass. That's good to know! I guess I'll take a shower then!"

Really puts a light on the whole, money will make you happy spin that so many technologists seem to have fallen into.

References:

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637562496056995840

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637563038258868224

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637563226755067904

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637563481139638272

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637563733124980736

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637565210266570752

https://twitter.com/notch/status/637569407208849408

This is totally not at the same scale, but still applicable. Coming from am immigrant family, jumping from 20k a year to 150k @ the age of 20 felt to me like i had made it. I traded in my civic for a sports car, bought a house, all the whisky a young man could want etc etc. Did i feel content? At first. Happier? At first. Then the realisation that there will always be someone wealthier dawned apon me. Those people work longer, harder, have more pressure, responsibility and usually dont even have the time to enjoy their wealth. Managing wealth? You do stupid shit like getting into more debt to try and "save money from the tax man".

The more money u earn, the more money u spend, the more stress u have.

I quite my job 8 years later, sold everything and travelled the world for 2 years, trying lifestyles i never imagined. In the far reaches of the amazonian rainforst where i vonunteered to help study the pink dolphins, I saw the poorest people were actually the happiest people. They had "nothing", but everything at the same time. Everywhere i went this was true. All my ailments that followed me while i was in civialisation suddenly dissapeared. Did they suffer from depression? nup. Poverty? from the outside we assume this was a bad word, but at the ground level, nup. If u live in a place that provides u with everything u need natually, u dont need money.

That was just 1 experience of many. Everyday was saturday and i had a purpose - looking for the meaning of life. I found it everywhere i looked, and money was never part of the equation.

So now im back; i love coding. Im already living the dream. I dont choose work based on pay, i choose it based on my moral compass. What did i discover? Well i think the meaning of life is a little different for everybody, but at our core, its love, connections, and experiences. No matter how much money you have, you cant buy the above.

http://www.avvx62.dsl.pipex.com/boto/br_about.htm

I also pick jobs based on my moral compass, but I reckon it's a lot harder than it would be if I'd been making 150+k for 8 years.

> poorest people were actually the happiest people

I saw this sentence like hundreds of times and completely disagree. How did you know that deep inside their mind? I bet I can manage wealth and be happier than being poor. Give me just $50M please that's enough.

Me also coming from immigrants family during Vietnam War, and live in Thailand.

Points of note from your comment:

>> stupid shit like getting into more debt

>> The more money u earn, the more money u spend, the more stress u have

The key to more happiness for anyone who is not dirt poor is to live with the means of someone 1-3 tax brackets below. If you make $100k/year, live as though you only make $60-70k. If you make $300k, live like you make $120k. It really is that simple. Stop trying to attain the "next lifestyle bracket", because it will NEVER "be enough". You will be miserable your entire life, trying to scrape your way to the "next level". "Unfulfilling" does not begin to describe that path.

I used to pay $1300/month rent, with a $700/month car financing, a $120 internet package, etc. I now live in a cheaper neighborhood with $640 rent, gave up the car (ie: $0/month financing), with $40 internet, etc. I went from $40k in debt and $0 savings account 3 years ago to $0 debt and 5-digit savings today. The difference in quality of life that makes on a day-to-day basis is enormous.

Forget the white picket fence and the $50k+ car. Nobody gives a crap where you live or what you drive - including yourself, whether you believe that or not. Live somewhere with great public transit or, if you really need - not want - a car, buy used for $500-$2,000 that gets you from point A to point B. Stop trying to impress people with your lifesteal. Live cheap, and use the incredible amount of disposable income to lead a happier life.

> Nobody gives a crap where you live or what you drive - including yourself.

Nope. Cars are one of my passions in life. I love driving my sports car. It's not about impressing people either. I don't understand why nerds _never_ understand this.

Because for every person passionate about sports cars (I track mine) there are 5x as many killing the clutch as they drive circles through traffic in their murcielago.

Of the four people I know who make < $120k/year who are paying $1,000+/month to finance a > $60k car, only one of them is a real "car enthusiast" who does it for himself. The other three are trying way too hard to prove that they are living the rich life. They don't give a single damn about the car; their only concern in the world is that other people notice they have an expensive car.

If owning an expensive car is what brings someone personal joy, I'm all for that. When a friend tells me he can't come watch a movie with me or come on a cheap local road trip because he's behind on his car payments, and he says it with a depressed facial expression that clearly shows regret for the car... yeah. I don't know how else to take that other than "stupid life decisions". And no, I don't drop my jaw in awe over their car - I just see them as a moron who has misplaced priorities.

Ok. I will concede that the above two responses to my comment are fair.

+1 I am not giving up my truck, and I will get (lease) my Z06 Corvette

I can think of few things money can buy that have impacted my quality of life as much as where I live, in both location and living space.

Nice find.

I personally claim that I am aware of much more really deep mathematics and programming problems that I would love to solve than I have lifetime. Using this money to fund a company to implement all these ideas (without investors on the tail) sounds like a quite fun idea to me.

So I personally believe that the problem that notch describes (in particular "The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying") would only exist in a strongly reduced version if I became a billionaire.

I hope notch pulls a jk Rowling, creates a pseudonym and makes another game.

Minecraft alpha was fun. Quirky weird and awesome. I like to think notch was happy building that. He could start another, and cultivate a community. If it sucks (the pressure), open source it.

Or whatever, it's his life, and I wish him all the best.

Games development is as much a crapshoot as book authoring, so I suspect Notch Prime's game would languish in indie obscurity like Robert Galbraith's books did, right up until someone leaks the association.

not really the point. i think notch would be happy making something in indie obscurity. Of course, i'm not him, perhaps he wants more money. I doubt that. Monthly releases for a few hundred users might be something he really likes. i accept that i would never hear about that game, or ever play it - as you say it's a crapshoot. the guy just seemed happy making stuff that other people liked.

Given he didn't optimise his tax bill when he sold Mojang, I doubt he wants more money. Afaik (read an article somewhere) 30% of the $2.5bn he got went to the Swedish treasury.

I agree notch's perspective is far better. This article says he only had 5 million... that's not a lot. Notch on the other hand made like 500M or almost a billion or something. There's still a lot you can't do with 5 million, but there's pretty much nothing you can't do with 1 billion. I remember reading those tweets and they were quite interesting.

edit: "better" is the wrong word, it's just cutting deeper to the core issue by a larger magnitude.

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