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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

Don’t underestimate what doubling your salary can do for you. Unless you already have all the financial resources you will ever need, earning that extra money, especially while you are younger can change the course of how quickly you reach financial independence. Once your financial house is strong, you can make decisions for the rest of your life that optimize for things other than money.

I chose to optimize for higher salary. I plan to get back into the nonprofit and social good world later in my career.

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> Once your financial house is strong, you can make decisions for the rest of your life that optimize for things other than money.

Even if you are not a long-term thinker, just doubling your pay for a year is almost like being able to skip work for 9 months after.

High paying jobs come with other externalities (managers who are beyond caring for anything other than their cars's model years, deadlines which are about some VP's travel schedule etc), which suck while it is happening, but having the ability to just step away from it for a 3-6 month period afterwards makes you feel less trapped in that.

The pain is real, but feeling less trapped can alleviate the suffering.

That's not to say that you should rush into a burnout factory, but getting paid more has immediate consequences to your time-value at a young age - I took a sabbatical at 28 years old, which was triggered by personal issues, but the fact that I could stop work & not worry about rent for 3 months was a big factor in actually doing it.

Is this a common pattern, work a big tech job for a year or two, take a big break, rinse and repeat?

I'm about to take a big break to recover from burnout, and while I don't expect to have trouble getting back into the market next year, I'm not sure it's something I could do repeatedly without my resume looking suspicious.

I took three months off between jobs recently which is the longest I've done since graduation. It's expensive but worth it.

I am currently on a (hopefully) three-month "vacation" between jobs, and the only thing I regret is that it cannot go on forever.

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes on the matter, "Whoever said that money doesn't bring happiness has clearly never tried being poor."

There's a corollary from some founder (one of the Instagram guys?):

There's really only 3 kinds of money.

There's "I don't have to worry if I'll make rent or be able to buy groceries this month" money.

There's "I don't have to think about prices or when I go out to dinner" money.

And then there's "I can take unpaid time off whenever I feel like it, and travel to where I feel like" money.

Past that, everything is just bigger numbers.

It always resonated with me, because (a) it phrased money (which doesn't really matter directly) in terms of outcomes (which do matter directly), (b) it coalesced things down into a few, very different outcome buckets, & (c) it made the observation that in terms of life outcomes, there's definitely a ceiling: unless you're looking for ways to blow money, there's a cap on how much you can reasonably spend.

Bill Gates' description of that ceiling: "I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger."

Maybe hamburgers are not the thing you should be spending your money on.

There are all kinds of projects that are potentially useful but not necessarily profitable. Having more millions of dollars means you could do more of them.

This is essentially what very wealthy people do with their money. They purchase changes in the world around them and so shape the world to more closely fit their own ideals.

I see it a lot like obesity. Too little is very bad. Too much is also bad. But there's nothing to flag when you have too much.

You see people here complaining that they can't go from $500k to $600k and everyone says that they're being greedy. But the dissatisfaction is a lot stronger at that range, and it only goes up when people become millionaires.

I think it's quite important to check that you're eating because you're hungry and not out of habit/greed/pride.

Seems to me that this is an effect of selection. Why are people not satisfied with having million dollars? Because the personality type who could become satisfied with having million dollars, would probably also be satisfied with having half million dollars, so they are unlikely to ever have the million dollars in the first place.

People who want "exactly one million, not less, not more" are less frequent in population than people for whom no amount of money is ever enough.

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