It might be instructive to understand how Markus “Notch” Persson’s life and outlook changed after becoming a billionaire when he sold Minecraft. Many rich people draw their purpose in life from their work. The money in and of itself doesn’t even really matter to them in terms of their sense of self-worth.
The Tragic Tale of Notch (Markus Persson, Minecraft) - YouTube
[Perhaps you do! We still haven’t seen his tax returns.]
I know quite a few reasonably wealthy people who drove old clunkers (or whose children did).
I remember when I got my B.A. and thought to myself that all I needed was $500/mo. net, and I’d be fine. That was a loooooong time ago. But, yeah, I’ve done the same thinking you’ve done.
I don’t know how it happens, but it has happened to me, too. I guess as your responsibilities grow, so do your financial needs.
The more you make, the more you spend, the more you need.
Up to an arbitrary point of course, but of course some people will take it ad infinitum. But the cheap ramen noodles you were good with at 19 while going to school and working at a part-time job, are far less attractive when you’re 45 and making some kind of decent salary. The crappy but cheap flat in a bad neighborhood that you shared with four roommates at 19 (one a passive-aggressive neat freak, one a mentally-ill ball of anger, a third that refused to bath regularly and the fourth guy that was okay, I guess), ditto. That rusty Datsun 510 with the holes drilled into the bottom of the doors to let out rainwater, ditto. And on and on.
Living better and/or having a family absorbs a lot and the grass is always greener until you hit your personal limit. I was just talking to someone the other day about I can no longer stand cheap-ass Hershey’s chocolate. In many, many ways I’ve become a snobby elitist. A rising income has facilitated or even created that and trapped me into a love of (very modest) luxury.
Not to mention as you get older and wealthier some costs just happen that never would have occurred to your 23YO self. My wife’s MS meds are $60k a year. The insurance that covers that combined with our house, vehicle and liability coverage is running almost a grand a month. When I was 23 I had a beater with minimum insurance and not enough belongings to even have renter’s insurance. You’ve probably also seen someone you know/love need long term medical care by your fifties. My mom’s care before she died was about $30k a month… Kind of changes your outlook.
I’ve known a lot of wealthy people (I do/did construction in resort towns) and many are deeply unhappy and insecure, especially in the “mid-wealthy” zone, like $30M to $50M net worth, trying to keep up with Joneses. I know a few VERY wealthy folks, and they are very driven, but seem perhaps a little happier. Most of their kids, however, are truly fucked up.
I bought my house 30 years ago. I now live here with my Wife of 25 years. The house is paid for.
We buy cars that we NEED to live here, and drive them into the ground. both are paid for.
What we are going to do in our early 60’s is take more extravagant vacations. First class all the way. While we are still ‘agile’ and can move around. Maybe a riverboat cruise. I donno. My dear Wife is looking at those. Or the British Isles or something.
I take care of the house, my Wife takes care of vacations. We each have our strengths, and weaknesses. She and I are fine with that, and it works very well. We just share the finances we have. Because it is BOTH of ours.
What would bother me would be the idea that you couldn’t participate in human interaction in this group unless you were also participating in the costly/complex dress up game.
It’s largely implied by your OP and comments by other posters, whether you realize it or not. What I mean is that the tone of “work” (meaning your labor) is negative. Something that you do begrudgingly or under threat of economic coercion in order to make enough money to pay your bills. If you can tolerate working more hours, you will make more money. If you had more money, you wouldn’t need to work and could do stuff you want to do. Very transactional.
My point is that “rich people”, by which I specifically mean the driven entrepreneurial businessmen you describe and those who emulate them, don’t think like that. They have a burning desire to shape the world to their vision, Elon Musk doesn’t want people looking for a 9 to 5. Those people can go work a cushy government contract for Boeing or something. He wants people who want to work 100 hours a week to invent a rocket to Mars. These are the sort of people who quit college to start their own companies. They don’t care about the “right schools” or the “right country clubs” until they are wealthy enough to buy them.
Yeah I kind of miss the days of living in a roach-hole (literally) 1 BR apartment on the outskirts of Boston in my 20s. Not that I’d actually want to live there now. But I kind of miss having no need or expectations of extravagance.
And these are very good reasons that we should limit their ability to get what they want lest they change societal expectations or desired standards for employer-employee relationships.
In other words, no employer should be allowed to set hiring standards based on an expectation that E wants es employees to work a moment more than is set forth by labor law.
I’m not sure what you mean by this - as far as I know, there is no Federal law that limits how many hours someone can work, just that some people have to be paid time-and-a-half if they work more than forty hours in a week.
So there are two kinds of people in this world: those passionately driven to perform their chosen task with superhuman dedication and lazy wage-slaves who want only to earn a subsistence wage, begrudgingly. Nothing in between, according to you.
I’m not buying this, “It’s not about the money.” In business, increased profit is a fundamental component of doing the work. That is the sole purpose of a corporation. If you are a businessman who loves your work, you must love making money.
Now I get how someone could love doing that in the abstract. I work, after all, in the development arm of a nonprofit, and I find it fantastically interesting and dynamic work to come up with strategies to increase our funding. And it feels great when the money rolls in. Revenue is such a concrete way to measure success.
I love making money. No way in hell billionaires don’t love making money.
Sometimes people really enjoy their work, but after putting decades into it, they really would like to relax. I absolutely love my work but I 100% can relate to the OP. If we inherited a bunch of money, I’d probably keep my job, but once I’m 60, 65 years old? Time to go do something else, maybe something with less pressure, or something I can pace myself at. For me in particular it’s going to be writing and publishing novels. Or woodworking, I’ve always wanted to do that. Gardening? The sky’s the limit. You can be passionate about something without it being the only thing.
So I guess that’s something I don’t find relatable: Wanting to do the same thing forever.
I think you actually can - it’s just that maybe you don’t think of those things as “jobs” . I bet if you had published your first novel in your 20s and were able to support yourself with your writing , you would probably be writing until you no longer could.
I can sort of relate to the OP - I did retire almost as soon as I could. But a lot of that was because of things related to having a job, not to the work itself - there’s a reason that most (not all) of the people I have known who kept working long after normal retirement age who didn’t need the money were “business owners”. I’m not saying they were billionaires, because they weren’t - but some were still involved in the family business they owned, even while their son or daughter did the day-to-day work of running the business. Others are doctors/lawyers/dentists/social workers with a private practice. I think that reason is because those situations give them the freedom to work as much or as little as they want to, without having to deal with anyone else’s expectations - they have neither a boss nor stockholders. But I don’t buy billionaires who are the CEO of multiple companies doing it for reasons other than the money.
For me the question is whether money and power can be distinguished. Lots of CEOs make money without being billionaires and some seem to think as money as validation of their genius whether they’re billionaires or not. (Billionaires as a shorthand term doesn’t work well for me. Only a handful of people are known as being capital B Billionaires. The press rarely talks about the other 99%, yet plenty of the merely hugely rich get lumped in with the 1% of the 1%.)
Looking back at history, people at the top of their particular industries were obsessed with power even the ones at smaller firms who had loads but weren’t among the Forbes 400. The vast majority of them worked as long as they possibly could. Biographies almost uniformly depict them as tyrants, which they could afford to be because they had money and control. Studies keep showing that 10-20% of CEOs are psychopathic, which is several times the percentage in the general population. (That percentage is of course disputed, with various definitions of the word and various studies coming up with different numbers.)
People can achieve control without huge wealth. Psychopaths succeed in every sector. Even if merely 1% of adult men are psychopaths, as some estimates hold, that’s 1.5 million just in the U.S.
Talking about the extremes of power and control as something just generated by wealth and working hard is pretty much missing the point. Billionaires sublimate psychopathy by succeeding in societally sanctioned behavior. An even higher percentage of the prison population appear to be psychopaths.
If you’re happy to live a small life, congratulations, you’re probably not a psychopath. You’re just flawed in some other way, though, because everybody is.
“My” dentist is semi-retired, working one day a week in the successful family business he founded and is now run by one of his sons. He does it for a little extra cash and a bit like a hobby. But he now refuses to do any seriously stressful work. Fillings, caps - sure. For him that’s a spot of undemanding fun. Serious root canals - no thank you. Nice when that option is afforded to you.
But my job IS largely transactional as msmith537 defined it. I’m decently skilled at it and my ability is modestly valued by at least my immediate couple layers of supervision. But I am already looking forward to walking away from it and I’m planning to be able to do so without resorting to any other paid work afterwards. I’ve honestly never particularly enjoyed a second of it 
.
I made pretty much your claim early on here, and was told flat out that it’s a myth. Yep yep.