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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

I made a significant amount of money at once. It ended up destroying a few long term friendships. In hindsight, maybe that was my fault. But human nature is a funny thing, and rapid changes in social status will reap havoc on social equilibriums built over decades

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It happened to me at much lower $. I grew up poor, all my friends are solidly blue collar middle class. I live in one of the nicer areas in my city, one tier down from the where the people live whose name you would know.

When you're poor, getting some extra $ means maybe you boost your 401k or something. But once you are doing the max, or maybe you make so much you can't legally put money in 401k, it's very confusing. My lifestyle didn't even change but I asked one of my friends for advice, if they had any family or something who had some money and I immediately lost that friend.

Well, it's probably hard to not let sufficiently large differences in wealth not affect the type of activities you want to do and some attitudes. Sure, you might still like to cook a lot of your own meals and go on cheap roadtrips. But absent money as a real consideration you're very possibly also going to want to do things that a person with a lot less money just can't reasonably afford--and while you can pick up a night out here and there it's not something that it's going to be comfortable to do all the time in general.

Not sure if that was a one-time mistake, but "wreak havoc" is typically how that phrase is written.

How might you do things different, if you were to have a second chance at that experience?

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