Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#81

Post by pierrefar » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 6:59 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #64

ttol wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, what did she say to kick you out?

It took a minute for her to realize that my comfortable savings was a few months in a third world country. She started quizzing me on my career -- "But you are a math professor!" "Postdoc, but close enough." "But ...?" Somewhere along the way, she suggested postdocs earned 6 figures, and I just giggled. As the reality sank in, she asked me something along the lines of "how can you only have $XXX [her guess as to my n…

I guess "FU money" applies to situations like this too!

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#82

Post by cwall » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:02 PM UTC

Here are some of the things I discovered after hitting it, and watch others do the same:

1. Getting rich makes you more of who you really are. If you're a jerk underneath it all, you'll be a bigger jerk when you hit it big...and vice versa.

2. In terms of problems, you're squeezing on a balloon. It's easy to pay the bills, but a whole new set of problems and hassles will present themselves. It's just a new set of irritants. There's just as much pain, it just comes from different sources.

3. When you can have everything you want, you have to learn to control your appetites. You can't imagine how much crap you buy when you can afford everything. It's surprisingly hard for most people to control their spending once they hit it.

4. You'll turn into the First National Bank of Bill, but your loan standards will be lower...and few people will ever pay you back.

5. Old friendships will wither and some of them will die, no matter how hard you try to maintain them. Jealousy is one reason. Subtile changes in your own personality will be the other.

5. If your pals aren't all in the same boat, and similarly rich, you'll have no one to play with.

In short: Money is a tiger. You master it, or it masters you.

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#83

Post by runT1ME » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:04 PM UTC

aaronsw wrote: post #6

In the short-term, my life was much worse. I spent a lot of really painful time struggling to come to grips with my situation. After that was over, things went pretty much back to normal. There's now a low-level fear all the time of losing all the money (something PG's written about recently) and I'm constantly worried I've invested it badly. I didn't make any dramatic life changes so people don't really treat me dif…

I didn't know you had a huge exit. Or are you talking about money you've made from being a semi-famous hacker now?

>(The reasons are more complicated but the result is I prefer my misery.)

Either way, that problem might be solved by a good Psychologist, that you probably should be able to afford. :-)

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#84

Post by aaronbrethorst » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:05 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #64

ttol wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, what did she say to kick you out?

It took a minute for her to realize that my comfortable savings was a few months in a third world country. She started quizzing me on my career -- "But you are a math professor!" "Postdoc, but close enough." "But ...?" Somewhere along the way, she suggested postdocs earned 6 figures, and I just giggled. As the reality sank in, she asked me something along the lines of "how can you only have $XXX [her guess as to my n…

That's hilarious! I had an almost opposite experience: my girlfriend is a professor at a university in Seattle. She says that she decided I was worth being with when—a couple weeks after we started dating—I quit my soul-sucking job without a backup plan and with only a few months of living expenses in the bank.

Specifically, she says she thought it was: "bold," "courageous" and "optimistic." Personally, I thought it was a huge disaster waiting to happen, but better than sticking it out at a job I despised.

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#85

Post by SkyMarshal » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:07 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #65

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 wha…

>In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard.

Haha, so true. As a software engineer one might expect writing a book to be easy by comparison, but once you actually start working on it, you find that writing a good book is anything but.

Good analogy.

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#86

Post by jeb » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:07 PM UTC

marcamillion wrote: post #72

While I have never gotten 'FU' money, at one point in my life I had access to all the digital media I could ever want. All the appz, movies, games, music, audiobooks, etc. Everything in digital format, I either could get, or had. At first, I was extremely excited - and naturally told a few people (who subsequently told a few people) and before I knew it I was the 'go to guy' for anyone that wanted any media. This exp…

Are you trying to say that you discovered thepiratebay?

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#87

Post by bpm140 » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:08 PM UTC

I once read a fantastic interview with Douglas Adams back in the late 70s, after Hitchhikers Guide had become successful in the UK, but prior to its impending US release.

Both Adams and his interviewer knew that the author was about to come into A LOT of money, but he didn't have it yet. The interviewer asked how he expected his life to change and Douglas Adams said one of the most prescient things I've ever read:

"The only thing that money changes is the size of your bills."

For instance, my wife and I always talked about traveling more, but after selling my company, we continued to mainly talk about travel. It's just not something we do a lot, even though money isn't an issue. Meanwhile, I've got friends who managed to backpack around Asia and Europe all summer in college when they were totally broke.

Money doesn't change who you are or how you live all that much.

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#88

Post by noname123 » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:09 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #9

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've found though - girls don't care about the money in the bank. Wherever you are meeting girls, I want to go there. My experience in an NJ bar a week or two ago: I was talking with a coder friend of mine about my job. This was a geeky conversation with words like "latency", "queues" and "atomic operations", as well as "lost $BIGNUM in half a second", rather than a manly conversation about "parachuting int…

This is a great point against living in NYC metro area. I doubt you'd suffer this in Boston (Academia seems to be the dominant life form), SFBA (tech; a trader would be a lot less sexy than the founder of a tech startup even pre-fu money), or Seattle or Portland (environmentalism? art? food?).

No. As someone who both have experienced both NYC and Boston urban living, I can tell you that Boston is no better than NYC. Sure there are a lot more schools in Boston, it's only the arbitrary scale of judgement has changed but the intensity/consistency of judgement is still the same.

Whereas in NY, yuppie culture surrounds either the high-finance/media-fashion/hipster type, Boston's culture is more on academic/engineering/townie-pride. In some sense, I prefer NYC because at least everyone's honest and at least it's a meritocracy of superficiality. You either gotta make six figures or have the American Apparel attitude and look to be in the group. In Boston, it's more like "of course, we are a open & accepting people," but "oh? you don't go to grad school at Harvard/MIT/BU? You are involved in software/allied health professions and don't have the holier-than-thou attitude? You are not WASP or a white-washed minority and don't drink the vegan-hippie-liberal ethos?" Haven't lived in Seattle/Portland extensively but my own superficial judgment of these two cities while traveling there, is that the latent vegan-hippie-liberal superficiality is even more rampant there.

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#89

Post by starkfist » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:16 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #9

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've found though - girls don't care about the money in the bank. Wherever you are meeting girls, I want to go there. My experience in an NJ bar a week or two ago: I was talking with a coder friend of mine about my job. This was a geeky conversation with words like "latency", "queues" and "atomic operations", as well as "lost $BIGNUM in half a second", rather than a manly conversation about "parachuting int…

This is a great point against living in NYC metro area. I doubt you'd suffer this in Boston (Academia seems to be the dominant life form), SFBA (tech; a trader would be a lot less sexy than the founder of a tech startup even pre-fu money), or Seattle or Portland (environmentalism? art? food?).

Boston is much worse. You've got academic assholes, finance assholes who are too racist to live in NYC, and townie assholes. There's a few interesting weirdos but they are all drunks.

Re: Ask PG & other successful folks: how did your life change after FU money?

#90

Post by bdr » Tue, Jul 13, 2010, 7:25 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #42

mattmaroon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this sort of black-and-white distinction between "good girls" and "gold diggers" and it's entirely imaginary. I'll spare you the evolutionary psychology behind it (which is easy to find if you're interested) but all women care about a man's success (of which money is merely the most frequent, but not only, indicator) to a large degree. Saying a girl doesn't care about money is like saying a guy doesn't care a…

The difference between the two is honesty. A guy will tell a girl "I thought you were beautiful, and wanted to meet you". A girl will rarely say "I thought you were rich, and wanted to meet you." For whatever reason, the vast majority of golddiggers are utterly dishonest about what they are really seeking. This leads men to get into bad relationships (which they would have avoided if the woman were honest), and they…

That's because people don't know why they feel things. The feeling comes first (e.g., being attracted to someone) and then we make up a satisfying rational explanation for it.