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I am rich and have no idea what to do

vinay.sh

551–560 of 1001 posts

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#551
post #469

I think that a lot of people with money need to be reminded that having wealth is a social responsibility in itself. If you can live just from passive income maybe you should just gift interesting people the excess money and have them accomplish their goals. Talk to a bunch of people and realize what you want to support. If some of them need 10k to start a business just give it to them. Or, if you want some equity, p…

> having wealth is a social responsibility in itself

We even have a word for this, noblesse oblige. It used to refer to the aristocracy, but I don't see much difference between the aristocracy of old and the moneyed classes of today.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#553
post #423

> I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt I’ve got an idea: take some good economics courses so that you learn how government spending actually works.

I don't fault this guy for wanting to join DOGE and make a difference. The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust. I wonder what will happen to all these Signal conversations when the in…

Yeah I find that anecdote incredibly revealing as to the way wealthy people move through political spaces. No offence to the author of the blog post, but he was the CTO of a company that sold video conferencing software—what on Earth would he know about public governance? Pick a random student with a BA in public policy & administration off the graduating class of 2024's honour roll, and I bet they'd do a better job at doing whatever "DOGE" is supposed to do than this guy would.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#555
There are so many incredible ideas, projects, inventions, songs, books, movies, video games, etc. that will never see the light of day because the brilliant person or team who could make it can’t afford to stop working for long enough to create them. Find things that excite you and help them become a reality.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#556

I honestly cannot imagine living with these thought patterns, it truly sounds like hell to me. You don’t need to do hard things or overcome adversity every day to have purpose and find life fulfilling, it is an Infinite Game (read the book), not a Finite one. If you are reading the comments, IMO these giant grand gestures to find some spark of insight (climbing mountains, moving to Hawaii, etc.) aren’t going to accom…

same experience will give different teachings to different people. for you going to a homeless shelter may help you appreciate life more, see that you can make a change in others by helping them etc. for someone wired differently - it may be a yucky experience with smelly people. so ymmv

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#557
post #3

Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything. What I’ve found is that you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation (assuming you spent a lot of your life and energy to this point focused on these, much like I did) with something else totally unconnected with being measured in that way. For me, I am focused on proving myself as a guitarist…

> One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been. The time to do that was _before_ writing a blog post titled "I am rich" and submitting it to HN

They already know who he is, he was a public figure executive that sold his company, everyone in his social circle would know what Loom was and would read in the news how much it sold for.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#558
The unspoken and oft-forgotten part of the "immense wealth" agreement is that, unshackled from the need to work to survive in perpetuity, you are also free to give yourself and your time to causes who otherwise would never afford to pay for your skills. My plan - should I ever reach that level of unfathomable wealth, as statistically unlikely as it is even for my privileged upbringing - is to eventually divide my time between IT work for the local school system/town government and running a small, tech-focused community center (think LAN center + board game tables + maker lab) out of my own pocket; the former for the benefits more than the salary (healthcare is expensive), the latter to give the local youth a place to hang out that doesn't require continuous outflows of money or a credit card.

So my advice to anyone, really, is to always consider what you'd do with your life if money were no longer the chief concern of it, and to find more ways of incorporating that into your life until and unless such a time arises. Whatever you do, though, should be in the interest of uplifting others rather than yourself (you won Capitalism by reaching this point, after all). That provides a fulfillment every human ultimately needs in some form.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#559

It’s always climbing mountains. Why does nobody ever go money-mad and excavate an exact replica of the dwarven city of Khazad-dûm in the Black Hills of South Dakota?

The mountains are loaded with metaphor, seem nearly insurmountable, filled with danger and excitement…

Turns out, of course, that they are less dangerous than in the past, money goes a long way, and the human body is pretty good at walking even without training.

Notice it’s never free climbing the nose in a day, which would require 5-7 years of dedicated training.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#560
We're all players in a game called evolution. This means we're biologically designed to cope with adversity, not success. The real contest in life is between closely matched organisms, each having only a small chance to survive.

Being a creature that's 1% more or less appropriate to its environment (not too smart or dull, not too strong or weak) is the actual game. Everything else is random noise. This means becoming spectacularly successful makes you irrelevant -- a spectator.

This can lead to artificial contests, between organisms that have already won the primary contest. So, after saying, "Wait, what now?", people invent make-believe goals -- climb mountains, make even more money, learn to cook a perfect omelette -- hoping to restore a sense of purpose.

In this non-contest, the least successful burn out, maybe even die prematurely. The most successful invent an imaginary, artificial goal that turns into a real advance. Transistors. Lasers. Antibiotics. Things that weren't really necessary until they appeared and, by existing, became their own reason to exist.

So ... done climbing mountains? Choose an important, unsolved problem and work on it. The problem list is long and deserving:

  Batteries.
  Cancer.
  Population.
  Late-stage capitalism.
  People who want to kill everyone who doesn't share their beliefs.
Not necessarily in that order.
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