7 ms·

The post has a good quote from Bill Murray: > I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover

• speedgoose 7y ago
  Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. Sometimes it makes it worse. However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • richthegeek 7y ago
    "have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress" is how many people define "rich".
    • speedgoose 7y ago
      True. I guess "rich" because you can pay your family bills and have the hobbies you love and "rich" in "rich and famous" don't mean the same kind of wealth.
      • woofie11 7y ago
        The threshold is whether you need a job. The difference in stress of needing to hold onto a job, versus of being their voluntarily, is huge. And it's not binary. If you have a few years cushion saved up, it's a huge decrease in stress. If you have a mortgage paid off and enough to retire off of, most people in the world would call that 'rich.'
    • Insanity 7y ago
      Even though I know what you mean - stress can be caused for many things that are not money though. Love (or lack thereof), loneliness, illness,.. But yeah, living without money-related stress is how I'd define it. That doesn't even have to be a lot of money :)
    • onetimemanytime 7y ago
      >>"have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress" is how many people define "rich". sure, but "great" is not easily defined. A new car or a jet? A $500K home or a $15M one to host parties with rich and famous. But people usually like to show off, one way or another. If you hit it big with a company, and have, say, $10 Million you can live extremely stress free everywhere in the world. And very few would know, at least no one in your town or extended family. But quite a few hint at their wealth, political donations, charity (announce it publicly) etc etc. It's tempting, but once you hit the news is over. In USA people might sue you for one thing or another, but in banana republic countries you can "taxed" by criminals: Give us $1 Million or your child is...
      • lonelappde 7y ago
        It's very hard to find a life partner who is willing to live merely comfortably knowing they can draw more blood from you, and had to resign your children to mere comfort, knowing they'll have to compete for ever scarcer living-wage-paying jobs.
        • scottlocklin 7y ago
          Ever meet old money? They manage it; that's how they pass their money on through the generations. If you're a tech dude in the Bay Area though, you have my sympathies: many predators.
        • mrep 7y ago
          Merly comfortably? At 10 million dollars, you can live off of 4% of that for the rest of your life. After 15% cap gains, that gives you $340,000 to spend a year. Outside of the bay area, you can easily afford a 5000 square foot house in a top school district, own multiple cars, take lavish vacations, own a second vacation home, pay for your kids college education and more. What additional benefits are you imagining in which having more money would not "resign your children to mere comfort"?
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      Then why do so many of the richest people have so much stress?
  • Jare 7y ago
    > Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress Generally speaking, to me being rich (disclaimer: I'm not) means having that kind of money today and the confidence that, no matter what happens (barring large scale events like wars or asteroids) I will still have it for the rest of my life.
    • pritovido 7y ago
      This does not exist. The moment you have money there is people out there that want to take it. It has always been, there is this part on the Bible that says that when you have money, there will be robbers making holes in your walls to take it. That was thousands of years ago. It is human nature. For me, being really rich is that you know the way to make wealth(not money) when you need it. This knowledge is more useful than the outcome of it.
      • dannyw 7y ago
        If you have a few millions in an index fund and are discrete about it, no one is going to take it. There are many rich people who live ordinary lives.
        • mattmanser 7y ago
          Because stock market crashes never happen?
          • ghaff 7y ago
            If you’re smart you diversify so you’re earning a few percent a year on some portion at very low risk.
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          • fock 7y ago
            I don't think the people who are non-obvious rich put their money solely in an index fund. They'll generally have about 50-500 apartment units in some big city, which (if properly insured) guarantees you can weather anything except for wars and asteroids. Maybe they put their earnings into an index fund though ...
  • adventured 7y ago
    > Why trying to become rich? Because there is an unlimited number of things you can do with it. You're limited only by time and your imagination. I've never understood the premise I'm responding to, it doesn't make sense, unless a person has zero ambition and zero creativity - and I don't think that's true of anyone. I could never have enough money. I could never run out of good things to use it on. Give me $100 trillion and a thousand years, please. You could spend $100 billion and 60 years of your life on just going after Malaria and you might not manage to vanquish it. You could spend tens of millions of dollars and decades on trying to eliminate homelessness in a small city and still not eliminate it (swap out homelessness for any number of problems that need fixing in most any nation, or city). There is what might as well be an infinite number of good uses for money, at every possible scale. I'd run out of time long before I'd run out of positive uses for large amounts of money.
    • brownbat 7y ago
      Yeah, the DOT has some value to baseline effectiveness of programs: if they have $30,000 they can improve some intersection or stretch of highway and save one life a year. They can always turn extra cash into lives saved, so they use that to measure the effectiveness of spending. (Preventing malaria deaths is much much cheaper, maybe the conversion rate should be lower, but let's go with 30k for now.) If someone says they don't want $30k because they live comfortably, even though they could immediately donate it to GiveWell, it's like saying they don't value saving other lives because their life is fine. Substitute in anything else you value. You could sponsor modern art competitions, or film preservation, or buy land for ecological preservation, or help fund policy research on key issues from think tanks... People reflexively associate money with consumptive hedonism, so it can seem like a negative, but it can also support almost any value you have. Money can build you and tacky gold lined apartment and buy you a loud sports car, but money can also cure the sick, feed the hungry, and house the homeless.
      • eru 7y ago
        Yes. The more proper way to see this is that consuming leisure is perfectly fine as well.
  • balfirevic 7y ago
    > Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. If you mean without having to continue working, that is indeed what many would consider being rich.
    • speedgoose 7y ago
      No, a normal job is enough to be happy in most societies in my humble opinion.
      • j7ake 7y ago
        Which societies are in a situation where a normal job supports a spouse, children, and aging parents? Most people want to be in a financial situation where they can support more than just themselves.
        • speedgoose 7y ago
          The spouse can work, we are not in the 1960s anymore. But even if she does not work, you can have a happy life in many Europeans countries.
          • j7ake 7y ago
            This suggests that the cost of living adjusted salaries of today is half of what they were in 1960s if two people need to work now versus when only one needed to. Also immigrating to a country with good social benefits does not solve the need to take care of elders and relatives , which would not benefit from the social system of the country to which you would immigrate
            • burntoutfire 7y ago
              > This suggests that the cost of living adjusted salaries of today is half of what they were in 1960s if two people need to work now versus when only one needed to. It's that, or people's "needs" (wants really) just got inflated over time.
  • weinzierl 7y ago
    > However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing. Some people enjoy making money regardless how much wealth they already have.
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  • jniedrauer 7y ago
    Money is life force in a quantifiable form. We literally trade life for money. If you have a drive to accomplish something greater than you alone could accomplish in a lifetime, then you need to amass capital so you can buy other peoples time and energy.
    • blotter_paper 7y ago
      This. When people act like money is worthless after $X, I think of Musk and Bezos pushing us towards space. I'm sure they both spend plenty of cash on useless shit that doesn't improve their lives at all, but if they only had $10 million each then nobody would landing large reusable rockets right now.
  • sophiamossman 7y ago
    I recently had a conversation with a friend regarding this and we came to the conclusion that there is a balance with wealth. For us, the more important factor was freedom, and having enough money to facilitate whatever that definition of freedom is for you.
• weinzierl 7y ago
  The unspoken premise of this quote is that fame and fortune don't easily convert into each other. The believe that both go hand in hand is what most people get wrong already. And there is also a certain asymmetry, because popularity at least can be bought to some degree but converting pure fame into lasting wealth is hard work if, depending on the circumstances, possible at all.
  • bartread 7y ago
    That belief has been illustrated in technicolor over the past decade. Plenty of "famous" people on social media have very little to show for it. I'm not talking about the Logan Pauls or PewDiePies of this world - they're clearly outliers - but the average famous person on YouTube or Instagram (tens to hundreds of thousands of followers), might have a decent to great income but they're not "rich", where rich is defined as not dependent on any source of income[1]. Many of them are in fact enslaved to the need to constantly produce new content, which is fine if you enjoy it but perhaps not so much otherwise. [1] My preferred definition is actually the ability to do what you want, when you want, and with whom you want, which is a little broader than simply money.
  • munificent 7y ago
    > The believe that both go hand in hand is what most people get wrong already. That's because it used to be true and was for quite a while. Fame means lots of people know who you are, which requires widely amplifying and broadcasting your identity and work. For most of modern human history, technilogical limitations made that broadcasting very expensive. You had to spend some money for each reached human. Think printing pamphlets in Dickens' era. This meant that, generally, only the rich could afford to become famous. Fame following money and the direction was very rarely reversed aside from occasional cases of infamy like mass murderers. Broadcast TV made that much cheaper. A single show could reach millions. But production was very expensive so even though the marginal cost per viewer was low, the barrier to entry was still very high. That meant few got in and those were mostly otherwise well connected or part of an established privileged class. You do start to see an increasing number of "marginally famous" people here who got recognition from being guests or contestants on shows. Think "Jerry Springer" famous. These people tend to be quickly forgotten but have the misfortune of experiencing everything about fame with almost none of the money. Then the Internet and video streaming happened. Now the barrier of entry is virtually zero — everyone has a smart phone that can shoot video. The marginal cost is zero — ads pay for distribution so the producer fronts nothing. Some money comes in, but its very little. So now there is a larger and larger group of people for whom fame came first and wealth came later or never. I don't think our culture has caught up to that reality yet. There's still a presumption that anyone famous always has enough money to deal with the downsides but that's sadly not true. I honestly feel bad for people like mid-level YouTubers who have stalkers and death threats but are effectively making minimum wage.
• jjeaff 7y ago
  Bill Mahar was talking about fame recently and he said it was very nice. Because people generally perk up and are friendly most everywhere you go. But I think it goes the other way when you become super famous.
• golergka 7y ago
  That really depends on your personality. There's a lot of things where objective value is hard to determine, and depends purely on your subjective feelings. Two people with narcissistic and schizoid personalities could have completely different experiences with fame: one could feel inspired and happy by the recognition, while the other would get anxious and depressed. In the end, learn who you are and what's comfortable for you, before listening to anyone else's advice.