I am currently reading How to become rich By Felix Dennis. The front cover claims that it is supposed to reveal some secrets of getting rich. I’m currently on page 70 and haven’t encountered anything revolutionary yet (although hopes are high), but one thing that struck me was a paragraph in the introduction, written by someone worth about half a billion dollars:
[I wrote this book to]…I prove that this wealth has given me the most precious thing in life. What is the most valuable thing in life that riches can provide? Easy: For me, it’s time. time. It’s time to read and write poetry if you want to. Or write a book if it takes my imagination. It’s time to travel on a simple whim, to walk in the woods, to think, to commission art, to read, to drink, to hang out with friends and loved ones… to do anything really, as long as it doesn’t involve day after day grinding for money in someone else’s office or factory. This is what money can do.
amazing! This is from a man who “enriches” me with over 1,000 workers and what he seeks and has is essentially the same as what I seek and have. In fact, if I outsourced a book cover it could be considered an art commission, and if blogging were poetry (ahem!) we would enjoy exactly the same things. This is somewhat unexpected given the spread factor of 1000. Normally I would expect Qualitative differences When the variances exceed the factor 10.
Good news everyone! You really don’t need $500,000,000 to have this time and live well.
He mentioned some cars he could buy, and I couldn’t, but on the other hand, he can’t drive them, so I guess that makes us equal.
I have on rare occasion considered working more to have more money so I can buy things, but honestly, giving up time to buy things is a lot to ask for, so I’ll just settle for cheaper things.
So I conclude that I have already exceeded what the extra money could do for me. More precisely, the marginal utility of more money is low. It’s been like that for a while. Even when I was working, money quickly evolved into just a way to record results. It is a natural result of spending far less than the wage.
I recently realized that I am getting old. I’m in my mid-thirties. Double that and I’d be in my 70s. For me 70 is quite a year. So, I have as much time to go back to zero as I do to 70, and I don’t feel like I’ve lived a particularly long time. The marginal utility of more time is high!
Therefore spending very valuable time to earn more money than what is required is uneconomical. Sure, accidentally making money is a good thing, but spending time actively pursuing more when it seems like I’ve already reached the limit of what’s possible with money (apart from ownership of big luxury items that I think I can live without) is simply insanity. When there seems to be no further satisfaction to be had.
Sure, everyone probably believes, as stated in the book, that they are the only exception that money can actually buy happiness, but I’m not willing to bet 15 years of my life on it.
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Originally published on 2010-05-31 23:22:55.
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