Riding through empty valleys at sunset with a herd of deer pacing alongisde me was enough to break me into tears. It's what I needed to move on.
Also since it was written when the vestiages of european feudal system still had some tiny amount of power, some of the observations about lords who owned massive estates but had no money and would refuse to take on any work, considering it "beneath them" while they starved was fascinating. It's both of it's time and timeless
But yes!
I'm also friends with people who became very rich. In their own ways, they all continue working hard.
> They value their leisure and live a good life.
There's an inherent contradiction here unless you believe you can live a 'good life' (which I would expect to be free from excessive discomfort?) while also living 'not comfortably by any stretch'.
You also have to consider what 'safely' means here. Sure, it means walls and a door so that you don't freeze to death or get eaten by dingoes or (insert local hazard here), but beyond the immediate, it also means having resources to obtain medical aid if required, ensure food supply and other necessities even in the face of unforeseen circumstances, etc.
It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.
On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.
Yes, wrt safety it's hazy. Eastern Europe, so it's reasonably safe, and also we don't take safety as seriously as the Westerners. Our medical aid is all right. They have enough money to eat, but you'd be surprised how cheap and basic a diet can be.
> It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.
Oh. It's possible to suffer even with infinite resources. Things can go horribly wrong. Health problems. Death. Other kinds of trauma.
> On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.
Yes, though some are learning and have improved a lot :)
and if you were a millionaire, I bet you could hook that up. Chicks dig dudes with money.
It's 4 years later, and I'm still searching...
The second time around, you may discover that finding success, getting rich, etc., wasn't actually the reason you were doing it.
My issue is product market fit. I've been building different ideas for the past few years, but traction has eluded me.
- AI Agent Generator: Created no-code platform for customizable AI agents with a MidJourney & RAG/VectorDB document and crawled website integration.
- AI-Enabled Town: Crawled all of my tourist town's destinations, retail stores and their products and then tied them into a React Shopify sales channel. Built an agent to interact with and it links to products and locations as it chats.
- Job-Matching Browser Extension: Developed Chrome/Firefox extension to analyze job fit and generate multilingual resumes/cover letters in 26 languages.
- Job-Searching Agent: Developed MacOS and Winows Electron app to perform a number of searches on popular job website and stream a list of jobs and a % of how the user matches up, so they can focus their time applying instead of sifting through job descriptions.
Ultimately, because competition eventually grew like crazy, I don't think the market timing is worthy of trying to rebuild it at this point. Maybe some analog for AI instead of e-commerce.
Oddly, after looking at your profile, it looks like I've been building the last few years in the same space as you. But product market fit has been elusive.