Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

If I had that much money, I'd found a company focusing on creating real value instead of just sales volume. Employ old people, enable direct trusted donations to African schools (Crypto?), make an app to teach 3rd world women how to treat their first baby, introduce and establish a social coin to reward caregivers... It's a great feeling to make the world a better place. And there are endless possibilities to help making the world a bit better each day if you don't have to waste your time to make money.

I'd advise you to reflect deeply. Imagine you're walking through the "museum of your life" at the last day of your life. All the pictures there show your important moments. What pictures is that museum presenting?

Showing off / buying expensive things makes you happy for half a year. Having a true social impact has a lasting effect.

Some good stuff here. I’ll add my $0.02.

David Brooks talk on meaning (and how financial/social freedom isn’t as great as you think) https://youtu.be/iB4MS1hsWXU

Paul Bloom and Sam Harris talk about PB’s new book The Limits of Pleasure (hedonism, happiness, meaning…)- https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/waking-up-conversations/t...

SH opinion on meaning, paraphrased: a narrative you can tell yourself and others about what you are doing. (Watch out for philosophical pseudo questions) Mindfulness & Meaning -- from the Waking Up app. Click on the link to listen now.

https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/2e0d71?source=content%20...

Thanks for listening. Best of luck.

I don't have any advice about what you should do next, but what you're experiencing is common amongst people who've become rich "overnight". Look at the difficulties Notch, the creator of Minecraft, had with his success, or the co-founder of RxBar: https://marker.medium.com/what-really-happens-when-you-becom...

7.5M euros is definitely more than enough for one person, but at least it's not in the range where now you feel responsible to do something big and positive with the money.

As others have said, use your free time to explore other aspects of life that may interest you. Try new things, and don't disclose your riches to others. If I were in your shoes, I would try as best as I could to spend time with regular people. The challenge now is to remain grounded as a human being since you no longer have the routine of chasing a paycheck. That said, finding a job might still be useful just so you do have personal development. Obviously, the hard thing will be as soon as you encounter difficulties in your job, you can easily just walk away from it instead of trying to grow.

The feelings of boredom and depression are normal. Because your culture and society imposed to-do list - like earn lots of money, work for a prestigious company are no longer relevant. I will not tell you what to do with your money, how to make it last a lifetime. That's unnecessary and not what you are even asking for. Advice regarding those comes from a place of insecurity anyway. Turn inwards. Forget you are European. Forget this is year 2021. You are a human who no longer has to worry about basic necessities. What's left to do? It would be pretty awesome if you could be in control of your emotions. Your desires. It would be pretty awesome if your self image would be independent of the most recent experiences, wouldn't it? To be calm under all circumstances, because you realize that there is nothing in the world to get worked up about. Achieving the state I mentioned above is something worth working towards. While doing that, by all means, travel, skydive, write an operating system from scratch. Or not. Worldly activities don't matter much, they are for the distraction of the mind. That's the reason we keep hopping from one to the other. Look up Ramana Maharshi. It could prove beneficial. Good luck

4% who knows-- at least historically it was a pretty conservative figure--, but if your concern about inflation is the ballooning money supply you should expect broad market investment to at least keep pace with inflation, since you're moving your wealth out of the supply-inflating asset.

A really conservative approach for someone like the OP would be to come up with a low watermark level of spending that is enough to live comfortably, invest enough in extremely low risk investments that just keep up with inflation to support that level. Keep their long term obligations within that level of spending... then invest the rest of their money in the market and spend the additional yield discretionarily.

Here is a really conservative approach for the OP's figures: Assume OP could live comfortably on 70k/yr in present dollars and that they'll live to 104. They set aside 77*70k=5.39m dollars in extremely low risk investments which merely expected to at-least meet inflation after taxes. They invest the remaining 3.04 million in riskier investments they expect to return more (market indexes, maybe a few companies, a bit of Bitcoin)-- and spend 4%/yr of that pool on discretionary spending, so an extra 120k/yr bringing their total spending budget to 190k.

Re-balance every once in a while to keep the nearly-riskless pool at the right size to guarantee their base spending level -- adding to it if it under-performed cost inflation or taking from it when it over-performs.

Purchase of a home could be taken out of the base spending pool, so long as care is taken to make sure the the funds needed for its maintenance and property taxes are included in it.

If the riskier investments perform well the discretionary spending budget will go up, if they perform poorly they'll at least preserve their base spending level. They could do somewhat better by immediately cutting spending during down markets -- those 4% figures don't assume that you're doing that but someone whos base spending is secured by another pool of assets should have a lot of ability to do so.