221–230 of 475 posts
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Life is fundamentally empty. Unless you're religious: you live for a while then you die. Maybe you successfully procreated, and your descendants live until something gets them too. Eventually climate change, or asteroids or supernova gets everyone left.
Unless we have a diaspora. Believing in the future of humanity is a thing. Not all higher callings are religious.
Is this truly new or even newsworthy information?
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Yeah... I literally don't buy it. High Cost of Living city has nothing to do with needing $500k/yr in earnings (post tax). What kind of mortgage and car do you have that? Simple answer... that's a $10M house or a $2M car or half of each of those. Besides the fact that if you're earning $1.2M salary, you're taking home other bonus/stock that are comparable. Getting locked into this sort of lifestyle is a choice not dr…
100% agree. We recently purchased a car. In our case the "expensive" aspect is that we bought new... a new Subaru Outback. We could certainly afford a brand new Escalade, but those types of behaviors would lock me into my current employer or something that pays similarly and that idea isn't something I'm fond of. And this dude bought that shit despite hating his professional life. Hard to feel bad for him.
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Yeah... I literally don't buy it. High Cost of Living city has nothing to do with needing $500k/yr in earnings (post tax). What kind of mortgage and car do you have that? Simple answer... that's a $10M house or a $2M car or half of each of those. Besides the fact that if you're earning $1.2M salary, you're taking home other bonus/stock that are comparable. Getting locked into this sort of lifestyle is a choice not dr…
The median annual earnings of palo altans is about $400k/year. That's probably workable for cheaper areas like south palo alto where a house built in the 80s will run you $2.5 mil. Move closer to downtown and you could easily double or triple your necessary annual take.
Yes, there is capital income from stocks and other market investments, but appreciation for those comes under capital gains, which are calculated (and taxed) separately, and don’t count as employment income, for good reason: You can’t use stock options vesting in 4 years to buy food tomorrow or pay mortgage next month.
The rich are depressed, the middle-class is shrinking and fearful, the poor are hopeless. I'm gonna take a leap here and say maybe people need some religion in their lives to give direction and meaning. I found it interesting that a person in the article who made $1.2M a year was still depressed in thinking they were wasting their lives and it was all meaningless. I ask myself, does this person have children? a famil…
I think a lot of people feel that gap, and that's why you see a lot of the flimsy "spirituality" that is essentially just feel-good notions cobbled together. Eliade talked about this in The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. People want meaning beyond pleasing themselves, they've just completely lost it in the face of a culture advocating self interest and consumption, and increasing secularism.
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> where minor increases in living space/amenities can end up costing large amounts of money. It is pretty crazy how little extra money buys you. E.g. in NYC, the only differences between a $2,000 month apartment and a $20,000 a month apartment are going to be things like location, granite countertops, a well-designed bathroom, and better windows. But in most cases the actual floor space and layout is going to be almo…
This is not true. $20,000/mo rent in NYC will get you a gigantic apartment (thousands of square feet), as you can verify on any housing listings website.
- He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said. Sounds like a good wife to me, and this "pay cut" is making 500k-600k instead of 1.2 million, what world are these people living in that you can't give up a job that you hate because you can't…
I bet its mostly taxes and real estate. City + State + Federal taxes are around 50%. So $600k. Private School per kid is $50k. Assume two kids so about $100k. Okay, now a 4 bedroom apartment in NYC is like $25k/month (on Zillow, eyeballing it), or about $300k/year. You're down to $100k-$200k for food, vacations, clothes, cars etc.
Oh, the humanity.
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"According to Census data, the median household income in Palo Alto is $137,000 a year, while the US average is $57,600" from: https://www.cnet.com/news/silicon-valley-middle-class-earns-...
I think this type of Census data understates household incomes. I am not exactly sure why, but Atherton comes in at about 400k a year per household. That is a lot, but doesn't seem like a lot for Atherton.
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> Are people who make more money less happy/equally happy/more happy than people who make less? This has been studied comprehensively over the years, that the results seem very clear: there is an ideal income level in terms of happiness. If you earn below or above that, you're probably sacrificing happiness. The ideal income level depends on cost of living, but on average, in the US, that income level seems to be a b…
I saw right around $200k in then current dollars around 1990ish, and you weren't sacrificing above that, on average, it's just that increasing income above that point had no further correlation with happiness/satisfaction measures.
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> where minor increases in living space/amenities can end up costing large amounts of money. It is pretty crazy how little extra money buys you. E.g. in NYC, the only differences between a $2,000 month apartment and a $20,000 a month apartment are going to be things like location, granite countertops, a well-designed bathroom, and better windows. But in most cases the actual floor space and layout is going to be almo…
This is not true. $20,000/mo rent in NYC will get you a gigantic apartment (thousands of square feet), as you can verify on any housing listings website.