I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life
Hi Vinay and congrats on the exit! It’s funny how things are: I was just a few weeks ago about to test Loom in Jira, and we were talking about how much Atlassian paid for it.
Anyway, if there’s something that you might want to do with your life, is build sustainable single-family housing. You already know that we live in an extremely abundant world and that remote work and driverless cars are here. But we still have houses built like we used to build them in the 1800s.
Don’t aim at scaling this to oblivion, though. Just design the best possible 2-bedroom house that would fit perfectly into its environment and climate (lots of them), using decade-old knowledge (all the data from ergonomics in a house to weather protection and insulation has been analyzed between the 1940s and 1980s) and current high tech (3D printing, high performance material). Then build a few and iterate.
This is a lot of work. This is physical and intellectual work. This is needed work. This is slow. This can make you more pride than ever. Building a better world, literally. It doesn’t get more fulfilling than that!
Why this perspective never seems to be in tech people’s minds? Because the focus on money transforms people into drones. It’s all about money and stunting, which is the complete opposite of fulfillment and belonging to society where you try to sustain things. Just like moms do all the time.
When tech folks realize that, they usually go on binges about O P T I M I Z I N G things when really, there’s nothing much to optimize. It’s not about that —life isn’t a start-up—, it’s about understanding what we need in life and the uncomfortable truth is, we have so much already:
-
I have the same phone as a billionaire if I want to.
-
The billionaire plays the same games as I do, probably on the same TV size we all have (65″).
-
Healthy food is not expensive, nor hard to make. It’s just knowledge and discipline.
-
Collaboration, friends and family relationships are good for you and can be done well without multiple millions of dollars.
-
Small spaces are a lot easier to cool and heat and that makes them cozy for both broke ass folks and richest people on earth because our meat envelopes and physical needs are still the same and always will. No matter what number displays in our respective bank accounts.
You get the idea. So what else is needed? Much more sustainable (buildings that last 100+ years) structures, way better designed than the temporary shoeboxes we live in these days. Everything else, we have. Oh, we also need to redistribute wealth properly, obviously, but that’s a societal task, not an individual one.
I understand why tech folks never spent time thinking about that though. They live in a screen 24/7 since middle school, and never had the opportunity to be stuck somewhere in life, having the time to think through things a bit longer, on their own. They trust their older peers in dogmatic ways. They’ve been racing their entire lives without pausing and then they explode under the weight of all those questions that a lot of people answer by themselves through a decent 9-5 life and years. Not a few weeks or months after a lucky ending.
Also, if you’re bored, learn to perfectly switch 360 kickflip to backside noseblunt slide on a 15-stair rail. It should occupy you for a minute.