In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/technology/05rich.html?ex=1343966400&en=37185230cd0560aa&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

by nickb • 19 years ago

33 28 19 years ago

nytimes.com

rms• 19 years ago

Well, that's slightly depressing... it's reflective of the fundamental existential angst of humanity, we're just not made to be happy.

pg2• 19 years ago

Hardly. More that rich is relative. There's no absolute standard for wealth. People compare themselves to their peers.

nreece• 19 years ago

But, WE choose our peers. Then we compare and crib about it. We are fools enslaved by time and space.

ivankirigin3• 19 years ago

indeed. Tiny fishing village in Thailand: lots of happy people. Same absolute level of wealth outside LA: lots of angry people.

bkrausz• 19 years ago

I can definitely see that, having only been in California for 3 months being an intern (i.e. having money in the bank for the first time in a while), it's hard not to spend when everyone here has cool gadgets and such (though on the scale of cell phones and monitors, not cars and houses...).

weeblyrocks• 19 years ago

This is exactly why you don't move out to Silicon Valley. Build your start-up, get out, and enjoy your life. You might even have something left to give to charity.

In Silicon Valley you'll blow your money on a huge house, a plastic wife, and kids who want a BMW the moment they can drive. Oh, and don't forget the taxes.

ivankirigin3• 19 years ago

Do a back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much it would cost to do something to an extreme: - constant tour of the world - ultimate gaming setup - beach bum in the tropics.

Then figure out how much you'd have to work to achieve it. In most cases, it takes less than a full-time median wage 52 . 40 . 16, meaning I could do them working far less than full-time.

"making it" is a state of mind. As is striving to reach an amorphous goal. Happiness research is perhaps some of the most useless work in economics because self reporting is so iffy.

If people don't feel rich, it has nothing to do with their absolute level of material comfort. Almost everyone alive today is far more rich than all other humans that have ever lived.

tipjoy2• 19 years ago

Most of us probably have those moments where we think of how great it would be to live one of your 'extreme' examples, but we wouldn't really want to live like that. Who wants to spend their lives just sitting around? In fact, most people I know spend their free time creating things in one form or another, and would do it 24/7 if given the opportunity.

Happiness is creating new things, and to the extent that money enables this, it makes us happy.

stuki2• 19 years ago

Seems to me, people are either of the kind that's happy as long as they have a cold beer and someone to share it with, or the kind that will always be sufficiently unhappy with what they have to bust their ass in pursuit of more.

I suspect Silicon Valley, like New York, is home to an over abundance of the latter kind. While at the same time, those who can't understand continuing to work like that despite having millions, are exactly those that would never have bothered putting in the effort to get millions in the first place.

augy4• 19 years ago

Some people are motivated by what money can buy others are motivated by the freedom it can bring. Someone motivated by freedom will put in just as good an effort as someone motivated by material wealth. The bottom line is that you are motivated.

pg2• 19 years ago

It's not just a division between people who are happy with some amount of money and people who always want more. There are also people who are unsatisfied because they have a constant need to create things. I believe most of the really driven people in Silicon Valley are of this type, actually.

augy4• 19 years ago

what about if you want to create good children? 60 hour startup work weeks can't be good for that, can they?

stuki2• 19 years ago

That is definitely true, and probably a big differentiator between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In Silicon Valley, there are those who are rich 'accidentally', simply as a side effect of doing something they really wanted to do. You see the same in the entertainment business, as well as in 'leisure' industries, like mountain bike and surf board building.

Once you go beyond these 'legends', to the, I believe, much larger group of people described in the article, this no longer seems to hold, though. The "legends'" possibly inadvertent, yet widely publicized, financial success, seems to have drawn to The Valley many more that ARE in it for the money, and these are the ones I doubt will ever be content.

davidw• 19 years ago

The people interviewed seemed genuinely concerned about money, rather than simply being smitten with what they're doing. Also... lots of talk about N hour days, with large values of N. I know I don't do my best creating when I'm completely knackered from too much work.

tipjoy2• 19 years ago

It's interesting that you think that people who are really driven can end up being unsatisfied because of that nagging feeling they have telling them there's more to be done.

I would think that having a lot of money would give you the freedom to choose your work, and the ability to wake up every day and work on something you feel passionate about would make you happier. I guess you could say that you don't need a lot of money to do that. But it would make it easier.

dood• 19 years ago

An abject lesson in unchecked desire.

ecuzzillo• 19 years ago

I know a guy like that. His take on it is that it's a combination of social pressure and families: families are often more expensive than any of ivankirigin's doing things to extremes, and they get more expensive as you put them in richer peer groups. I suspect that if you were single, being worth $10 million would sit with you just fine, even if you wanted to do extravagant things.

(Not that that would make me choose to be single, though.)

augy4• 19 years ago

I need at least 10 million for my daughters sweet sixteen MTV birthday party. If her party is not better than the other boys and girls parties than she won't love me anymore : (

hello_moto• 19 years ago

augy, I think your DNS mistakenly re-route you to news.ycombinator.com instead of Slashdot.com

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Someone had to post this:

http://mog.com/Sethpian/blog_post/7493

vlad• 19 years ago

Well, it's stories like these that make us pause and reflect that we are lucky not to have such troubles.

henning• 19 years ago

And here I was, happy to have health insurance and enough to pay rent.

If only I were unhappy with millions of dollars.

zach• 19 years ago

Well, there you go. If you wonder why a "normal" house in SV costs five times more than in St. Louis or Dallas, this is a profile of the answer. For that matter, I understand better why Athertonians live in $12M houses -- they'd be $4M houses in other parts of the country, so curiously they're getting more bang for the buck.

And it has a reciprocal effect. When a major component of life, one's house, costs five times more, that depresses the wealth effect. When you're living among the super-rich, same thing. If these folks were living in Buffalo, they would be so acutely aware that they were exceptionally rich you wouldn't expect them to have anything to strive for. So there's a lack of a sense of privilege.

But it's also interesting to see the cavalier attitude toward wealth that it engenders. To be the richest fellow in town and still strive for "just a little bit more" requires a rare mindset. But yeah, stick a multi-millionaire in a suburb of super-millionaires and golly, what's a couple million bucks? Not much. I mean, it's not like you're going to quit your job or anything.

RichM• 19 years ago

So if living among people much more wealthy than oneself leads to so much angst, why not try living among the lower classes? You ought to feel fantastic then.

In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich

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