Hacker News Reader

Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

Billions in currency won't give you one single second of life more.

You gotta read that out loud to yourself a couple of times.

Just affording a safer car, or not having health hazards in your house or workplace, buys you "seconds of life" on average.

Working 70 hours a week is a health hazard in itself.

But that's a separate issue from having billions. You can work 70 hours a week and still have troubles with money (like me, but it's my own fault, most of my friends envy the amount I earn, but I spend it all on maintaining home and mortgage, but maybe this year I will replace that 8yr old laptop). Or you can have billions from working two years and then just resting the rest of your life.

If you hate your job. If you love it, it's play time.

yes, but you don't need 'billions' to have a safe car, or not working in a factory with dangerous equipment and/or environmental hazards.

Sure it can, that's why healthcare is so profitable.

Probably somewhere in millions to tens of millions is upper limit of diminishing returns, unless you believe quack/unproven/illegal science and are willing to have children blood transfusions.

I think personally, at ~$2.5-$3M and at least 1 paid off house, the diminishing returns really start to kick in.

At $5M level you are pretty much all set, and at $10M and up - unless you are a consumption freak, you are really talking about generational wealth - i.e. money that will likely get passed down to your kids unless you try to find ridiculous ways to spend it.

This all assumes your goal in life isn't keeping up with the Jones's - if you fall into that trap, no amount of money will ever be enough.

I find it funny at times to think about if Larry Ellison is jealous of Zuckerberg's money, and Zuckerberg is jealous of Bezo's money, and Bezo's is jealous of Musk's money and Musk possibly being jealous of Bernard Arnault's.

If that is your personality - then you will never be happy.

I'm talking purely about healthcare. I doubt there are real therapies costing beyond "millions", outside of experimental cost.

Not sure what the rest of those points have to do with healthcare.

Above a certain level of wealth, the game is no longer about wealth. It's about power.

You're already dead in geologic time.

By the same coin that wealth doesn't persist after death, neither can one iota of pleasure or experience be taken to the grave. Your brain will rot and everything becomes dust.

This rationale is equivalent to yours.

“Born to die” :)

There is only now.

You are the eternal now.

Be here now.

You can sometimes free up time by spending money. You don't need billions. At the same time, it's hard to pay someone to do work for you if you're barely scraping by.

But the point of the article, is that they are making this money, and probably not billions, by giving up their time. So _any_ time that they can free by spending money is needed, since they spent so much of their time working.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com