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I am rich and have no idea what to do

vinay.sh

761–770 of 1001 posts

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

#761

Therapy. Wealth and success is one of the most massive crutches there is. It can make it almost impossible to be truly in touch with your insecurities and pain because its simply too easy to hide in your victory. Your toughest challenge now is to, despite your wealth, find a way to contact the pain that drove you to your hunger for success. As the bible said, it's easier for a camel to get through the head of a needl…

Therapy = Exactly. He thinks he has freedom and agency but he's just being puppeteered by conflicting subconscious forces he doesn't understand and seems to have no insight into. This is a man who's in a self-driving car turning a steering wheel that's connected to nothing.

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

#762
post #73

I don’t think his problem is money. I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared. Now he needs to develop a new identity. This is especially difficult for single founders without kids (in the sense that people with spouse/kids already derive much of their identity from those 2 things). Selling a company isn’t all that different from going through a divorce (in the sense that your identit…

I don't think his problem is money.

I think his problem is he might not be a very good person.

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

#763

Perhaps you should consider exploring the path of religion or spirituality. Faith has a way of providing inner peace and grounding. As humans, we are inherently designed to seek meaning through connection, building a family, and raising children. Watching them grow can bring a profound sense of purpose and fulfillment that no material success can replace. This might be the key to rediscovering what truly matters in l…

> Faith has a way of providing inner peace and grounding. The fact that people can believe things via “faith” that have no empirical basis in reality scares me. It certainly doesn’t provide any inner peace or grounding to me.

Humans are animals. Spiritual animals.

As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.

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

#764

> 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.

Defaulting on the debt is not going to happen but the consequences of avoiding default will not be good.

Of course, DOGE isn't really going to do anything to fix this either. Complete theater that the fixes will low and behold happen to work in the financial interest of those running DOGE.

The young who don't think the debt matters are almost guaranteed at this point to have to deal with US fiscal dominance in their lifetime. That is going to be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity.

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

#765

I can definitely sympathize with this guy. I imagine selling your company, coming into immense wealth, and losing your identity of ~10 years can really mess up an individual. But at the same time... this seems rich coming from the dude who co-founded Loom. Calling his ex-coworkers NPCs and believing he's qualified to streamline the US government - all because he built a glorified screen recorder? Have some humility L…

> Calling his ex-coworkers NPCs and believing he's qualified to streamline the US government - all because he built a glorified screen recorder? Have some humility LOL.

This is basically Elon Musk's MO. Except it was shiny cars and not a screen recorder.

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

#766
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…

No. He wanted to help DOGE dismantle the US government. People like that should just blow their money on themselves and the people they like and leave the rest of us alone.

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

#767
It has become a meme at this point, but it seems men will do anything but go to therapy. Especially here, when the author can clearly afford it, and is going through a existential crisis.

Also, if this is the cohort of people joining the DOGE initiative, I'm even more afraid that I was before.

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

#768
To me, it seems that the author previously focused on "making as much money possible". That is understandable as a driving force, as most people think to be rich is what it means to be successful. It is also very understandable in the context of "the American dream", which is all about this. But now that the author reached the place of being more than rich enough, this overarching purpose and goal is gone.

What I think is much better though, is to instead just have curiosity as a driving force. And I think many people here on Hacker News do have curiosity as a bigger driving force than becoming rich. It is curiosity that drives one to tinker around, make random projects, hack around. Making money in the process of this has just been a convenient side effect in our industry. The truth is, if you have insatiable curiosity you will never not have purpose because there will always be a "next day" that you do not know about yet. It isn't just something intrinsic either, you can self-identify as being insatiably curious and try to live that way.

Having that said, there is a certain amount of privilege required to even be in a position where you can claim this without having to worry too much about your survival.

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

#769
Some time ago I have watched an interwiew from Shia Labeouf on why he became catholic, for more that I think a good advice for everyone is getting closer to God, He said something that may help you:

"Purpose in life is when you get something you're good at or have a natual inclination to that and help people with that, that's porpose"

I'm very very far from getting rich but that's what I think that maybe help you

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