It might be shorter to list the things I wouldn’t do. Believe me, $50 billion is way more money than I’d need to make self improvements. You could literally change the world for the better with that much money as a seed.
Just thinking selfishly, I’d free myself from my current job since it has no real future. It also eats up 46+ hours 6 days a week, and I have unpredictable overtime, so I’ve had little time outside of work to do anything useful for the last several years. Which is part of why I’m still at an undesirable, but decent-paying job.
I’d build homes in both Japan and the US so that my family has a stable base that we can call home instead of living in apartments and moving, on average, every 2 years or so. I’d clear all of my family member’s debts, on both my side and my wife’s; if my family members are happier and more stable, I’ll be happier too.
I’d go back to school and get at least a Masters in engineering or architecture, or microbiology with a bio-engineering focus. Considering that I majored in literature originally, and I currently have a wife and child to consider, it might take financial independence for me to have enough time so that I could actually finish one of those courses of study in any kind of reasonable time frame. I’d have to start from scratch, basically, even though I had some of the pre-reqs for undergrad courses covered in math and science when I was first considering an engineering major. Obviously should have stuck with that.
While I’ve been doing pretty well with my fitness goals on my own, anyone can benefit from a good trainer and nutritionist/cook. I would have a gym and dojo built at my homes, and given that my consistent hobbies have been some kind of exercise and martial arts even without the support of a trainer, I’m pretty sure they’d both get almost daily use.
I’d hire a language tutor for Japanese. I’m relatively fluent, having lived here long enough, but I’m acutely aware of gaping holes in my linguistic abilities. My wife is not a particularly patient teacher, and a student/teacher role is not a good relationship dynamic for most couples anyway.
I’d also start learning other languages. Probably Mandarin, German, French or Swahili, maybe Russian, and I’d bring up my Spanish to conversational levels again. Between those languages and my native English, I could probably have a decent conversation with just about anyone in the world including Africa as French or English covers most places, and Swahili anyplace the other two don’t.
I’d hire a couple of software engineers, start learning programming myself, and (finally) implement some of the software ideas that I’ve had floating around for the last few years. I’ve never been able to devote enough time to learning programming besides the very basics, which is nowhere near enough to implement the things I’d like to create.
I’d write more. I attempted to start a serious blog and kept it up during slack times, but work interferes with my writing schedule so much at unpredictable intervals that I often haven’t been able to update for a month or more. I’ve got a folder on my computer with literally a hundred topics I’d like to cover in depth, and time enough to maybe bang out a couple of paragraphs every couple of weeks at the level of quality I’d feel comfortable putting out in public. Fucking frustrating. (And before you snark, message board posts are held to a much lower standard than anything I’d attach my public identity to, so they take a lot less time.)
And of course I’d travel. A private plane would be ideal. I’d also like to get my pilot’s license. I first was interested when I was actually too young to solo before the ground school qualifications ran out, so it would be a most-of-my-lifetime dream to get qualified.
Stuff that would make me feel good and would meet some of my needs, but wouldn’t be strictly selfish:
I’d found a couple of training centers, hire some good trainers to design programs, and start a real fitness movement here in Japan. “Fitness” here is usually considered light cardio and yoga for women, serious bodybuilding for the insane few men who get into it, or distance running. There’s nothing in between the extremes. I know there are at least a few people interested because I’ve already started an informal fitness club, but I’m limited in what I can do personally with my very limited time and the readily available facilities. Small price to pay for some workout partners and a group of people I can use for some seriously fun athletic events.
I’d start some schools to teach more progressive techniques for teaching to educators, since education in Japan is horribly outdated in a lot of ways. Sure, a select few get great test scores, and the average level of testable ability is pushed higher through sheer time and persistence (Japanese schools have about 180 hours more during a school year due to Saturday classes) but few of those kids with high test scores know how to actually think, which is one of the many reasons why the elite university in Japan — Tokyo University — is an intellectual sinkhole compared to virtually any top university in the US or UK.
In learning Japanese I’ve found out that foreign teachers have vastly more effective ways of teaching the writing systems than the Japanese have ever developed. They teach kanji through brute-force memorization instead of mnemonics and other associative techniques. Even for the simpler syllabic writing systems, their teaching sucks.
Don’t even get me started on the dearth of critical thinking, writing and analysis, and scientific analysis skills that they don’t teach here. The math courses are good, but it’s all rote learning with no theory and few proofs. The science is the same. Linguistic skills even in Japanese aren’t taught for shit, and their foreign language study is famously among the worst in the world.
I’d start a couple of international schools, with courses taught at least bilingually (Japanese and English) and hopefully with supplementary language courses in several other languages. The Canadian bilingual education model is fairly good, from what I understand, so I’d hire some people familiar with how to implement that effectively. All of the education work would benefit my son and my community, so it’s not exactly altruistic.
In the same vein, I’d start a scholarship for Japanese teachers to study overseas. Right now, all the money goes into bringing foreigners here. It’s how I first came here. The problem is that the whole idea is flawed. I can’t change where that money goes, but with $50 billion, I could sure as hell pay for a bunch of English teachers to go overseas and in the process force them to actually learn to use English instead of just study its grammar and vocabulary.