Comment by david-gpu

Nobody takes it literally like that though, because at least in a better job market way too many people have that money.

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.

What I've learned, both in terms of personal experience and from reading up on the psychology, is that to maximize happiness over time you need to optimize for ensuring you can maintain a steady upward trajectory.

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.

Yes, TeamLab is the low-hanging fruit, low-effort version of what I wanted to see

It's also the case that having enough money not to work makes it very simple to engage in self destructive behaviour.

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 think having kids should help a lot. I'm spending around an hour every evening with mine and a few hours during weekends, but neither me nor they feel this is enough. I would also go skiing for 2 weeks every winter with my family and rent a cottage in the countryside for whole summer holidays, but I have neither money nor time to do it.

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.

Like all things, financial independence means it's one of the things you can stop worrying about, and focus on what you think matters. It means you don't have other people telling you what you must do 8 hours of the day. Of course, some very very rich people have decided what they want to do is argue with strangers online. But that's their choice to make ;)

Decaying body might be one of the toughest arguments there, which unless we find a way to stop this, my solution would be to have kids and develop them instead of myself. Since I do like competitive sports and it is kind of hard to accept that at some point I am no longer going to be able to improve.

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.

Probably diminishing returns, but sometimes I think there is also selection bias, with ultra rich getting there because of never ending satisfaction, so it is contingent on the type of the human. Satisified person would stop sooner while never satisfied would naturally become the richest.

A lot of the things I do within those hours are spent on things I don't want to or like to do.

Being young and healthy goes a long way. I was happier when I was a poor ahh college student but that doesn't mean losing all my money and possessions would be good for my mental health.

Maybe artificial in the way that we hypothetically could do things better if there wasn’t so much inertia to the status quo.

"Healthcare should be a right at this point in our society's development"

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.

[flagged]

The much better philosopher Buckaroo Bonzai said it first.

[dead]

No, thanks. There's really nothing to learn from people with this particular rare flavor of brain chemistry.