Can Money Set You Free? | Hacker News Reader

Can Money Set You Free?

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69 pointsmahipal34 comments

This shows the author, his father and grandfather had the wrong end of the stick. His grandfather, wanting security, had traded his time and independance for security, and got neither. His father, wanting to ensure he had both security and longevity, got neither. The author, apparently seeing this as a failed experiment, walked away from it.

What he failed to realise that neither his father or grandfather ever got control over their situation. The continually worked for money by trading their precious time for security. It's that which made them unhappy, not the actual money.

The author, to me, is making the fundamental mistake of thinking that you have to work 40 hours a week for 40 years to have 'money', so the choice is between working like a dog or having nothing, not realising that their is another way. Can money set you free? Of course it can, but not if you're trading your free time for your money.

For most people, it is a choice between security of income and freedom to spend your time as you want. The most secure people on the planet are prisoners, but they don't have the freedom to do what they want. If you're prepared to accept a less-secure income (by being risky, ie, startups) then you're going to gain the benefits of freedom when/if it does work out.

Bottom line : if this guy's Dad had cashed out at a younger age and spent the last 20 years of his life doing things on his own terms, he wouldn't have died an unhappy man in a short retirement.

There are few career paths where one can "cash out."

Right, so choose one where you can. That's my point. Don't bash your head against a bank wall for 40 years and then think you've wasted your life.

In other words : you can't sell a job, so why spend 40 years working at one?

What are you going to do after you "cash out"? Work can be a source of purpose in one's life. I don't believe in this idea, that seems implied in your post, that bliss lies in comfortable unemployment.

>What are you going to do after you "cash out"?

Whatever you want! Start another job, go trekking, work for a charity, write poetry.

The original article questions whether money can get you freedom, the answer is : yes it can! The ultimate freedom is choosing to do things each day because you want to, not because you have to.

You can start another job, go trekking, work for a charity, write poetry, etc. without needing to cash out. Just do it now. No need for money, if that's what you really want.

Your life is made up of what you are doing right now, not what you think you're going to do sometime in the future.

Your comment reads to me like an extremely long variant of "Let them eat cake."

You really need to explain how working for a little while and then "cashing out" was a viable option for these men that they simply chose not to exercise.

Yeah with the added constraint that it was a pension that the Dad retired with.

I would agree with you if you were talking about coal miners or supermarket checkers, but the one guy was a dentist and the other guy was a banker. Even 80 years ago, dentists and bankers made more than three times as much money per year as regular people. If they couldn't retire after one-third the normal career length, maybe the fault was not in their stars, but in themselves: perhaps a failure of frugality?

Or the people who make just one third are just even poorer. I have an income in the top 10% of my country, yet my feeling is it is only sufficient to scrape by in a moderately convenient way. Certainly not enough to retire early. Like to buy a house or apartment, I would probably still have to take a 30 year credit.

Pretty much everybody has the feeling that their income is "only sufficient to scrape by in a moderately convenient way". In the end, of course, they're all wrong: no income is enough to keep you alive. What good does homeownership do you once you're dead?

You're comment points out very effectively that this is an illusion. I'm sure you're aware that the other 90% of the people in your country are also at least scraping by, even though many of them have an income that is a fraction of yours. Do you suppose they spend all their time missing the conveniences you take for granted? Unless those conveniences are things like access to surgery and adequate food for their children (do you live in Zimbabwe?) probably not.

So consider whether the conveniences that account for the discrepancy between their scraping along and your scraping along are really worth the inconveniences required to buy them.

If you're like 90% of people, you never will consider this seriously — because if it wasn't crazy, everybody would be doing it, right? — until it's time for you to retire.

No, it was not meant to be 'let them eat cake'.

The point is : in free countries, we all get to choose our destiny, particularly so if born into middle class families. Any of us can choose to work hard for a while, find success and cash out. These men chose to take paid, salaried positions : they sacrificed their time for security of income stream. They (apparently, we have no evidence otherwise) never tried to question this, or try any other way of gaining both money and free time.

My point is they should have investigated other ways to make their money rather than work for someone else their whole life. The Authors conclusion, to me, is that working for money doesn't give you freedom. I agree completely, and say you should be finding ways to make money work for you.

I don't think my explanations are coming through very well, that's a shortcoming in my writing. But I fully understand that many readers won't get what I'm trying to say, because they probably have the same mindset as the Author, his Father and Grandfather.

I guess I just disagree with your premise. We can choose what we do, and we can influence our destiny, but we cannot choose our destiny. You can have a great business plan, eager customers and a wonderful revenue model and get hit by a drunk driver tomorrow. I wouldn't then say, "Well, that guy should have chosen a destiny where he didn't get run over."

We can't choose whether we get run over, and we can't choose whether we "find success" or have an opportunity to "cash out." We can try to influence things the way we want, but choosing our actions is not the same as choosing our results.

> You really need to explain how working for a little while and then "cashing out" was a viable option for these men that they simply chose not to exercise.

Actually he doesn't.

They lived far above subsistence. That's a choice. One consequence of that choice is that they weren't saving the difference between subsistence and their chosen lifestyle for investment and/or later use, including early retirement at subsisistence.

I'm also pretty sure that no one forced them into their occupations and that they ignored opportunities that they could have done while pursuing said occupations.

I don't know what they did with their time, but I do know that they had time to do other things that would have had different outcomes. If they're unhappy with the consequences of their choices....

While reading, I hit upon this sentence:

"Dad’s example made me feel that, if I wanted to write for a living, I had an obligation to try and do it, and I’ve been writing full-time since 1996, when my first novel did well enough to let me quit my day job as an editor at the London Review of Books."

particularly "my first novel did well enough to let me quit my day job"

... so, the money he made set him free from his day job so he could do what he was interested in. :/

I'm having trouble seeing what the author's definition of freedom is. Financial "security" is one definition I hear people use, and he brings up. But that can be gone in a moment or you can die and it doesn't matter, as his father did.

Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? I think that has to be defined first.

The freest people I have met are those who don't worry about what they can't control, work hard at what they can, and are content with the ups and downs of life. Money seems, to me, to be uncorrelated-- at least above a minimum threshold.

Money for me is physical freedom, the most literal kind. I work, work, work, but I can jump on a plane and fly anywhere on a whim, and I do. Averaging ~1 new foreign country/month so far this year :-)

Have you seen this guy? http://www.chrisguillebeau.com/ He shares your interest in travel; you might find it interesting.

nice quote buried in there:

...the profound truth of Seamus Heaney’s elegy to Robert Lowell: “The way we are living/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.”

This quote was interesting to me, "That would be the end of the world for serious writers, who are not performers and who can’t earn a living giving concerts and selling T-shirts. Nobody knows how this is going to play out."

There isn't an audience for successful writers to be speakers?

Only if you're Malcolm Gladwell.

I know plenty of academics who are highly engaging in writing but utterly useless at speaking -- even in private conversations, never mind public speaking.

I feel sorry for their students, but I'm glad for the books and research they produce.

Do you know of any who were able to improve their speaking? If so, do you know how?

For very famous ones, yes, but it drops off pretty quickly. For most authors, the speaking gigs tend to be unpaid--- travel around the country doing book readings and such to promote your book. An exception can be nonfiction authors who can get onto the corporate workshops circuit, but my guess is that novelists aren't too much in demand there.

I can't imagine that a significant number of people would be able to earn significant amounts of money by speaking.

>On the one hand, I have no boss, so I can’t be sacked – everything about every single aspect of my day and my work is entirely up to me. From that point of view, I’m about as free as it is possible for a person to be. On the other hand, I have no job security or protection of any kind. If people don’t want to read what I write, I have no income .

We always have "boss". It doesn't matter if it's my manager at my day job, or my customers at the startup I'm working on. We all serve a master. Even the hobo on the street looks for food when his stomach directs him to do so.

I don't think money itself is freedom, or that it could buy it. Though it does buy nice things. Freedom is being able to pro-actively direct your life, move your life. Freedom is being the boss, freedom is being the hobo. They are equal in my book.

I don't think having customers is the same as having a boss.

You can ignore a incompetent customer who doesn't know what he wants. Try this with a similar boss.

But you can't ignore customers as a whole. It similar to having a boss, but not exactly the same.

I very often enjoy theatantic, but it has a script somewhere that locks up my browser. I've been trying to track it down, but no luck yet as it downloads a lot of stuff from all over the place.

Anybody found it already?

oblig: I've noticed that people who attain financial freedom often end up continuing to work in that field (after a year or two of feeling useless). We need a purpose more than we need "financial freedom". So you might as well do what you love in the first place; that passion is the best way to be excellent, which is not a bad way to be financially successful as an incident. The challenge is having the courage to live. Money isn't courage.

No.

Social mobility != Economic mobility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Yes. Money can at least set you free financially.

"So Dad was a banker but he couldn’t bear talking about money..."

I think bankers deal more with "debt" than "money." I don't know if this has any relevance to the article and what the author is saying.

I interpreted it in a different way; as an example, my father has zero interest and perhaps even scorn for discussing virtually any topic he's done for a living. Doing it for a living can ruin it for you.

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