In a way having money makes it harder because it makes it harder to blame your unhappiness on your circumstances.
As it is, I am acutely aware of my privileges as part of a household with two IT-based incomes and not too many worries, and that the world being what it is right now is giving rise to so many uncertainties that I wouldn't dream of abandoning this unless I had a really big bag of money like the author.
Pretty much everyone says this, but surprisingly few people actually seem to succeed at it when push-comes-to-shove
Ask a wage slave what he'd like to accomplish. Chances are the response will be something like "I'd start every day at the gym and work out for two hours until I was as buff as Brad Pitt. Then I'd practice the piano for three hours. I'd become fluent in Mandarin so that I could be prepared to understand the largest transformation of our time. I'd really learn how to handle a polo pony. I'd learn to fly a helicopter. I'd finish the screenplay that I've been writing and direct a production of it in HDTV."
Why hasn't he accomplished all of those things? "Because I'm chained to this desk 50 hours per week at this horrible [insurance|programming|government|administrative|whatever] job.
So he has no doubt that he would get all these things done if he didn't have to work? "Absolutely none. If I didn't have the job, I would be out there living the dream."
Suppose that the guy cashes in his investments and does retire. What do we find? He is waking up at 9:30 am, surfing the Web, sorting out the cable TV bill, watching DVDs, talking about going to the gym, eating Doritos, and maybe accomplishing one of his stated goals.
Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated.
I worry that I don't have enough of a life outside of work to make retirement fulfilling, and actually, I don't actually mind working if I'm completely honest. I just never liked the stress of needing a job.
Lack of desires is the first canary in the coal mine of a decrease in mood.
As much as it sounds empty those who are able to distinguish between a 500$ TV and a 5000$ one have a very fine tuned sense of desire which doesn't collapse at the tail end.
Once you get there, you have to face reality: while being poor leads to unhappiness, being financially independent does not lead to happiness either. Don't believe me? Look at billionaires out there; do all of them look like happy and well-adjusted people to you? Not naming names.
And that's why wealthy celebrities repeat again and again that "Money doesn't buy happiness". It's because they know from experience that it really doesn't help all that much.
Yeah, but it let's you suffer in relative comfort which is the most that anyone can realisically strive for.
If you have never met a person who is content with their life you may benefit from expanding your social circle. There are sincerely happy people out there.
That said, a lot of people who get rich, because status is their real motivation, are shocked by how horrible society still is. At first they get hooked on the drug of high social status, but then they learn to see through the flattery and realize that nothing has truly changed, and they’re just as miserable as before. It tends to take about two years, in my observation, for the “new life energy” to wear off. Money teaches you that there isn’t some “better” society to aspire to. The people “up there” aren’t the supervillains Redditers imagine billionaires to be, but they’re not better either.
My daughter is autistic and when she started to learn how to read social cues she realized that her so-called friends didn’t actually like her, which I suspected myself but never had the chutzpah to say, and it made her angry. Getting rich has a similar “learn what people are really about” curse.
I've been the young immigrant who arrived to a foreign country with the clothes on his back and whatever fits in a suitcase; occasionally splurging by buying used clothes at a thrift shop and buying a slice of cake at the supermarket once a month. If anything, I was probably happier then: healthy and hopeful for a better future. Now I'm in significantly worse health and rather jaded.
Thank you for sharing your own experience.
Sure, they are just people like you and me. Doesn't mean their mere existence isn't evidence of a major flaw in our implementation of capitalism. Our society is becoming far too stratified. Healthcare should be a right at this point in our society's development, it's a stain on our country that we still carry on with a system that works for nobody except health insurance CEOs.
A 'right' shouldn't depend on someone else's labor.
"it's a stain on our country that we still carry on with a system that works for nobody except health insurance CEOs"
I do agree that we need to get rid of the middleman. Replacing it with another one (the government) is a mistake and leads to the same inefficiencies.
Common procedures should be charge directly to the patient. These prices will be forced to go down as there will be actual competition. This won't work in cases where the surgery is rare, and insurance will work here. This will cut most of the bloat out of of health care and reduce the costs for everyone.
Lasik eye surgery is a good example of this. It's not covered by insurance. A decade ago, it was $10,000. My parents just got it a year ago and paid less than $1,000 out of pocket.
Greetings from europe where healthcare is free for everyone.
I had > 1m at one point. It was enough not to work. It wasn't enough to experiment with random things without risk. Couldn't buy a house in NYC,SF,LA,Seattle. Would just have to go back to work. Couldn't start a business for a project that required 10-20 people. Couldn't really start co-working space for 20-40 people at current rent prices without feeling like I'd probably just be throwing away a few hundred k.
What I could do is travel. Could also live anywhere for a few years.
OTOH, if I had F.U. money, I would do those things and more. I might hire people to do them. There are 5 to 10 apps I'd like to see exist. Would be happy to pay some people to make them and make them open source, if I had FU money. Would love to start a tech-interactive-art museum the size of at least most major museums in big cities. Would consider funding startups.
I have one friend, x-coworker, that picked a different path than me and made lots of $$$ (no idea how much). But, they invest in startups. Goal is to invest $1 million a year. They visit startups and pitch events once or twice a month. They also have a personal project. Otherwise they travel with their S.O. and visit their adult kids around the world.
Sure, there's no lack of things that one can do with money. But would you be substantially happier? That's the issue at hand. Do you look at people with exorbitant wealth and see unlimited happiness? Do they appear to be in a permanent state of contentment and satisfaction?
Win the lottery or sell a company? Invest most of it, and allow yourself a "raise" you can permanently sustain every year.
It will do far more for you than raising your expenditure once, as you get used to it and return to near your baseline happiness very quickly.
> Would love to start a tech-interactive-art museum
I get what you mean, but having enough not to work is the definition of FU money. It means you can just drop your things and leave when the boss demands you something you're not willing to do.
If you want to tie it to a single scenario I'd say it's taken on a meaning more like 'I'll do what I want to you/your business/parking because I don't care about paying to sort it out if I'm sued'. Parking where I 'can't' & paying the 100x fine seems better to me than finding where I 'can' and paying the 1x ticket sort of thing. Not to say everyone's morals would have them act like that, but illustratively.
I am sure it can be different for everyone, people see the World differently.
You are still you, your problems are still there, you are still bound to a slowly decaying body, there's no GAME OVER banner and credit roll proving that you have won the game of life. Because you haven't. Hah.
You can of course keep yourself entertained with all sorts of stupid stuff that doesn't actually matter. Or you can accept that there are still only a handful of things that bring people contentment, and you don't need to be financially independent to do any of them. I'm talking about bland obvious stuff like spending some time with loved ones (including pets and plants), going out for a walk in the park, etc. Unsurprisingly, a ton of retirees do just that. It's not because they are old and can't do anything else, it's because they have finally figured out what works.
And it's not like doing five times as much of that stuff is going to make you five times happier, either. Anybody with a full time job can carve out some quality time instead of arguing with strangers online.
If you have a 9 to 5 then you're waking up at sunrise and going to bed some time after sunset. You're probably commuting, getting out in the world, chatting to people even if it's just the colleagues, Starbucks drive through, supermarket checkout clerk, that sort of thing.
If you have retirement level money and you're alone there is absolutely nothing stopping you from waking up at 2pm, sitting on your computer playing World of Warcraft ordering takeaways, not going out for a walk or seeing the sunlight, getting slightly more depressed each day in a spiral.
There's also nothing stopping you from going out drinking every day or every other of the week, shrugging off the hangover then hitting the next one. And so on and so forth.
People easily underestimate how much their sense of well-being is related to simple things like just going for a walk in the sunshine every now and then or eating properly.
I find that having a daily schedule and trying to stick to it helps. Also, going for small quality of life improvements, trying things out to see what works and what doesn't, such as a different pillow, or replacing some foods with alternatives.
Having free time forces you to deal with all the emotional baggage you have accumulated over the years and it's a bit much, too. I was obsessed with saving money so that my family wouldn't struggle if I became unable to work; as a result, I didn't process the reasons why I had that fear in the first place. My dad became severely disabled when I was in college and it was a very traumatic experience for my family.
The irony of the situation is that by the time I earn the money my kids will grow up, leaving me a sad lonely man.
For example, even between my two children I noticed that with the second one I've had sleeping issues, while with the first one I couldn't understand what "sleepless nights" everyone talks about. Like, a newborn kid at night sleeps 50 minutes out of every hour and so did I at the age of 25, being fresh and well rested in the morning. Didn't work as well at the age 31. Can't really imagine what it must feel after 40. And in general I would prefer healthy sleep over money and time.
> I think it's better than lack of energy and stamina. At least that's what I extrapolate from my experience so far
I had children late --essentially retired when my second was born at 40-- and I completely agree: it would have been better to have the last kid before we turned 35. You made the right choice!
If it is sleep I guess one potential way for me to deal with it is that my partner goes to sleep earlier, e.g. 9pm and I go around 4am or later, which is what we kind of already do anyway since I am such a night owl. We also sleep in separate rooms, so we could potentially have both deal with the baby at different times. Not sure if anyone has done anything like that?
Still I feel like there's a huge difference between having to work vs having knowledge that you have enough that you can sustain a healthy and comfortable lifestyle without having to work, and therefore can opt to choose exactly what you want to work on rather than what might pay the most.
It may be the case that once I reach complete and comfortable financial independence it will not be all I expected it to be, but right now I don't see myself not appreciating the hell out of it, however I am sure plenty of people have thought they would be happy when reaching X goal and they either weren't or it was fleeting. I do have to say that so far I have come a long way from where I used to be from what I consider a hopeless position.
But there is a difference in my view whether you can walk in the park knowing that you don't have any potentially stressful responsibilities and problems coming up or you are walking in the park and excited about working on a hobby project of yours since you can 100 percent focus on that.
I never understood that kind of argument. Your kids will have decaying bodies just the same. You're only recreating what you're trying to escape, in somebody else.
That might mean you cannot travel the same way in retirement that you did in your 20's. That doesn't mean you still can't enjoy it, just that you need to take things slower and be gentler with your body.
And I say this as somebody who really did not want the responsibility of raising children.
Wait, you don't?
Do you have less than 24 hours a day to do things?
Being unhappy because you are homeless is not the same being unhappy because some woman doesn't treat you like she would do a man who looks better than you are just two different things.
Zen monks have attained this understanding without the need to make the money first however.
It reads to me as being critical of the assumption that being rich makes you happy.
This is reflected by many people who became rich and self destructive.
Money removes unhappiness and raises you to a baseline, but after that it doesn't provide extra happiness in and of it self.