As someone who has made "the big bucks", let me tell you - it's overrated. At least, in the fashion in which people generally proceed once they have capital. T

As someone who has made "the big bucks", let me tell you - it's overrated. At least, in the fashion in which people generally proceed once they have capital. The thing is, most of the time one finds that expenditures grow to match income and capital - you have shinier toys, a bigger box to keep them in, and the ratio between income and expense stays constant. You find yourself constantly levering up, reassessing what it is to be rich, aspiring to loftier goals - all of which are just a slight rotation of the hamster wheel. I finally reached the conclusion that the only winning move is not to play. Sold up. Went frugal (feral?). I'm now travelling the world marvelling at how far how little can go in some corners, and considering the next move. Subsistence permaculture up a mountain is looking appealing at the moment - and the capital outlay is tiny. I can retire, at 32, and enjoy living. 130k is a lot of money, but so is Seattle. In much of the world, it would be a fortune that you could live off for decades, not a year. Ultimately it comes down to what you want in life. Money is gas in the tank, which can take you places - but like gasoline, having a lot of it sitting around does little for you - how you apply it is what makes the difference - and even if you have no gas, you can still walk. So - the question is, what brings you happiness? Not money - many think it does because there's a gap in the chain of logic, whereby the means somehow become the ends, but if you think about what you want money for, it might reveal that money isn't actually what you want, but you've spent long enough in the pursuit of it that your true goals have been left by the wayside. I can't pretend to have the answers, but I can say that I'm having the time of my life on $20 a day, living in a van. The other thing that has opened my eyes is that I'm not alone in this conclusion. The more I wander, the more I meet disillusioned entrepreneurs who have likewise sacked it all in to be a vagrant. I write this sat on the terminal moraine of a glacier, watching a little bird slowly edge closer to me, and the shadows creeping over the mountains. The air smells like moss and honey. You can't buy this, but I feel something I thought I had lost - happiness.