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Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

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Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#31
post #11

There was a great analysis of what happens when you win the lottery on reddit some years back - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the... > Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse. Of course many of the issues related to winning the lottery are caused by the attention you suddenly receive. But a related story from someone that was…

I imagine a big part of lottery winners going bankrupt are due to lack of education and/or comfort in having that much money at once (after all, the vast vast vast majority of lottery players are lower middle class to poor). It sounds like the writer (somewhat ironically) came from money so she'll probably be aight.

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#32
post #11

There was a great analysis of what happens when you win the lottery on reddit some years back - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the... > Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse. Of course many of the issues related to winning the lottery are caused by the attention you suddenly receive. But a related story from someone that was…

That in turn effectively triggers an existential crisis - what do with all this extra time? Give your money to me. I have a million things I want/need to do. So many things to do in the world. How can you possibly get bored?

That's exactly the right perspective but if you've spent the last 20 years doing some job purely for the money, it's not an easy mental state to transition to and whether you're able will likely have a large part to do with your education and upbringing.

For example your social network may be largely people you work with - if you stop working, you lose those connections. And lockdown has shown what impact social isolation can have.

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#33

Is that person even real? The ending made me doubt it, as it was just a list of things leftists want rich people to do with their money. Like donate it all somehow, and under no circumstances give anything to their kids. Wtf? I worry so much about the world my kids are going to grow up them, that I am trying to give them as much of a financial head start as possible. I don't want them to have to suffer through discri…

It's not just "leftist", it's impostor syndrome. If she had spent days and nights, weekends and had 3 abortions and 2 divorces to come up with a product idea so innovative it liberated people from a common chore forever (like say she invented a way to never have to sleep anymore while having the benefit of rest still here), she maybe wouldn't say it like that.

She'd be "fucking hell finally I get something out of this endless suffering". Here she joined a company, waited a bit, and became a millionaire. We may all feel a bit disappointed at winning life with so little excitement :D

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#34
post #20
post #2

One thing that immediately stood out to me was the following quote at the beginning of the article: > You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing I'm happy for the author that $200,000 isn't and wasn't a life-changing amount of money for her, but to so many people it would be incredibly life-changing. I could very comfortably live off that amount of money for 10 years. As an alternative view, that's m…

The worldwide median anual household income per capita is about $3000: https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo... Which means most humans won't make $200K in their entire lives. Considering that it's not a life changing amount of money just shows how the 1% has lost touch with reality.

Looking at everything as a global stat, also doesn't make any sense. If I spend a 100 USD on dinner, that is all earned/spent by me on my experience in my time-space bubble. Farmer in Africa on an orphan in Gaza wouldn't be directly impacted by that.

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#35
post #24

> Being a tech worker is not like banking, where you know you’re not doing good for society I... I work in banking and I think I'm doing good for society :D It's weird how deep this belief banks are an artificial parasite that built itself on top of normal people became. If people don't like banks and think they're really bad, they could really try removing them... it's not like I'd disobey a law or anything that say…

Do you know how banking works?

Banks keep injecting new fiat money into the economy via loans and thus dilute everyone's salaries (buying power) by inflating asset prices artificially and thus make them increasingly out of reach for salary earners.

Loans are also used to facilitate thousands of different financial schemes to inflate stock prices, distort the markets and drive honest people into corporate servitude and ensure that they will never be able to afford a house or any passive-income asset.

At a global scale, it converts salary earners into slaves and asset owners to into masters. Intelligence and skill are entirely factored out of the equation, success is all a socially-oriented scheme of who is who and who knows who; not much different from Stalin's USSR.

The banking sector is the main reason why there is growing wealth inequality and why jobs are getting increasingly useless. It atrophies people's useful skills and replaces them with useless bureaucratic skills as they are forced into the highly inefficient, monopolistic corporate sector and are shielded from essential competitive pressure.

For many smart, ambitious, passionate, hard-working people, it has turned their lives into an absolute Kafkaesque hell.

Once you can see what the monetary system is doing, you cannot enjoy any work. You cannot enjoy well paid intellectual office work because you know that your job is useless and you're making your money on the back of financial exploitation. You also cannot enjoy real useful, meaningful work because you get paid less and you know you're being taken advantage of by those who do the useless work. You can either be a crooked winner or an honest loser.

The only meaningful job I could find was in blockchain space, but because financing is all driven by fiat monetary policy (driven by banks and governments who have no idea what the problems are), the industry is a complete centralized brainfuck.

The reality for many people is beyond what even Franz Kafka could have imagined.

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#36

I'm in a similar situation, but it's like 1/3 of what she'll make. And I have literally no idea what to do now. I have a good feeling for how to manage it. But not a good feeling about what it means for my life. In the SF area, it's not enough to live with a family. Where my wife and I are from, it's enough to early-retire with average incomes (4% of 2M$ ~= 80k$/y, 40k$/y median income). But do I want to do this? Or…

I'd say you can now find a job that best aligns with what makes you happy. The money a job pays you is no longer the most important aspect but merely a secondary one. Want to work 20 hours a week, you probably can. Want to help the world, you probably can at a non-profit. Want to learn a new technical skill set, you probably can at a job where you take a lower level. And so on and so on. You can now trade off salary from a company for whatever you want.

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#37
post #15
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your life circumstances, is there an amount of money that is large enough to celebrate, but not so large as to be life changing? If so, then you can relate to the author's point, but for a different value of N. The author is speaking from their experience. I think if they were to caveat every point like this, it would be a much longer read and one would get tired of reading the disclaimers. In the past few years,…

Life changing is a moving goal post and it is contextual for the individual. Roughly 10 years ago when I first started in software development I was making ~$40k and thought I had made it and I'd be able to achieve everything I wanted on that amount assuming I just kept up with inflation. Fast forward, I bought $500 of Basic Attention Tokens at $0.17 and after currency conversion it is over $5k. The money has 10x'ed…

>anyone's who lifetime earnings are going to be $1M could see that as a life changing amount.

I would define life changing as being able to have kids if you couldn't before, moving to a radically different environment than before, or being able to stop working if you were working before.

So probably it needs to double what you were expected to make without it.

Re: Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire

#39
post #11

There was a great analysis of what happens when you win the lottery on reddit some years back - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the... > Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse. Of course many of the issues related to winning the lottery are caused by the attention you suddenly receive. But a related story from someone that was…

I imagine a big part of lottery winners going bankrupt are due to lack of education and/or comfort in having that much money at once (after all, the vast vast vast majority of lottery players are lower middle class to poor). It sounds like the writer (somewhat ironically) came from money so she'll probably be aight.

Smart people don't play the lottery.
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