Comment by j4coh
2 months ago
Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything. What I’ve found is that you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation (assuming you spent a lot of your life and energy to this point focused on these, much like I did) with something else totally unconnected with being measured in that way. For me, I am focused on proving myself as a guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene. These people have no idea how much money I have and wouldn’t give a shit if they did (I didn’t really change my lifestyle after getting lucky so it’s not obvious). So it’s an area I can be creative, grow, and still feel like I’m doing something. At the same time I’m doing part time consulting, mainly for people I worked with in the past who have started companies, just to scratch the tech itch. So far so good but I can’t say yet if it will stick. Maybe for you it’s art, music, going and getting another unrelated degree, or something along those lines? If you have more money than you know what to do with, fundraising and supporting good causes can be really rewarding. Both in terms of giving back something to your local community, and having really nice social elements to it.
One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been. Everyone starts wanting to pitch you their investment idea and it can burn down friendships when their ideas are bad. Being a VC to your friends is a path to sadness for everyone.
> One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been.
The time to do that was _before_ writing a blog post titled "I am rich" and submitting it to HN
They already know who he is, he was a public figure executive that sold his company, everyone in his social circle would know what Loom was and would read in the news how much it sold for.
Well, you can make new friends. I have no idea what actual name is behind vinay.sh :?
The domain name is consistent with the name of one of the founders of the mentioned startup, Loom.
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The about page links to his Twitter which shows the full name.
Funnily enough, the link is to a tweet describing how he wired all his money to his parents.
>Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything.
Mainly though if all the purpose-giving focus was on just getting money and the related grinding to begin with.
Getting mega-rich didn't take the purpose out of Steve Jobs, for example, which was focused on building stuff with some specific twist (his idea of good design). Or Steve Wozniak for that matter, he found hobbies aplenty. Or take the Rolling Stones. Filthy rich, but did they ever give the impression they got bored? Or Dylan, equally rich, which doesn't even have the extravagant lifestyle of models and exotic vacations and high life the Stones had, but is still content to record, jam, play concerts etc. into his 80s.
If the person has other interests, from programming to mountaineering, and from politics to art, they can still be there with or without money. Like the "guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene" thing.
Paul Allen comes to mind. makes a hobby buying the most expensive artifacts known, as well as a bunch of other stuff like starting a band.
Balmer (and Cuban) seem to love continuing to do other, big stuff.
> but did they ever give the impression they got bored
It often gets described as washed up rather than bored, but yes.
Dylan is a good contrast.
Been on a Dylan concert a few months ago, and I really wondered why he did this to himself, at his age, with his money. He seemed so utterly bored.
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This is my dream. Having enough money to be able to dedicate to things I like, trying to be good at something without worrying about money, or time, or being tired after work.
Open a bookshop, being a rare book dealer, open a small museum about an author, research on a particular topic and write books...
That would be the ultimate dream, though I am sure I won't ever be near to fulfill it.
God, we use to have a street full of people running unprofitable stores. Some were deep in debt making the dream a reality.
Why not a functional bookshop? You don't need money, you need to work on the plan(s). How do museums work? Where is the crude draft for the book?
I had a chat with a guy once who had a laundry list of things he wanted to accomplish but had convinced himself non of it was possible without money. About 1/3 of the list were things one could just go do right now.I think a hundred life times worth of stuff It was mostly helping people in need. One could definitely not help anyone and convince the self it is because it always costs money????
Some non profit here was selling unwanted books for 1-2 euro. I spend an hour or so typing titles on my phone mostly stuff published long ago and bought a whole stack of 200+ euro books. I haven't looked at them and didn't try to sell any but I'm sure it was money well spend for an hour of fun.
You don't need a machine gun, fight with your bare hands.
I used to have an online bookshop, mainly for fun and as a side income.
It takes a lot of time and it's very hard if you have a full time job.
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That sounds great.
Many people overly focus on what they want to retire FROM - work, but not what they want to retire TO - hobbies/volunteer work/etc.
Basic eating healthier, exercising more and consumption-based things like travel are not going to fill the gap left by a full-time job. One can quickly get bored and/or run out of money with that kind of mindset.
Given enough money, or whenever I do retire .. I'd spend my time making music, photographs, do even more reading, etc. Anything that occupies your time and exercises both your body & mind are important.
I once saw an article about apartments that NYC libraries used to have in the library for caretakers. My skipped a beat and I realized I'd never wanted anything more in the world than to just be able to 'pop down to the stacks' at 10pm to select my next read.
What amazes me is that between audible, kindle, libby, and a few other places, we live in a world where books are that available from the comfort of a cozy recliner. Truly the greatest wonder of the modern age.
As I recall from a similar article, some of those apartments still exist, and are no longer limited to librarians but may still allow access to the library. If living in NYC is an option for you, it's probably worth getting on their announcement list and be ready to move if they have an opening?
Problem then when you get bored, your bookstore still requires work.
At a certain level of wealth, any job you can do can be done by someone else better and cheaper
After you have the bookstore up and running, you could hire a few people to take care of daily operations. It would still be your bookshop, and you could drop by every now and then and just hang out in the store read some of the books, or you could even whenever you felt like getting more involved on some days tell your staff that they can take the day off if they like and they will still get their pay for the day and you’ll handle the customers and the register. I dunno, this is just how I imagine it could work. I’m not rich, and I don’t own any bookstore or any other kind of shop for that matter so maybe my idea here is off the mark.
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It does? What happens if you don’t show up for a month? Or just keep it open once a week? As long as you remember to clear out the fridge every now and then, you should be fine :)
Why would you think any of those things are not a lot of tiring work, emotional drain and expensive? I don't understand why you can't do any of these as a hobby now, and need to wait until you're "rich" and won't have any real skin in the game.
> > Having enough money to be able to dedicate to things I like
Money doesn't buy time, whatever you like you'd be better off starting now then at some point in the future when you think you have enough money because you make the fallacious equation "enough money = enough time" but that is wrong because mental and physical acuity diminishes with time so a minute in your 20s is worth more than a minute in your 30s and much more than a minute in your 60s etc...also odds of mental/physical illnesses increase, life gets in the way in modalities that you don't expect yet, inflation, collapse of society...in one word entropy.
Money cannot beat entropy or slow it down
Running a bookshop is entirely possible without FU money, but it will be hard work and probably not make you much money. Read Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop for inspiration :)
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c9fb361a-30ef-45d5-b777-...
People need work to be happy. That doesn't have to be, say, office work necessarily: it can be making music full time, or volunteering at a hospital, or any number of other things.
But you have to have something keeping you busy that makes you feel like you have a purpose.
You’re on the right track, but I think it’s a bit deeper than just needing something to work on or stay busy with. I effectively retired a few years ago and have spent the time since engaging in various “work” across the kinds of categories you mention. Yet, all of these efforts have carried a sense of purposelessness—a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.
This contrasts sharply with the purpose I felt when I had less money and was struggling to build my business. Back then, everything felt deeply do-or-die meaningful. Now, no amount of exercise, goodwill, or intellectual pursuits compares in terms of providing that same sense of purpose.
I don’t think humans need the pursuit of money itself to be happy, but once the foundational needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are met, the higher levels often feel less urgent—and, paradoxically, less fulfilling. There seems to be diminishing returns from “work” as a source of purpose.
As someone who kind of quasi temporarily retired early a few times this is the biggest problem I see. I learned foreign languages and programming languages out of pure necessity to survive and it was thrilling to succeed and make money with them.
So everyone (at least me) has this fantasy of how much better it would be to learn things on their own schedule for pleasure without undue pressure, but they don’t realize the pressure to survive was what made it feel so meaningful without that they soon fall into dilletantism.
For all his issues I think this is why Musk has gotten so much done, because he ups the ante enough to feel real risk if be fails.
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Our species, like all living things, has optimised towards struggling through life to the best of their ability (which was always limited). To "win" within the already apex species of humanity means you are hitting your head on the ceiling of what your body and brain was made for, hard.
This is why I stopped striving for success on that scale and returned to only work a small software job.
> a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.
A suggestion for your consideration, or that of anyone in a similar position: give enough of the money away that this stops being true, and find fulfilling paid work (not necessarily in that order). I strongly suspect, from my own experience, that there's an amount of savings that you can keep that is adequate to remove any worry about winding up on the streets (or being stuck with work that actually turns out to suck, etc), without making further earning feel pointless to your own comfort. I think there's an ethical case for doing this even if it made you less happy, but even better if it's win-win.
Totally agree. But it can be surprisingly hard to find what this is for yourself when you are used to climbing the school / corporate / startup ladder your whole life.
Anyone who has "more money than they know what to do with" is a fool. There is an unlimited set of things to do with large resource allocation. Depending on the magnitude of that resource allocation, the set increases exponentially.
It shows a total lack of introspection as well as connections with the people, the Earth, and the universe as a whole.
Go eat some psychedelics and travel inside yourself for a while. Listen to what a tree far in a forest has to say. You'll know what to do with your dragon hoard in no time, I guarantee it.
It's true that there are infinite ways to waste a fortune, but that doesn't mean you're a fool for not having decided how to spend your money. I'd actually argue that it'd be more foolish to go figure out what to spend it on "in no time"
Yes, it is foolish to hoard allocation aimlessly. Anyone who amasses resources without a vision or for the sake of amassing it is a fool.
There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others." To take on that responsibility then do nothing with it, and actually publicize you don't know what to do with it, is disgraceful. As long as there is suffering, there is more work to be done.
Move aside and let people who know what to do take over.
In the past, when people didn't know what to do with resources, the people would very loudly & painfully clawback the misallocated hoards and make better use of them. Recently, a CEO that didn't know what to do with resources & took active part in misusing them returned his misallocation to others.
This kind of misallocation is a universal crime. A life is nothing compared to the magnitude of this crime. Ideas of "ownership" and "it's my money" are irrelevant. The crime stands, and the justice of balance for this crime always comes, one way or another.
Escaping the responsibility of this duty, and the negligence of misusing funds, is easy; sell everything you own and reallocate resources to others who are better able to manage them.
Revolution is the "final" reaction to misallocated funds. It is when a mass of misaligned, foolish resource allocators who collectively lost their way and lack all vision to allocate, hoard most wealth. This misallocation chokes out the society they've hoarded from, like a blood clot, and leads to a death of the society if not addressed.
I would be very scared right now to be part of the group of people who have hoarded resources and mismanaged them, because this planet is on the cusp of a clawback.
Alternatively, if visionary resource allocators are allowed to operate, it brings wealth to everyone. It raises the standards of existence, brings about lasting peace, and makes for a prosperous existence. These visionary allocators are most definitely not in operation in these times, and it shows.
I will dream of a day when this changes. I hope that this change occurs peacefully, and with minimal suffering, even to those who has caused incomprehensible suffering due to their greed.
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That last point is salient. I grew very rich in the last 3 - 4 years and I funded a bunch of my friend's startup ideas. Now I cannot bear myself to reply to their happy new year wishes because how the relationships have soured.
If you're never getting that money back, you might as well forgive them and forget it. Then at least you'd keep the friends.
It's never even about forgiving. I am not even angry at them. What happens is there is now suddenly a pedestal. No matter what we do, they know I gave them money. And I know they took it. The relationships don't remain the same anymore. It's weird.
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I think this is the best advice. If you are going to fund a friend, give them a grant, no strings attached. They can return the favour if/when they have the means on their terms. Anything else is going to kill your friendship.
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I had a friend who I lent money to his startup during Covid. He promised would be paid back within a year. Multiple hard conversations and it’s 4 years later and not one cent has been paid back to me. We currently don’t speak to each other. He’s delusional with his startup ideas, lives in lala fantasy land. Refuses to get a job and take any responsibility. He has zero track record of success, so it’s somewhat my fault for loaning him money.
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Are any of your friends the type that is blunt/honest regardless of how things are going?
Personally I've found the problematic ones to be those who feel like they're obliged to act deferrentially once money is involved.
The blunt/honest ones that don't change their personality like that still seem ok.
> I’m doing part time consulting, mainly for people I worked with in the past who have started companies, just to scratch the tech itch
How do you pick you hourly rate? If a friend of yours of the past came to you and asked you to consult for him, and your friend offered you say $80 USD per hour, would you find it offensively low? For someone who doesn’t have a lot and wants to hire consultants for their small projects, I think offering $80 USD per hour is not bad. But I’m curious to know how that amount feels to a potential consultant if the consultant already had a lot. Or do you prefer taking a percentage of shares in your friend’s company as pay? Or something else?
I am happy to take whatever they offer (including helping for free) depending on where they are at. I don’t need it really and I’m happy to help. But most people at least that I’ve worked with are happy to do what’s fair. I haven’t ended up in a hostile negotiation or anything close to it.
FWIW I’ve done similar for friends who are on a tight budget , consulting for 1/2, 1/3 1/5 “regular” rate. Sometimes with equity but not always.
I’m nowhere near rich, but when I was consulting full time of I had enough hours to hit my “ok” target for the year, it felt right to be flexible with some of the rest of my time …
> How do you pick you hourly rate?
A fair formula that i was given years ago is;
Take the annual salary you would be paid if you were an employee, add 30% to it for overhead/profit and divide by 48 (working weeks in a year) to get your weekly rate. Divide by 40hrs to get the hourly rate.
Another one is to take your annual salary, divide by 250 (working days in a year) to get your daily rate and increase that by 30%, billing in daily units.
The above formula can and should be tweaked based on the project, client, your needs etc.
The tricky thing about formulas like this is that it is very domain dependent.
What you describe is a reasonable approach for a freelancer who expects to bill most working hours. It falls apart for a lot of consulting scenarios where you bill fewer hours and spend more time generating work. In that case you may be better off setting rates so that e.g. 1000 billed hours will reach your base target salary equivalent...
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If you are already “FIRE” and do it for fun, or you can schedule all 40h per week on billable work this works but I would increase by 50%.
If you need to do marketing to get clients, meet clients, etc to close contracts then I guess you should expect only about 20h per week of billable work as the rest is on you. So you need to at least double the hourly rate.
> One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been.
Having lived through this arc myself, this is excellent advice. While the most enlightened/mature people have no problem just being happy for you, this still leaves a lot people for who a significant disparity in wealth/success becomes a problem. It ends up impacting the nature of your relationship with them in subtle but significant ways and it can be very hard to get past. I've found it's just better to avoid the issue by being as stealth as possible about wealth (while still being honest and true to yourself).
Or, stop being friends with those people?
I'm good friends with some very rich people. Everyone knows they have money. They learned how to say no, and how to let go of people who just want to milk them for cash.
Or alternatively it can be the start of a feud/rivalry with the "envious" , and I mean not at the political level but at the human to human level.
Might seem counterproductive or even "toxic" but it's sure better than the nihlism that the author is expressing.
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> For me, I am focused on proving myself as a guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene.
So you’re Dickey from The Talented Mr. Ripely?
Music has been a huge discovery and joy for me too.
I left the tech world seven years ago after a "career" of five years, not super wealthy but having enough saved/invested that I could live frugally and it would grow slowly on its own. I've been doing a wide variety of things mostly outdoors, but these last three years I've been learning to play the fiddle and it's took over my life in a good way.
It's been a rich seven years and aside from occasional brief moments of doubt, I'm very glad I did what I did. I have had time to focus on:
- health (most awesomely, my eyesight has improved dramatically)
- family and community and relationships
- simply being in the real world (nature)
- learning about and changing my behaviors/habits to be more who I want to be
- passions - particularly trying to protect habitats from being destroyed, which is very rewarding even if they might still get destroyed someday, they've gotten to exist for years longer than they would have.
- each thing that's caught my curiosity: gardening, forest conservation, foraging and cooking, building and carpentry, learning various skills and now most of all, the fiddle.
I won't say it's all been easy. I've wrestled with a lot of questioning of what matters and what to give myself to - because I have the choice and there is no obvious default path anymore. But I always feel my way into an answer - even if it has shifted around over time.
I don't have kids, I want to, and I think about how I'll find someone to do that with. I bet it will happen, I live in a rural area though so I pretty much have to travel to meet someone. Meanwhile, I have a sweet nephew and I get to spend a lot of time actively being his uncle.
The world is far more interesting and wild and beautiful than I think most of us have been led to believe.
Do you have children? If not, it's a great use of time, especially without financial pressure
Children are giver of immense sense of satisfaction that’s totally disconnected to wealth (though being wealthy certainly helps). Just remember - no short cuts.
I'm fairly certain children are a much greater giver of satisfaction without wealth, because when you have money you suddenly feel like you need to provide them all the best, whereas if you have none, you only feel like you need to keep them alive.
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Children are the best. The highs in life are orders of magnitude higher, and the lows are _so_ much lower. But the baseline is incalculably higher. My children have made me feel so much more fulfilled. And they have also made me better.
> though being wealthy certainly helps
I think it is worse actually.
I do, and I love being available for them. I have time to teach my kids music and things I know, which is awesome.
love to hear it! In that case, branching out to other peoples' children can bring great satisfaction. For example, volunteering to teach a class at a local high school
There's something off about the post that I'm not sure I can pin point, but it's there.
What are these oft referenced insecurities? It's hard to get a read on this without details, but dumping your girlfriend to do random selfish shit (climb mountain, go to Hawaii, etc.) - it's not a surprise he's unfulfilled (though working on doge would be exciting).
This trap of 'working on yourself' that leads to endless mindfulness and narcissism leads you to become aloof. People tend to derive purpose from community, friends, and family. This is what religion used to give people independent of the pseudoscience.
Being financially independent is great, but it doesn't bring fulfillment.
A long way to say spend time with friends, work on a relationship, get married, have kids. People can do what they want, but most people will likely be the most content doing this. If you can find something to work on you're also excited about great, can do that too.
You can only dick around traveling and 'finding yourself' for so long, it gets old and repetitive.
How long have you travelled the world?
Not the OP, but after a certain age (mid 30s in my case) traveling just becomes cumbersome, i.e. when you realize that there are no big insights about oneself that can be gained via traveling that can’t also be gotten back at home, surrounded by friends/family and a couple of good books.
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> you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation
Kind of ironic, but that kind of sounds like the people who've been saying those things aren't the most important in life might have been right all along?
To access the others, you need to have good money/salary/financial success, oftentimes.
Heck even for good therapy, you need to have those.
"Therapy" seems like mostly an American thing, so not sure how really universal the need for it is. For Americans though, sure.
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One thing you could do is give me 20k no strings attached so I can stop paying for my parents screw ups from when I was 20 :)) that will make me a lot less resentful towards life's stupid dice.
Isn't it basically separating your identity from your work and finding meaning in different parts of life (relationships, interests)?
> I am focused on proving myself as a guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene
That sounds awesome - tell us more.
Seems weird that you have to advice people that they should hide their success from people they're befriending.
Living a double life like that doesn't seem right to me. It has something to do, perhaps, with the type of people you're surrounding yourself with. If someone can't be friends with you without asking you for money why are you keeping such people around in the first place.
Using discretion or being modest isn't necessarily living a double life. I'm sure there are plenty of things you're not open about; that doesn't necessarily make you fake, does it?
I thought we were talking about friends? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the meaning of the word.
I wouldn't imagine being friends with someone and not trusting them with knowing how successful I am.
I think maybe, and this might be a cultural thing, a lot of people tend to use the word lightly. I simply wouldn't get to a stage of being friends with someone I am not able to trust in such a way that I have to hide how much money I have from them.
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It’s not about living a double life. I don’t secretly blow cash on hookers and blow, I just live a pretty modest normal life and don’t talk about the details of my investments or means. Mainly I don’t have to worry about anything really.