Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what timeframe were your working years? My concern is that "investing mostly in equities" (assuming a decent percent of growth stocks) can be the deciding factor if you happen to hit a good bull run but potentially disastrous if your market timing is off.
Time in the market >>> timing the market. Even the absolute worst luck gives you perfectly acceptable returns on 30-35 year timelines. Multiple orders of magnitude better than a savings account, for sure. Time and time again the best approach for highly compensated people who don't want to actively manage their finances is to put a chunk of every paycheck into a broadly diversified range of index funds and forget tha…
I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
201–210 of 214 posts
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the amount of money is more of a secondary point here. You're shackled to somebody else's schedule, whims, priorities, etc. until you have the money to not do that anymore. That doesn't necessarily mean 2.5m liquid though. How much would you need to work if you bought a small-ish house, lived on a very strict budget, and generally kept expenditure to a minimum? There are places in the US where you can bu…
> How much would you need to work if you bought a small-ish house, lived on a very strict budget, and generally kept expenditure to a minimum? I would need a lot because I like the city life, for example. I do found idyllic to go to the countryside here in Sweden and spend quite a few weeks there for summer and winter but that's not the life I'd like to be living for years. I enjoy being in a city for my hobbies, suc…
I very rarely hear about FU money from people that don’t need millions of dollars to leave their job. It’s important (IMO) for people to know that that doesn’t necessarily _have_ to be the case.
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
You already don't owe anyone your time. You contract with an organization to trade your time for money, which you can then trade for other stuff. Most such employment contracts can be ended easily by either party if they don't like it. I've spent a significant amount of my career working on problems of my own choice, both in someone else's employment, with a co-founder, or on my own. The limiting factor turned out no…
> it was that the set of problems that are worth solving in today's economy and can be solved by one person (or even a small team) is vanishingly small, and I just had a bigger impact when working with larger organizations. That's an important observation. There isn't really that much interesting technical work left that a single programmer can do, as the field has been thoroughly mined for such work for decades now.…
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#204I felt like that until I got to around $2.5 million liquid net worth. Now I still like money, but each additional dollar is starting to show diminishing marginal utility. Though of course I'm still trying to grow my net worth, it's no longer the main focus of my life, especially now that I'm "retired" from my main career at least. I split my time between gaming, running, reading, socializing and working on my trading…
how is it possible to save 2.5 mil from salary? I am from upper 5% in germany in terms of salary, and I can only manage to save ~10kEur/year, while maintaining decent lifestyle. An order of magnitude lower than you'd need to retire with such a sum after 20 years or so. How do you do that? Genuine question
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I see a platitude like this it reminds me of those self-compensating put-downs people use like "well she's so pretty, she must be dumb" etc. that have no reason to be true. I feel like meaning is vastly oversold. People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine. The whole search for meaning I feel has sprung up only among the people who have too much free ti…
I would respectfully disagree. When you say people survived and just had children, what then would explain the popularity of religions throughout human history (ignoring whether they are true or not)? It appears to me people have repeatedly searched for a higher purpose that goes beyond their material situation. Hell its even true with those disconnected native tribes in south America drinking ayahuasca and achieving…
1) Saying "well sure you have money but money won't buy meaning" is usually just a self-defense mechanism. "Well I don't have the money, but at least I have meaning [questionable] and he doesn't [also questionable]." Money and meaning are probably uncorrelated. If anything I'd expect an average(!) person with money to have more meaning than average person without, given that by this only point of evidence, they are better at goal-directed behavior of some sort.
2) The 2nd point is the meaning is unnecessary. I am not sure how elaborate the religious life of subsistence farmers was, but I don't think they were looking for anything like meaning in a modern sense... Ditto for getting high on plants. It strikes me more of a curiosity motive to explain the unknown, the kind the drives modern science. To the extent that it involved meaning, it was more of a meaning of the person as a cog in the now-explained world, not some transcendence. Even the nobles/etc. would see their meaning in advancing the agenda of their city-state or smth like that. Going by modern cosmology, there's no inherent meaning in the universe, so any one you choose is just the one you create (arbitrary), or more likely someone else creates for you with their own questionable motives.
When I started thinking more of the finite-ness of life given the above, I found that it's not the lack of meaning that's the problem, it's the search itself. In this paradigm, money isn't everything, but time and experience is; and you have far more time and better experience in modern society if you have some minimum cashflow. Ideally, you need e.g. $60-80k/year (iirc that was the happiness plateau in the studies for the USA), ideally without sacrificing ~50% of your waking hours for it.
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#206All the money in the world ain't gonna by you meaning. But pursuing it might distract you from that fact. For a while.
Every time I see a platitude like this it reminds me of those self-compensating put-downs people use like "well she's so pretty, she must be dumb" etc. that have no reason to be true. I feel like meaning is vastly oversold. People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine. The whole search for meaning I feel has sprung up only among the people who have too much free ti…
That's a deeply impoverished and modern view of both the past and children.
Wealth is a means, and can be a good thing in the right context, or a bad thing in the wrong one. We know that wealth beyond a certain amount is not associated with increased happiness, and is as often as not associated with decreased happiness.
I can attest to that.
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time I see a platitude like this it reminds me of those self-compensating put-downs people use like "well she's so pretty, she must be dumb" etc. that have no reason to be true. I feel like meaning is vastly oversold. People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine. The whole search for meaning I feel has sprung up only among the people who have too much free ti…
> People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine. That's a deeply impoverished and modern view of both the past and children. Wealth is a means, and can be a good thing in the right context, or a bad thing in the wrong one. We know that wealth beyond a certain amount is not associated with increased happiness, and is as often as not associated with decreased happines…
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#208Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#209“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew. “What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead…
Re: I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
#210“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew. “What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead…
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, Summer Day https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laur...