Finding Meaning

Two things came across my radar recently; cks talking about Job Vs Career, which is an old post, and apenwarr talking about Billionaire Math, which is not.  They’re very different, but they both give me the same “meaning of life” vibes, so let’s talk about that.

“Where am I going?” and “What do I do now that I have all this money?” are sort of the same question, just from different angles.  It’s a spiritual question, because the process of answering it has the shape of a spiritual journey.

What do you really, truly want?

It’s really hard to untangle from what everyone thinks we should want!  It’s a question that comes down to values and worth, and it takes time to uncover those values.  It takes thought, grit, commitment.  It takes looking inward to our own expectations, and deciding whether we need to hold onto those.

An example

Consider my experience buying my second car.  (The first one had been purchased used, in my youth, mainly on affordability and whim.)  I surveyed the market, chose a car, shopped around, and ended up not being able to buy right then.  I had been laid off, becoming a statistic in the Great Recession.

But that was a blessing.  It gave me space to think.  It slowly dawned on me that the Honda Fit I had chosen was exactly the kind of car my parents would buy, where price was the main consideration and “how much car can I get for the money?” was next in line.  True to form, they purchased a Nissan Versa the next year.

Five years later, the car I finally purchased was a Subaru Forester.  With my old car, I was tired of the low ground clearance, ramming the football-sized chunks of ice dropped off of larger automobiles in the winter.  I was tired of having such a small car when the need to move larger items arose.  I was tired of needing to choose gears, and we were reaching a point where the computer might get better MPG anyway.  I wanted a more reliable, more common car, that didn’t need to go fifty miles to a dealer to get treated by someone who really understood it.

Also, I needed a car that would fit inside my normal-size, urban garage; that eliminated the Outback.

To find all those parameters and make a new choice, I had to sort out my feelings, deciding which were internal, and which were inherited from the outside world.

But to get back to money…

Most people want more money

It’s a common bias, to think that more money will solve all the problems, without creating new ones.  It’s easy to look far up the wealth ladder, especially with TV and internet.

The thing that is seared into my brain on this point is an article from the 1990s, where a minister (the author) asks his friend, “What would it take to make you truly happy?” “Another $33 million,” he responds without hesitation.

You can’t just want money.  You have to want money for a reason. You have to know when the need is met, so you can do the real thing.  It’s not an end in itself; it should always be a means to an end.  The hunger is dangerous.  Trying to win at mere accumulation did not work out for Sam Bankman-Fried.

I want to think that, whether I had twice or ten times the money, I still would have chosen the Forester. Because it fit my real needs and values.

Going your own way

It’s important not to run out of money, for sure.  Another problem is going very fast, but in the wrong direction (one that isn’t satisfying at all.)

It’s worth starting slowly.  It’s okay to hang on to an unfulfilling job while exploring.  You can figure out goals piece by piece.  Start something that seems good.  If it doesn’t meet expectations, let it go again. Turn the experience over.  Sort out the good parts from the bad ones, and look for alternatives that might have more of the good and less of the bad.

If desires change over time, or the dream can’t actually be realized, that’s fine, too.  I used to think that I would be the best programmer ever, able to jump into any codebase in any language, and do stuff.  I’d be a jack-of-all-trades generalist extraordinaire.  The problem is, true expertise didn’t work that way.  Deepening and extending my abilities in Perl and PHP actively rotted my capabilities in C++, and turned Rust downright impenetrable.  That’s not failure; that’s feedback.  It’s probably something I could change, if I thought it were worthwhile for me to learn Rust and put all my energy back into becoming an übercoder.

Again we reach spiritual territory: once something speaks to your soul, you’ll have all the motivation you need.  But you can’t wait to know before you start anything.  You have to get out, try stuff, and change course where needed.  It’s an experimental process.  If no ideas can be tested, nothing happens. My brain alone was certainly not enough.

P.S.

A quote:

It’s stupid to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.
—Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

Take care of yourself.