I've been meaning to write about this one day. There are some
things that change. For example, you learn to distinguish problems
that can be solved with money from those that can't. You can buy
your way out of a lot of schleps.
Life doesn't get an order of magnitude more enjoyable, because you
still can't buy your way out of the most serious types of problems,
but a lot of annoyances are removed.
The best part is what I thought would be the best part: not having
to worry about money. Before Viaweb I'd been living pretty hand
to mouth, doing occasional consulting. It felt like treading water,
in the sense that while it wasn't hard, I knew in the back of my
mind that I'd drown if I stopped. Getting rich felt like reaching
the shore.
One thing you learn when you get rich, though, is how few of your
problems were caused by not being rich. When you can do whatever
you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial
blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping
them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact
that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping
99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away,
they see how hard.