I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
bennettnotes.com
bennettnotes.com
“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?
If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Dickens had this attitude’s number long ago. Do not mistake the writhing in your guts for “an undigested bit of beef”. It’s a more important signal.
https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laur...
I think while you don't have "FU money" it's important for money to be the main focus of your life. You don't have freedom if you don't have a lot of money and you can't be 100% happy without freedom, at least in my experience, though I know opinions vary here.
In the meantime, most people tend to agree with me that at least to a degree more money = more happiness, it's the reason that capitalism works afterall, and it raises the standard of living - or choice of not working - for all of us over time
Also, I hate bosses, performance reviews, bullshit non-producing jobs who make up the majority of your tech peers, commutes, forced social small talk with people you don't like, etc. So even if I 100% loved what I did everyday, I wouldn't like all that BS that comes with it.
Now, being able to spend my time as I please with full autonomy - that is where the incredible boost in my happiness has come from
What do you think capitalism is exactly? What's your definition that fits the context of that statement?
Except the research shows marginal “experiential” happiness (as opposed to “reflecting” happiness) occurs much, much lower than your threshold. To this point, both you and the comment you’re responding to could be right (although I’m not sure about their tone that you have a duty to give money away)
But it turns you into a wage slave. Turn off the cashflow and everything collapses.
Wealth gives you happy levels of cashflow regardless of working for it right now. Hence it creates freedom.
You won’t be more happy by having wealth, you’ll be more reliably/resiliently happy.
What was interesting is that above a certain income, life satisfaction actually began to decrease. I wonder if there is a similar corollary to wealth.
Why are you reacting so heavily on a quite balanced comment?
Yes, that's a very balanced comment. You are the one who is being unbalanced.
Given the market of the last decade, investing everything above the 30-40k expenses and income tax in the S&P500 and re-investing the dividends would have brought GP there. Not really sure about how one can make it with 30-40k including rent in the Bay Area, but this sounds like the most reasonable takeaway for most readers.
You might as well get the advice "marry rich" - it's probably more likely.
Debt is a killer. I used to have a lot of credit card and personal debt, and was paying over $1,500/mo in interest on less than $100k USD/year. If you get stuck in that trap it's damn near impossible to get out of if you overextend yourself.
A lot of folks grossly underestimate what they spend eating out and drinking. Probably less of a problem now than a few years ago, but coinciding with my credit card debt phase I would have told you I spent "$100, maybe $150" a month when it was closer to $400-500.
If you're not set up for retirement (see below) there's little to no reason to be leasing a brand new BMW. I was absolutely guilty of this and it's tens of thousands of dollars I essentially set on fire for three years. You don't even have to sacrifice the nice car, my 2016 5 series was less than $25k out the door and I got it right after someone turned it in off-lease. My payment is less than theirs was and it'll be paid off before the warranty runs out. I'll then have an "asset" (not really) worth $5-10k, and can get another $25k off-lease car which will cost me less and get paid off quicker, if not in cash.
If you max out your 401(k) you are saving about $20k/yr while only reducing your taxable income by ~$15k/yr depending on your marginal tax rate. A Roth adds another $6k to that if you're under the cap (something like $140k for 2020) and you can withdraw the contributions from that account at any time without penalty. Not helpful for someone making $40k/yr but if you're making $100k it's hard to make a good argument not to max out your retirement unless you live in one of the outlier cities as far as rent and expenses.
There are absolutely the /r/personalfinance types who act like if you go to a restaurant more than once every six months you're going to end up destitute and starving while homeless. And the FIRE community is a borderline cult. But nobody working in our industry, even in super high-COL areas, really has to worry about retirement, even if they've made dumb mistakes like I did that ended up costing hundreds of thousands in the long run.
Even if you are above the Roth cap, you can contribute post-tax $6k to a tradtional IRA, then immediately roll into a Roth IRA. This is known as a "backdoor Roth".
Additionally, some employer 401(k) plans allow you to contribute post-tax money to your 401(k). The IRS specifies an upper limit of the total of [employee pre-tax + employer match + employee post-tax], which was $57k in 2020. The post-tax portion of the above can also be rolled into a Roth IRA. This is commonly referred to as the "mega-backdoor Roth"
Also, don't forget catch-up contributions to each if you are over 50.
Point is if you have the income to support it, you can save much more in a tax advantaged way than just that $19.5k pre-tax 401(k). Please look up the tax consequences of any of these options before doing them. They are straightforward but contain a few pitfalls, such as the pro-rata rule affecting rolling over traditional IRAs into Roth IRAs.
Prior to covid, find apartment within 30 biking to work, get two bedroom, split with roommate.
Going out $150/month
Limit yourself to going out with coworkers once a week, social gatherings once a week and a rule of only buying one drink while out.
Groceries & clothes $400/m
Make all your meals at home unless your work offered fully subsided meals and or on specific days subsided meals.
For clothing, only buy once the piece no longer serves it's function. Do not buy simply because it looks good or it has some "new feature".
Subscriptions $70/m
Netflix, Spotify, GitHub, Youtube Red, and Audible.
Books $50/m
Libraries are a good saving spot here but sometimes you're unable to get some of the new technical books.
Bike maintenance $500/yr
You're going to put wear and tear onto the trusty bike.
Remaining $0-10k/Yr
Yolo. Flights back to see family. Replacement bike if it gets stolen. Random transit trips to see friends.
Free beer, pizza and get to meet interesting people.
Even the absolute worst luck gives you perfectly acceptable returns on 30-35 year timelines. Multiple orders of magnitude better than a savings account, for sure.
Time and time again the best approach for highly compensated people who don't want to actively manage their finances is to put a chunk of every paycheck into a broadly diversified range of index funds and forget that it exists. In the US this means a) getting your company 401(k) match no matter what; b) putting the rest into a Roth IRA as cash flow/debt service allows; c) putting the rest into the remainder of your 401(k) as cash flow/debt service allows; d) putting the rest into a non-tax-advantaged brokerage account that basically mimics your 401(k) but probably has better fund options.
Meaning if you were planning on retiring during one of the long sideways or downturns your required "time in the market" may have just been extended by a decade. The impact of that depends on the unique time constraints of the individual and how well they addressed risk exposure.
Add to that, most economists don't think the long-term market returns will approach the past returns. Most now think 6% is reasonable, when the past was 10%-12%. This extends the horizon further unless you are willing to increase risk exposure by selecting higher growth stocks.
Your comment was that equity investing can be disastrous if you hit the timeline wrong, and my only point was that unless you're speculating or are only in the market for 5-10 years, that has never happened. We have no way of knowing if that will happen in the future or not, but there's no reason to believe that we're going to see decades of middling or negative growth. There's really no other option if you want to have a real retirement unless you plan to just rely on whatever government assistance you can get.
>that has never happened
This is the part that I disagree with. Talk with anyone who planned on retiring around 2008-ish. As a hypothetical, if the market is the proxy measure they lost around 5-8 years of retirement because they had to have "more time in the market" to re-coup losses. If they actually retired and were drawing down their money, it's even worse. Granted, the hypothetical is biased because someone of retirement age shouldn't have that much market exposure, but the point still stands that, while true at the population level, waiting for the market to recover doesn't always work out well at the individual level. I tend to think the people who tout long-term averages of market returns tend to ignore the long periods of sideways or downward movement that may align with an individual's specific circumstances.
That's why, just check how tech is pay in USA http://levels.fyi
The gist: If you didn't inherit, you are fkd in Germany.
MOST of wealthy people inherit it (and 2/3 of super wealthy inheritance in Germany is former Nazi money). It's unfair.
What helps me get by: I know my life is good, even though exiting the treadmill is most likely not possible. Enjoy what you have, invest a bit and focus on things that make you happy :)
There are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house now - housing in the US overall is actually cheaper than it used to be per sqft as far as I recall. Then, in 30-40 years you may too be renting out a paid-off house.
In any case, it doesn't require winning the startup lottery or having a $400K salary at Google.
ADDED: ~$2m + paid-off house is the sort of range people (typically engineers, non-software) I've had discussions about "targets" with have in mind.
If I do not retire early and continue on this path, I would probably reach $3.5mil by age 50.
If you feel secure in being able to maintain an income where you can enjoy both the basic and leisurely aspects of life. That you won't be made bankrupt by illness, or by unfair illegal/legal proceedings. In these circumstances the drive to sit on top of 2.5M to feel relaxed about your financial situation will likely fade away.
The other key thing is investing in the stock market, specifically index funds which have a historical real return rate of 7%. Folks who invested since 2008 got way higher returns from a phenomenal bull run, but let's assume a more "conservative" 7% return.
Save 100k a year with 7% returns for 15 years and you have 2.5mil.
The flaw in that modeling is that your earnings typically peak later in your career, so OP may have made a lot of their money in the last few years from being a high level employee making 500k+ a year.
Keep in mind that the lifestyle changes you make now pay off more than double, by helping you save faster, by having those savings accumulate interest/earn you money, and by reducing the amount of money you need to sustain retirement indefinitely.
Finally, make compounding growth your friend, not your enemy. Kill debt ASAP, and start socking away as much of your money as you can in a growth-bearing account. If you can reliably save 50% of your income in an account that beats inflation by 4%, you can support your lifestyle indefinitely on growth after 17 years.
Also, eating out takes a lot of time... driving to a place, sitting there waiting for waiters to return a credit card, etc. The alcohol is super marked-up. You don't know the ingredients of the food well, it's usually loaded with sugar and fats. I don't mean never do it, but living that way is miserable.
And especially in the pandemic, eating out means tons of containers to deal with. Even if you push just push everything in the trash, it's still like a half a bag's worth. And if are a good doobie and wash the containers, recycle, save the leftovers, etc., it's nearly as much time as if you made it yourself. Again, not that you never should, but save it for special occasions if you wanna have a long, above-average healthspan.
I like feel they're actually under-inflated (at least for comparing high paid workers in both places) because of equity.
The company I work at has rallied many times over 100% since I joined a bit over a year ago. I could sell my equity and "semi-retire" 30+ years early, working when/if I feel like it and not eat really into my savings
It wasn't some grand plan to join a company that would do well during a pandemic, but I did intentionally choose a public company since saying in the tech sector has exploded would be an understatement, and I wanted equity in that.
I'm guessing a lot of people who joined FAANG companies in the last few years are all probably sitting on enough to start thinking about that.
There are those who feel this is a bubble and not sustainable... maybe? But the way I see it is, even if this is the bubble before the next dot com era-style bust, it's better to have a position in it provided by my work and cashing out along the way, than not and end up losing my job anyways.
In all fairness, if you're working for a public tech (and many other) companies, you probably have good health insurance that's at least subsidized and 3-4 weeks of PTO which may not be great by European standards but isn't nothing. (Though admittedly increasingly shared with sick time so if you're out a lot, it's less good.)
In the US the OP would be in the top 3% of earners, top 4% in the UK. Even if you are in the top few percent you still have to spend most of your life working to be 'free' for a bit at the end of it.
Of course if you are inside the top 1% you could probably get away with a 10-15 year sentence. Where the average wage is generally life with a few years of poverty like freedom at the end.
Yes, if you put it in a 0% interest savings account. Buying assets that give an ROI is what most people do..
[1]https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
It happens, but only if you have a loose definition of "many". If a family makes $531k, they are in the top 1%
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...
Most of that 2.5 million probably came from either interest or capital gains (which compounds). I've only been saving for a bit less than a decade and my increase in net worth for the last few years was greater than my total salary (before tax) the same year. [My salary is extremely low compared to Bay Area.] I save 40% of my after tax income.
Americans have notoriously poor investment/saving habits, which obscures the fact that it is remarkably easy to accumulate liquid wealth in the US if you are a diligent saver. The median US household has enough investable income, after all ordinary life expenses, to accumulate a couple million dollars over a typical career. High earners can easily save 10x that amount.
Well there's your problem. Extremely few well paying (say $150k+) jobs and crazy taxes don't exactly encourage wealth accumulation.
Try Bay Area - with tech salaries there and stocks growth being what they were this past decade, the real question is how is it not possible (if only you wanted) to have made $2M+ working for a FAANG for a decade there.
Or at least go for Switzerland, although market is much smaller there, beware. But I know multiple multimillionares in person who made it all on Google Zurich payroll.
If Switzerland is an option, ping me. I am a well-connected tech recruiter with a solid network in Zurich, and I worked as a programmer before, so I know the tech scene here inside out.
I am unfortunately one of them, intellectually, I've conclude the same for myself many times over, and have been unable to change my view on this, as much as I'd love to find peace in my sitaution and enjoy life (tm).
What's hard about it is that it's probably impossible for most people to achieve this kind of wealth, after all, in the current socioeconomic situation, you can't be rich in any traditional sense of the word, without someone else being relatively less well off.
Until we have robots doing our work, and almost-infinite access to resources through no or little work of our own, the traditional definitions are valid.
I was with you up until here.
The total amount of wealth in the world is constantly growing, and you can positively influence it's creation, by introducing new efficiencies or new goods and services that didn't exist before.
In many ways, the wealth of the average person living today is much greater than kings and emperors living centuries ago.
To elaborate:
The total AMOUNT of wealth is growing, and its uneven distribution makes my point even more obvious.
Explain to me how you'd expect to get the following services in a "everyone has FU money with no robots doing the work": Car repair, lawn mowed, anything built, groceries checked out, actually, anything at all.
The only reason these things work is because there's enough unequal distribution that _someone_ has to do something they don't really want to do, in order to give someone else something they'd like to have.
The traditional job is something that nobody wants to pay for doing, but almost everyone want to pay for having done.. In order for anyone to DO that job, they have to be poor enough to accept trading in their time for money.
I'm super lucky, as I'm almost doing the same thing at my job as I'd be doing in my free time, but I still take money for it, because, after all, I'd be writing slightly more interesting (to me) code if it was my hobby. It's just that my hobby won't make me rich, because my hobby is not in trying to turn a profit on my hobby.
I dunno man, I'm average and can't afford N wives, have someone do my dishes, clothes, own and tend thousands of hectares of land for me, father 12 children.
Maybe i'm reading about different kings than you do.
The probability of fathering 12 children, if anything, is probably inversely proportional to your wealth, these days.
Not sure owning and tending thousands of hectares of land has much utility in and of itself. It was a proxy for generating wealth, like someone owning a lot of equities today. But the question is what utility was available to purchase with that wealth?
Granted kings and emperors in some ways were better off in some ways than the median wage earners today, but not in others.
That king probably had one or more personal doctors, people they more or less owned, whose sole purpose and responsibility was their well-being.
Even if the efficiency of that person might have been low, it's certainly a lot more than being able to rent an hour of a doctors time.
Also, I have a color TV, which no king at that time have, but is that technological progress really wealth?
By that definition, starving people with cellphones are still wealthy.
(Assuming we're talking a couple hundred years ago or longer.)
Who didn't have access to antibiotics, vaccines, or any of a plethora of other modern drugs, germ theory of disease, anesthetics, etc. etc. I'll take an hour of a modern physician's time and access to hospital/pharmacy. Thank you very much.
Quantity doesn't always beat quality.
I even implied as much. What I'm trying to say is that being wealthy has nothing to do with the technological level of your country at some given point in history. It may have some correlation to how good access you have to whatever the highest technology available at your point in history is.
Even if that were true, all of your gain in wealth doesn't have to come out of a single individual's pocket. If you make something (e.g. an app) for which a lot of people pay a very small amount, presumably because they get some value in return, it seems a fair deal and leaves everyone else very marginally poorer, and not unfairly. If you consider the value they have gained from using your product as a form of wealth, then no one is poorer at all because you have created wealth.
What they can do with their wealth where I am is _VASTLY_ different from what they can do where they are. They're basically median wealthy among themselves, and they still have to go to work like everybody else, the numbers they're pulling seem impressive only at first.
I'm not talking about being fair or not, only that for the current economic system to work, you need equality of resources. I'm not saying it's a good thing, just, it's how it works. I'm all for changing that, I totally expected it to have been figured out already by the time I reached adulthood, but there are no flying cars (1)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Where-My-Flying-Car-Memoir-ebook/dp/B...
Glad that we agree, that's what I believe too and that's why I strongly hate capitalism.
You aren't free at all unless you have enough capital to stop being forced to take any job offer just to survive.
Personally, after spending most of the past decade in substandard / 'affordable' student housing, I'm now very comfortable with owning a house and making ends meet at the end of the month. I've got enough savings to keep afloat for a year if I somehow lose my job, and I even have some in the stock market because savings account interest is trash at the moment (iirc because of European money lending policy, causing cheap mortgages, causing low savings account interests, and causing climbing house prices from both low mortgage interest rates + investments in real estate).
You may feel very differently when you are looking back on your life near the end of it.
I think what they're saying is that it's important to focus on money early on if it's achievable for you to reach this level of independent wealth in a reasonable time frame.
Being financially free can certainly help with #2 but I don't think it inherently addresses the others.
The amount of money one 'needs' depends on a lot of things, like cost of living in the area you happen to be in. While US$ 2.5M may not seem like a lot in the US, one can live like a king in may other areas.
One doesn't even need to live in one particular place: people cruise around the world, often spending less than US$ 40K per year in total expenses if you don't get too fancy:
* https://www.instagram.com/sailinguma/
* https://www.youtube.com/sailinguma
Your nest egg would allow for several decades at that burn rate.
Unless you want to live an extravagant lifestyle (nothing wrong with that) $2.5 million is more than enough to retire in all but the most expensive US cities. And let's remember this is liquid, so real estate doesn't really count in that. One or two properties you're not living in could easily float that extravagant lifestyle for years.
It helps a lot that I work remotely in IT and live in Poland which is a very cheap country and I'm very low maintenance (for example my ideal vacations is biking and playing D&D on the internet which is all I did in 2019 ;) ). I have 0 interest in cars and drive 1997 Fiat Punto in which a replacement engine costs less than my daily salary :) I know because we've burned it once by accident :)
I don't think money have to be the main focus, as long a your have a sustainable plan with big margin of safety. I could live for 10 years out of my savings easily, that's enough freedom for me if the alternative is delaying the freedom till I'm old. It would probably be a little different with kids, but we don't want to have kids with my wife, so that's not an issue.
I am actually thinking of moving to Poland if this guy keeps paying me, but I probably should go after I got 2 clients minimum.
The thing is that not everyone can or will achieve that. If we know that, what's the main drive for others to do that? We don't live in a system where this is possible, I'm glad you've achieved it but preaching this "money should be the main focus of your life until you have FU money" will just make a lot of people frustrated and unfulfilled.
So why should that be the main goal of anyone's life when there is so much more to life than that? Are we all slaves to money then? Are our lives only meant to be lived after we are free from the shackles of money?
I really don't like that perspective.
Currently I just can't wait to reach that state. Sometimes I'm counting days even. I could never be happy/relaxed as long as I am forced to work, or forced to work under someone.
With regular work, I think I am saving around 70% of my total compensation, but I am also finding ways to do side-hustles. Hopefully I can hit something that will help me reach passive income or otherwise I will be dependant on my career compensation. So as long as I haven't achieved that state I will keep trying and spend most of my time trying to reach this state.
You'll always be 'forced to work' even if that work is just keeping your body alive and well. Perhaps it would be worth trying to find happiness now, rather than hoping it's hidden behind the next achievement.
I just don't see how I can find happiness when I have to give away 8 hours of my prime mental resources 5 days out of 7 while having stress of needing to meet expectations and impressing others. I just don't see how.
I just need to be able to do things when I feel like doing them as opposed to confirming with someone else's set routine and answering to them. Otherwise I won't be satisfied/happy.
It’s a matter of perspective though, as always, and to me, happiness lies in being able to set my agenda and share power over it with whom I choose, not with whom I’m forced to share it with.
I've definitely got happier, more hopeful and more confident in myself as I've started to make enough to see that there's a possible way for me to escape this routine and still have decades of life left to live where I can spend time on whatever I want while still having youthful energy.
And I do feel like focusing on getting to that point as early as possible should be my main goal right now. The more money I make in present the more I can invest to achieve that point even earlier (as money makes money) as opposed to being half in, half out.
I won't sacrifice another 10-15 years of my life while I'm young to have a possibility to have all the time in the world when I'm 60.
It's a matter of perspective as you pointed out.
Yes that would be way too late. I am hoping to achieve this by the time I am 32 or 35 at the latest. If I get lucky, by 30.
I won't have enough from career likely by 30, but I should have enough to start some side project that would hopefully garner enough passive income.
I've spent a significant amount of my career working on problems of my own choice, both in someone else's employment, with a co-founder, or on my own. The limiting factor turned out not to be time or money: it was that the set of problems that are worth solving in today's economy and can be solved by one person (or even a small team) is vanishingly small, and I just had a bigger impact when working with larger organizations.
That's an important observation. There isn't really that much interesting technical work left that a single programmer can do, as the field has been thoroughly mined for such work for decades now.
Interestingly, it's very different in art world - in technology, the new solution has to be an improvement upon state of the art, whereas in creative pursuits it merely has to be different and interesting. Hence, there's basically infinite work left for writers, painters, solo musicians etc.
How much would you need to work if you bought a small-ish house, lived on a very strict budget, and generally kept expenditure to a minimum? There are places in the US where you can buy a house on a bit of land for just over $100k (ex: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/904-Grant-St-Tupelo-MS-38...). What could you do with half an acre of land, a paid off house, and minimal day-to-day obligations? Imagine: work for an hour or two per day so that you have money to buy food, pay power/electric, etc., then idk... read? write that book you've always thought about writing? get in shape? start a garden? go fishing? There are so many possibilities.
I recognize that moving across the country, having the money to pay off a $120k house, etc. is an enormous privilege for some people and I'm certainly not asserting that it's an opportunity that anyone could take advantage of. Only pointing out that the bar for FU money might be lower than you might think.
What'd I actually do? Found a series of startups, none of which went anywhere. Fiddle around with technology, and learn some new technologies. Fret about how I wasn't being productive enough. I didn't read all that much - I read much more when I was in college. I got out of shape.
I have a friend who retired at a similar age who said "One of the worst parts about having money is realizing that most of your problems were not because of money in the first place, and then having to face them." Retirement removes a lot of constraints, but that also means that if you're still unhappy with your life, it's because of you and not your boss or employer.
What an irresponsible advise, given that you factored out the importance of the relationship with the significant other.
"Just find the love of your life!"
"Just live happily ever after!"
I mean, you don't even care if someone's personality and mental state allows for that. A family is not a retinue waiting on you to fullfil your every need, is it?
If starting a family was a silver bullet then we wouldn't see such a high rate of divorce and so many kids screwed up because their parents divorce sucked.
I mean, the assumption alone that people never thought of something like starting a family is mind-boggingly idiotic and presumptuous, as it assumed everyone around is just a mindless NPC.
I would need a lot because I like the city life, for example. I do found idyllic to go to the countryside here in Sweden and spend quite a few weeks there for summer and winter but that's not the life I'd like to be living for years.
I enjoy being in a city for my hobbies, such as music, it's easy to find good concerts, people to mingle and chat about those hobbies. I like the human connections of cities, I enjoy meeting my friends to do something, to see an art exhibition, to make music together.
Nothing of that is possible with little money, I'd need to save a lot through decades to keep this lifestyle work-free.
I don't want a family life so that leaves me tied to having friends and spending time with them, moving to the countryside would be worse for my needs than having to work.
Not everybody dreams of owning a house and settling down in peace in the middle of nowhere, with all the free time to look at trees and write about them. I love going to a secluded cabin, bringing all my music gear and staying there for weeks but it's not something to live on for years.
I very rarely hear about FU money from people that don’t need millions of dollars to leave their job. It’s important (IMO) for people to know that that doesn’t necessarily _have_ to be the case.
"The Bible is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"
-Martin Marty
I can share from my own experience (and from talking with the friends I've made along the way) dedicating your time and resources to charity volunteering is a fulfilling force, but never ultimately so. It doesn't stop whatever is really gnawing on your soul about direction in life. Those things have to be understood and addressed directly.
Are you displeased of not having passions because you think it would be a nice, healthy thing to have? Or is it because you have the impression that people that are passionate about something have an easier time monetizing it, and your ventures are failing because of it?
Also, are you sharing this to get some thoughts on the matter? Or to get views for the post and potentially get people to subscribe to your newsletter?
The fact that it's even a question is a big hint of what's wrong with chasing business above everything: you might not even know which of your interactions are genuine anymore. Genuine interactions are a human need, and they are fully incompatible with ulterior motives.
1. Try and make 'the optimal thing'. Something easy to create, and so lucrative that I won't have to make anything else again
2. flail like the author describes
3. decide that no amount of money is worth feeling this way (or otherwise burnout via your method of choice)
4. make nothing for a while (~6 months for me)
5. start missing some aspects of what you used to do
6. gradually start making those things again, with the goal being to make those things.
Hopefully step 7 is profit, time will tell. If it's not, I'm ok with that too :)
It's certainly not where the people who want to found a "startup" in the PG sense of the word, or be the CEO of a massive company, are. And (also paradoxically) I think most of them are probably in the same place the author is. Even if they have hobbies and passions, their #1 passion is probably "making more money."
But pursuing it might distract you from that fact.
For a while.
I feel like meaning is vastly oversold. People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine. The whole search for meaning I feel has sprung up only among the people who have too much free time ;) I found that I became much happier when I explicitly rejected it, absurdism-style, and then at least partially internalized the notion... it doesn't quite get you back to the natural lack of concern that you have when you are young and don't think of life as finite, but it's the step in the right direction.
It appears to me people have repeatedly searched for a higher purpose that goes beyond their material situation. Hell its even true with those disconnected native tribes in south America drinking ayahuasca and achieving a higher spiritual purpose. It seems to be built into us to want to transcend our material desires once a certain level of sustenance is reached.
Personally, having been a money driven individual earlier in my life (with a high paying job in finance), I quickly realized beyond sustenance for basic needs, money meant little. The reason for this “enlightenment” for me was a serious health problem that made me reevaluate my finite life.
So I would wholeheartedly agree with the original post that money cannot buy your life meaning.
1) Saying "well sure you have money but money won't buy meaning" is usually just a self-defense mechanism. "Well I don't have the money, but at least I have meaning [questionable] and he doesn't [also questionable]." Money and meaning are probably uncorrelated. If anything I'd expect an average(!) person with money to have more meaning than average person without, given that by this only point of evidence, they are better at goal-directed behavior of some sort.
2) The 2nd point is the meaning is unnecessary. I am not sure how elaborate the religious life of subsistence farmers was, but I don't think they were looking for anything like meaning in a modern sense... Ditto for getting high on plants. It strikes me more of a curiosity motive to explain the unknown, the kind the drives modern science. To the extent that it involved meaning, it was more of a meaning of the person as a cog in the now-explained world, not some transcendence. Even the nobles/etc. would see their meaning in advancing the agenda of their city-state or smth like that. Going by modern cosmology, there's no inherent meaning in the universe, so any one you choose is just the one you create (arbitrary), or more likely someone else creates for you with their own questionable motives.
When I started thinking more of the finite-ness of life given the above, I found that it's not the lack of meaning that's the problem, it's the search itself. In this paradigm, money isn't everything, but time and experience is; and you have far more time and better experience in modern society if you have some minimum cashflow. Ideally, you need e.g. $60-80k/year (iirc that was the happiness plateau in the studies for the USA), ideally without sacrificing ~50% of your waking hours for it.
That's a deeply impoverished and modern view of both the past and children.
Wealth is a means, and can be a good thing in the right context, or a bad thing in the wrong one. We know that wealth beyond a certain amount is not associated with increased happiness, and is as often as not associated with decreased happiness.
I can attest to that.
I've been giving at least 10% of my income to charities for about a decade (a pledge I signed along with thousands of other people at https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ ).
From this perspective, you're still earning a lot, it's just that you choose to give a fraction of it away. It's not the same as earning less. Plus, giving to research-proven interventions that help others feels like the most meaningful thing I do with my life.
Go try something new. If it clicks, great. If it doesn't, I'm sure there is something else you'll find, too. Just get out of your comfort zone.
I’d also posit the OP intuitively understands this and is why they’re looking to “fix” it, why they think this is a problem because it feels like it should be one. And I personally agree, there’s no added meaning to life if you’re only looking to be better than those around you. One day I imagine you’ll realize there’s no winning or losing, there’s just life. It goes on.
I think mindfulness can address a lot of the concerns here.
To the author, please keep it up. You remind me a little of me at 25 yet much more articulate and aware. Keep asking the questions, keep paying attention to your feelings, keep on trudging the path. And therapy could really help! Good luck.
> “Oh umm…that’s great Pam. But that’s a lot of work, and no money? Like…is it really worth it? Imagine if you turned it into some type of education business. What’s the market like for that? You could charge at least $300 per student.”
I find the above comment particularly interesting. Working at a youth charity and starting an education business for privileged kids seems like two very different activities to me, with very different rewards and challenges.
The problem with this hobby, and I suspect this is what the author may be sensing, is that the motivation is extrinsic. The rewards come from outside himself. He is forever reliant on an external force for his own satisfaction.
I think the best fit for this guy would be a hobby that is, like his current hobby, based around the mastery of a skill -- something he can practice and see himself getting better at -- but which doesn't require an external rewards system.
The good news is that almost any creative hobby can satisfy these requirements. As for which one to pick? I've found that looking back to one's childhood can be immensely helpful. What amazed you as a kid? What's something you really tried to be good at, but you couldn't quite make it work? It doesn't have to feel like passion yet. It just needs to be a seed. A tiny hint at an activity you might find satisfying eventually. If you give yourself enough time and room to play with that thing, you may get to experience that passion taking hold.
(I'm modifying it for later update, to add a link to content on "if someone is bored" w/ my ideas on hobbies and other possibly worthwhile things to engross oneself, but in the meantime, that is: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581266.html )
- japanese animation
- programming blogs
- blogs about blogging
- blog about making money online
Impostor syndrome is likely grasping at wind. Nobody's going to tell you, you're in a valid life position. That validation is not graspable, because it's not coming.
Real life (interesting) cautionary tale if you need one:
Cool, were you born this way? Have you always had no interests? When did you first realize? Okay, I'm being sarcastic.
Problems like these might go away on their own. But if you want to actively solve them, you have to look inward, not ask the audience. I don't know what you like; I know what I like.
Consider therapy.
The reason I suggest therapy is that I'm sensing guilt. Guilt is a sometimes but not always indicator of repressed emotions. Repression is a possible explanation for a lack of interest in pleasurable pursuits. But I, the anonymous Internet stranger with fifteen minutes of mental bandwidth to offer, cannot possibly plumb deeper than that.
If he had a bajillion dollars, might he be doing other things? Sure. But that doesn't mean his only interest is money, it's uncertain whether he'd be doing a variation of the same things. Seems plausible he'd do a video about what it's like to be mega rich.
People who are only in it for money are often doing quite mundane things. Would I have stopped my paperroute if I had loads of money as a kid? Yes. Would I stop coding altogether? Probably not, I like it.
Until you have FU money it takes a change of attitude to forget money. The people you surround yourself are as well important. Just spend some time with some artists and you'll be more like them.
Parts of me feels the same since I moved to a big city where in order to own a house I need to pay mortgage until I'm 60 even if I'm in top ~3% of earners. I guess it's the stress, the uncertainty of our world, the competition, the ego.
Me, I enjoy accumulating knowledge. It gives me great joy to know things I didn't know before. I will keep doing this until I stop enjoying it. To each his own, and the freedom to choose is the best part of living in the US.
[1] https://simonsinek.com/find-your-why/
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...
Is it necessary? No, but there are lots of strategies to choose from, and some will likely be more effective than others. Life is short, and I have finite time and energy to dedicate to 'finding my meaning'. I'd prefer to know ahead of time if a strategy is likely to work for me.
Starting your own thing is different than being in school or being an employee. If you were "gifted" with the blessing of being good at school life, not having a defined goal for you could be part of the issue. With school
The ability to focus is like a muscle or any other skill, you have to practice it.
Interesting read nonetheless.
Good self awareness on the part of the author. Next step is action. When you realize a deficiency in character (judging everything by monetary ROI), there's a concept of "Agere contra" meaning to act against. You choose to do something directly in contrast to the deficiency.
So in this case, I'd recommend definitely need to start helping people. For free. In as inefficient way as possible. Something like cutting your elderly neighbors lawn with scissors.
Taking a step back, this is the result of (1) insulation from real hardship, (2) capitalist/consumerist brainwashing esp. of the entrepreneurship-fetish of software startups.
I have some hobbies still like reading (non biz) and fitness but work dominates a lot of my time.
And note that with "grey areas", I mean things that would be repulsive to ordinary people, e.g. patent trolling (is it illegal? no! does it make lots of money? yes! is it unethical? what do you mean? :-)).
Some people do manage to “make it” in 2020 but it’s more dumb luck than anything. You can do everything right and fail miserably — this is the outcome for most people with your mindset who chase “get rich quick” schemes. Sounds like you’re having cyclical burnout from smashing your head against the wall because every market is crowded and you have no real way to set yourself apart — again, this is by design. Late stage capitalism and all.
But even if you do succeed, there’s a good chance you find yourself in your mid 30s with a lot of money but poor social skills and limited interests to draw upon. Women / men of this age tend to be attracted to people who are interesting rather than wealthy. If your only passion is how you make a living, that’s kinda dull. You’re 25 and probably have lots of friends now, but by 35 most of them will be married and doing their own thing and you may see them a couple times a year. If you’re boring and haven’t developed interests, you’re going to be lonely.
You can cultivate interests — just do things for the sake of doing them. Once lockdown is over, join a sports league or take dance classes. Do it just to meet people and you’ll eventually find something you like. Money comes and goes with economic cycles and I honestly don’t think the future is very bright economically for most people in the US. Find ways to cope with the existential dread now or you’re going to end up a lonely 35 year old with no friends and few prospects.
I seriously doubt this. Looking at myself I care a lot less about 'interesting' people than I did in my twenties. Maybe interesting is a euphemism for social capital, but social capital is greatly linked to wealth anyway.
Aren't more and more people starting to realize the endless push for side-hustles and youtube subscibers and making stuff just to sell isn't worth it/healthy? We need more balance