You are much better off developing a specialty that you enjoy. Money is a side-effect of happiness and persistence.
Yeah "money is not everything" but I'd be able to do more things I like if I had house and spacious garage. But that's $$, $$$ if I also want to live in place with reasonable commute
My hobbies take up a lot of space so I understand what you want. We had to move out of an in town location to get the house we wanted. A 1,000sqft in town house the same size as our duplex rental wasn’t going to cut it.
Luckily I was able to find jobs in an area 45 minutes away from downtown with virtual worker status (3-5 days a month in office max). I changed jobs and was able to find many other ones in the same area.
There's a lot of great places out there. Believing that we have to all cluster around a few cities is pretty bad for us.
The West Coast does have a higher employment of Software Developers per 1,000 people. Especially SF/San Jose. Texas seems to be increasing more than other areas outside of California and Washington.
My house is 2000 square feet. I have a recording studio and a wood shop and too many 3D printers. I am getting a garage permitted for another ~800 square feet. The place cost $480,000 four years ago and is around $620,000 now on Zillow. I am a fifteen minute walk from a train and can be in downtown Boston within the hour.
There are ways to get what you want other than "be an extremely unlikely curve-breaker of a success". It frequently means "not being in San Francisco or New York", granted, but...you've got options.
Im glad for you but I don't think you are making the point you intended.
But I don’t expect the person to whom I replied to be concerned with individually solving it either, and so while I think we can solve our own problems while being mindful of our society’s, the latter didn’t seem appropriate here.
You don't really need a graph to understand that change...
Good on you for fucking with the NIMBYs though, they're the reason house prices went up by an insane amount.
My house, on a 30-year, 10% down, if bought today at the Zillow valuation + my property taxes and insurance, would be about $3800/month. That is absolutely not nothing, but the same square footage in Alameda, CA--a better substitute in some ways, esp. re: transit--is in the $1mil to $1.25mil range, which would be more like $7500/month (if you could make the 10% down at all).
Given that staff+ compensation in the Boston area is pretty reliably north of $200K these days, these are much friendlier numbers. And again, Boston is still an expensive area! There's lots of places in the country that are cheaper. I use Boston as an example because even on the edge of the suburbs there's still decent-to-good public transit. Go just down the road to Providence, which has a thriving local scene of its own and is still on the commuter rail to Boston but otherwise kinda lacks local public transit, and you can get a house like mine that's roughly as walkable to the basics (restaurants, supermarkets, etc.) for like $380K. And if your job is in Boston you can still be at South Station in under an hour and a half of sitting on a train that, IMO, beats BART and CalTrain pretty solidly, let alone driving (which I've known a lot of people, historically, to do from Providence--and that seemed awful).
Me, I work mostly-remote, so I'm not tied to being here in the first place. I just like it here. But realizing that there are significant options is important.
It doesn't. Money buys comfort, power, prestige, security, ..., but not happiness. A happy person is a happy person. An unhappy person is an unhappy person. It sucks in a way but from a different pov it is a wonderful equalizing fact of human experience (like the bliss of orgasm, available to poor and rich alike).
A million is a lot but my first reaction to your comment was this is something only wealthy people can afford to say. Especially in the US where we don’t have universal healthcare.
Just typing this made me realize I need concrete, achievable goals though so I appreciate your comment. I am not the gp but this is something I expect a lot of us need to work on. Something like:
1. What are my financial goals? 2. Is it realistic to have those goals? 3. How do I know if I am on track? If not, what can I do to correct my course?
Money is largely a product of working, but broadly uncorrelated with time or effort. If you think this is untrue, try working a minimum wage job or two for a while. This shouldn't stop you working hard for returns. but it should offer a reality check.
Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can remove stressors. However realistically this is linked to income-outgoings / debt. Earning a lot but being highly leveraged and living an expensive lifestyle ends up not being much less stressful.
I may work until I'm 70. I may be dead before I'm 50. I don't want to be miserable today in order to live a mythical good life in the future. So I plan assuming the most important thing is being content day in day out.
I guess I have a high discount rate. It's not obviously right!
1. Allowing one's discount rate to vary with age.
2. Varying the time horizon. Exponential decay probably doesn't map very well to how people think across different phases of life.
For many people, their discounting may change roughly as follows:
- When you first pop out, life is only the present.
- When young, e.g. 2 or 3 years old, kids may want things very soon, within seconds, minutes, maybe hours.
- Young'uns start to understand money. They might look towards saving for their first bicycle. Now time horizons look more like 1 to 12 months.
- As people start to develop educational and professional goals, they allow more deferred gratification: preparing for their career or buying a house. This horizon might be around 1 - 10 years.
- Somewhere in a career, people might start planning 5 - 50 years out, often for for kids and retirement.
- As people approach their end of expected lifespan (or face a life threatening illness), they probably care a lot about:
-- personally, living in the moment. This might mean checking off the bucket list as well as high quality relationships
-- financially, allocating money away from themselves towards emphasizing long-term, inter-generational goals, like providing for their family or donating to charity. These goals have 20+ year horizons.
- The ultra wealthy have the means to create charities with 50+ year time horizons via an endowment.
do things that are good
ultimately no one knows when we will expire
balance is hard and sometimes it’s nice to look back and say oh i worked so hard for nothing but the experience of working hard and that’s okay too
we all end in the same place
“nothing is good or bad, thinking makes it so”
As a side note, finding and focusing on developing a speciality that I enjoy is a lot harder than making a lot of money. For me at least.
It's just so fun to do something where knowing stuff actually changes people's lives every day.
I'll be happy along the way regardless I'd say.
Because that's what usually happens with such "bet my life on it" goals on something that affects most of your daily efforts for years.
This is not a "I'll learn to play guitar this year" kind of resolution.
And don't pretend your way is the only way of looking at things. "Money is not important" is something people say if they have a lot of money.
Well if money was key to happiness, why would people with money say that? Wouldn't you expect the opposite? The reality is money helps with lots of things in life, but it's never more than a means to an end. You should always be striving to enjoy what you can in life as you go, because cultivating a happy life requires being present. Otherwise you'll blow right by the stuff around you, and by the time you get the money you were seeking you may be on an island. That's all people mean when they make that statement.
2) Happiness isn't my goal in life. It's not a healthy goal either.
Not sure if you were going to go there, but lets skip the 'on a permanent heroine IV' interpretation of happiness.
but i aim for peace which isn’t joy
i find pleasure to be destructive (sugar, sex, booze, drugs)
so i’ve been aiming for peace which isn’t happiness but it is pleasant without causing me to crave more of it
where joy or dopamine rush always makes me want moar
Also, stoicism.
Sugar, booze, drugs, video games, social media, television, etc. are destructive. Those are unnatural things which are engineered to give a dopamine rush. I've been healthier in periods of my life when I did. Going "clean" is stressful, but lands me in a healthier place. I can't usually do that because of family and social ties.
The odd item on your list is sex. Sex -- in the context of a permanent, stable relationship -- builds social bonds and helps emotionally regulated. Studies show that too.
in shorter term relationships it makes me want sugar booze drugs more
sometimes it’s like
oh this is “pleasure” why not get more
i hope that in a committed relationship it would be different
I'm not going to generalize to anyone else, but for me:
- Casual sex is psychologically harmful.
- Regular sex with e.g. a spouse is healthy.
I find that it (1) Builds a close emotional bond. Conflicts don't seem so important. (2) Emotionally stabilizes me and makes stress go away.
As well as a number of additional positive effects. The older I grow, the more I agree with conservative, traditional cultures about sex: One lifetime partner is ideal. A small number or zero is okay. A large number is bad.
I'll mention: I'm not drifting conservative overall. Some places, I'm to the left of the left, some to the right of the right, some off-axis, and some at the center.
A good book -- more mainstream than most of these comments -- is "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl. It has been listed as one of the ten most influential books in the US a few decades ago, although has fallen somewhat by the wayside in recent years. I believe the core thesis. It's worked well for me.
Leading a meaningful and purposeful life, having good relationships, helping people, doing interesting things, learning, and growing tends to be a more effective path to emotional well-being than searching for happiness.
To answer your question directly: My high-level goal is to leave the world a better place than I found it and to have a positive impact on the lives around me.
Or everybody should be left to live oblivious to some statistical facts, lest they be hurt?
Depends on what happens to the economy.
15% inflation for 10 years will make us all millionaires!
That's assuming wages keep up with inflation, which is something we're seeing very few signs of these days.
I don't think I can do it in 1 year. 5 years is perfectly possible.
We live in the golden age of computer science entrepreneurialism.
Venture capital has never been easier to get. The low hanging fruit is largely still unpicked. And, with full remote, hard working highly capable talent has never been easier to hire (hire Europeans, they're overeducated and underpaid).
IMO, not starting a business in the next 5 years would be remarkably foolish.
Just have to write a 35 page business plan, get it reviewed by capable people, have a good idea, and execute.
Last word in that sentence doing a lot.
Step 2: ?????????
Step 3: Profit!
iirc, graduates at Goldman and similar traditionally do/did a 20 page investment banking proposal every 2 days.
They're filtering, so whenever they don't have enough real work, research and write a business proposal for some IB deal or whatever line of work.
Essentially, they just research, write, then supervisor reviews, director reviews, nonstop.
That's investment banking. Write dozens of proposals, pitch a couple to actual companies the partner thinks are good ideas.
https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-pitch-...
https://www.10xebitda.com/investment-banking-presentations/
And it works. They're usually quite good ideas (after all those drafts).
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley funds ridiculous stupidity, because somehow technology startups just make that much money.
I have no idea how Silicon Valley VC firms make any sort of return on capital.
Then it wasn't on the merits of the business plan, but the idea, niche, timing, connections, delivery, and several other factors besides...
Millions can scrible some startup idea on a napkin. Getting a VC to take you seriously is another matter, even with a fully fleshed presentation, a prototype, and a well written and researched business plan.
Given that I'm not one to balk at writing 35 pages and an 8 digit bank account is relevant to my interests could you throw out a few of the low hanging fruit? I assume you won't be angry if I take one.
The state of the globe's capital markets for a range of non-equity financial products is appalling.
Forget cryptocurrency exchanges. The global financial tools available for bonds, futures, you name it, just about everything else is so appalling.
I think you've missed a lot of developments in the last year or so...
>Just have to write a 35 page business plan, get it reviewed by capable people, have a good idea, and execute.
Thousands of aspiring SV millionaires have done just that and their companies still got nowhere.
Not to mention this sounds like the business version of "how to draw an owl" meme.
Then if you can't impress people with your 35 page document, back to your day job.
Getting excited about a subpar startup idea seems like the biggest point of failure.
> I think you've missed a lot of developments in the last year or so...
Trend vs business cycle.
The long term trend is the world's accumulating vast stores of capital. And capital has to be deployed.
Once the current business cycle is over, the capital saturation will mean Silicon Valley VC idiocy will resume.
no we don't, not any more. the disruptors are now the ones to be disrupted, and they're trying awful hard to keep that from happening.
like, sure there are still new businesses starting, that's true in a lot of fields. but SVB imploding is a fantastic sign as to what is truly happening to startup culture.