A few million dollars go a long way in changing around your life. Knowing a few people with a few million dollars, one of the things they'll confide over drink

A few million dollars go a long way in changing around your life. Knowing a few people with a few million dollars, one of the things they'll confide over drinks is how much less it changes your life than you would think. Unhappy families with a million dollars are unhappy families. Sick parents with a million dollars are sick parents. Seeing the Avengers with your kids with a million dollars is seeing the Avengers with your kids. (Flipside: Maybe it is just a reflection on the kind of people I'm likely to know, but four separate people have told me that the thing that really freaking rocks about being a millionaire is that you can easily swing a cleaning service coming by and doing the whole house every single week.) I sometimes think about how things could have shaken out differently. I went to a fairly good school and many of my classmates went into management consulting or finance. A good deal of them wondered why I didn't. (Neither option was ever really on my radar screen. I think if you had asked me in college "Sketch out how you, Patrick, would get a job at McKinsey" I would have been literally incapable of answering that question even though the answer was probably "Put on your debater suit and talk to the recruiter from McKinsey.") They have fairly predictable career trajectories and are now hitting 30 right as I do. I was raised to never talk about money, so I don't, but if I were guessing I'd peg many of them for low seven digits millionaires. This would have been mildly irksome to me if I were still a salaryman (less for envy over their conditions and more for still being a salaryman), but since life is pretty rocking right now I don't give it too much thought.