I will never undertand this people that live all their life working, when they clearly have the chance to retire much sooner.
I will retire right away if I had 10 millions. Maybe 50 millions if I was younger than 40.
I will retire right away if I had 10 millions. Maybe 50 millions if I was younger than 40.
And, anyways, I think you say this now, but if you were to get those 10 millions you would probably change your tune. A lot of people would find some other project to dedicate their energy. Especially the kind of people that make stuff happen.
That doesn't sound very positive to me. Perhaps OP has a point
but I could get a home near a major airport like 10 mins from SFO, and so with working out and eating consuming 4 hours and sleeping 6 hours a day and 2 hour of spouse time. I legit have 12 hours a day to work everyday. I could easily do that in a sustainable manner 6 days a week, and spending Sunday relaxing by helping out in my parent's farm and then relaxing in the evening before going back to work next week.
Seems like an ideal life for me. The only difference from today is the extra 3 hours I spend in traffic and an average 1 hour daily in running errands. And extra work on Saturday like fetching groceries, looking after my home, fixing stuff etc.
If I get money, I could save that 4 hour of my life and dedicate it to working on something I really like.
You need a lot less than 40m$ to get a house 10 minutes from SFO, Daly City or outer neighborhoods in SF have homes for less than a million for sale right now
Don’t apply the morality of a worker to a top capitalist
I’d wager you can say this about most jobs. The anomaly is butt-in-seats office jobs.
The work/retirement dichotomy is such a weird and peculiar artifact of the 1950s US middle-class nuclear-family milieu.
That's gone.
For the rest of us, it's just...live your life, until you don't.
(viz. Below the fold: "Buffett remains as chair...")
He worked for 60 years because he liked doing it, and as he became more successful, the job just getting more pleasant for him.
I cannot speak for him but from reading his annual reports and various writings and listening to the occasional interview, it seems that he enjoyed working much more than anything he would do while being retired.
You can call this great american work ethic, and that is part of it, but the other part of it is that when you are the boss you can kind of remove most unpleasant parts of your job and leave only the parts that are the most fun and interesting for you.
So likely at least 8x your pre-tax salary (like 11 or 12x post tax) is gone right off the bat as soon as you retire. So if you are retiring before age 40 basically all of your wealth will vaporize as soon as the mother of your children realizes they can basically take the entire wealth through a mixture of divorce, child support, and alimony and they must act fast before the imputed income calculation drops.
It's not hard for me to understand why people keep working even if I'm not and don't want to be that way. There are so many reasons, I'll list a few, some work just as well even for people who are working despite having "enough", whatever that means. Some people just really like having a job, or think of it as a moral duty (and themselves as doing good by fulfilling that obligation), or some get their self-worth from having a job, or some like being occupied by work when they know that without it they'd just rot. Some like the social company. Many actually like their work a lot more than they dislike it and pay above some threshold is just "nice". If you're particularly good at your job, too, there's a lot of joy in doing things you're good at, no matter what kind of job it is. Some have expensive tastes or have made expensive compromises or have fallen on expensive bad luck that all can need ongoing funding. Some want to make or support things and need capital to do so. Some just see life as a game, and money going up is their source of happiness and sign of winning. There's all sorts of minds and preferences in this world.
Being in charge of Berkshire hathaway is a very powerful and respected, revered, envied, coveted, admired. Retired is just retired. As folksy as he presented I suspect Buffet very much enjoyed weilding that power which he could not likely ever get elsewhere.
You could argue he was retired and just continuing his hobby.
I my employer didn't pay me, I'd stop working on their projects. But in the meantime, I enjoy my profession (at least most of the time) and get paid. If I had enough money then I'd stop working on what my management wants and work on stuff that I want to work on. And I have to imagine that at this point, Buffet is also doing whatever he wants to.
I can design and build anything. If I didn't have to do it for work, I'd be making my own evil projects.
You can't take the country out of this boy it turns out...
To some people, their careers are interesting in and of itself, beyond money.
This applies to many professions: scientists, CEOs, writers, painters.
Not my cup of tea (and Die with Zero book explains the common sense on this) but I get why though. There is tons of status attached to it, lots of people don’t know what to do with themselves, a lot of identity ( especially in US) attached to the work.
Some people just love what they do. In addition to people loving what they do, there are also people who don't like to do nothing: travelling, reading, sipping pina coladas in the pool in Florida, painting, playing videogames all day long etc. is not for everyone.
And there are even people who fit both: they love what they do and they have moreover absolutely no interest in retiring and "doing nothing".
EDIT: also some people are action junkies that must be working. A friend of mine is working a full-time regular job and is also a voluntary firefighter, responding to emergencies during week-ends etc. He doesn't do it for the little additional money it brings: he does it because he loves to be helpful.
We all have pleasure and suffering along the same couple of orders of magnitude.
In geological timespans, none of the fun you had will matter. Even a year from now, your memories are just wistful nostalgia (perhaps a psychological detriment!) And that's if your brain architecture is even set up to recall senses and events well (not everyone can).
My view is that the intellectual pursuit is more fulfilling than a world simulating traversal of novel experiences. Those neurons will turn to dust soon anyway, and it'll be like it never even happened. Why spend so much time fretting over it?
Spend time with family, but trying to rack up on restaurants and things and places and visits - meh, it's just simulation and squirts of neurotransmitters. Ephemeral. They leave no trace. It all fades to emptiness.
I'm not saying be completely stoic. But don't overdose on pleasure and thrill and novelty. Over indexing that way cuts down on impact.
Building never stops, even when you do. Laying a foundation shapes human behavior at scale. Leads to more shoulders being stood upon. Higher order effects.
Every single person I admire made an impact.
I'm not my genes that I was built from or the genes that I might pass down. I'm the ideas and deeds of a short life that hopefully left lasting impact and caused second order effects.
Build what? The next big ad serving platform? The next mass surveillance platform? New ways to squeeze money out of people? You’re right we all die so nothing matters, why would what you build matter more than the relationships you make, the good feelings you create? Build, but build art. Build something that will change peoples minds, make them feel good, make them want to change the world.
Do not conflate building something to make some guy richer, as just as or more important than spending time with family or creating true art.
I personally realized that I got bored of solo sized projects. It’s a lot more fun working with other really smart, motivated people.
— Voltaire
I like travel, I like relaxing at home. But I don't know if it's what I'd want to do all the time. I like having some pull, driving me towards a greater goal.
- you enjoy it AND
- you do not have a "boss" telling you what to do AND
- it makes you more "popular" because the World you live in associate a higher number with your "value" in society
Why would you even stop? It's not about having enough to survive.
It was that quest for more that made them even get to that 10 or 50 million you talk about.
If they didn't have that personality for more, they likely would have stopped way sooner.
For folks with the ability to make truckloads of money and then give it away to good causes, that is going to be the best choice v trying to add value in the world to make themselves feel better.
> For folks with the ability to make truckloads of money
Make it? Like actually invent and build stuff? Or just harvest money from others because you have the capital?
As for "harvesting" - call it what you want - he is taking a truckload of money out of the financial system and giving it to worthy causes.
Imagine if I said "there are so many more worthwhile things to do than painting" if some famous artist retired.