So, we have all heard all the quotes from great people saying that the people who are rich aren’t the really happy people, but those who follow their dreams and stuff are the TRULY happy people.
But…one the other hand, we realize money IS an object (as proved by my thread here.
So what’s the deal? How do we follow our dreams and not end up in the poor house, which is inherently depressing and horrible?
Rambling:
I don’t think people who follow their dreams without planning for the future at all are very happy in the long run. They may have a good time early on when they’re studying acting or WW2 European history, but eventually the bills come due. When you’re 60 years old with no savings in the bank and still working as a waiter because you couldn’t break into acting or academia, your golden years start to look pretty bleak.
Nor do I think rich people are inherently unhappy. They can be unhappy if they focus on gathering wealth to the exclusion of other things in life, but a lot of times the things they do that generate their wealth also make them happy. People like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are (or were, as the case may be) filthy rich, but they got that way by changing the world as they saw fit; that’s gotta be a pretty powerful feeling. And now that Gates is filthy rich, he’s turning his wealth toward philanthropic ends, presumably because it makes him happy.
Two friends of mine, both engineers, recently completed MBA’s. One was motivated primarily by the higher salary he could command; maybe he’ll be happy, maybe he won’t, I guess it depends on how he divides his time and passion between career and family, since his career seems to be primarily about money. The other, though, was motivated by the desire to start something. With the extra knowledge he’s gained of how to run a business, he wants to create jobs in Michigan, something we badly need here. He will become wealthy as his career progresses, but I think he will also be happy because he is creating something of value for the rest of us.
As for the rest of us…
Didn’t Aristotle advise moderation in all things? Can we find some middle ground in our lives?
Years ago a wise tour guide in Mexico once told our group that we all ought to feel very lucky in life that we had three big resources that allowed us to be there that day:
-health
-wealth
-time
He was right, and I’ve often found myself thinking about that. Some people struggle with two or even all three of those things, but nearly everyone struggles with the wealth issue in one way or another. The most common problem seems to be mismanaging your wealth so that it’s not available when you need it, but a few people have the opposite problem: they become penny-pinchers, always saving for the future and never living in the present. Then when they retire, they have great wealth, but either their health is failing or they find that they can’t break their lifelong penny-pinching habit.
Find the middle ground. Save aggressively early in your professional career, and if you do it right, you can reduce (but not eliminate) your saving rate well before retirement. Now you have wealth, and you still have health and time. Even then though, you will have to find dreams that fit within your budget. That’s reality, and there’s not much you can do about that. Example, several years ago I briefly looked into the possibility of amateur road rally racing. I quickly shitcanned that idea as I realized how incredibly expensive it would be. Instead I decided to stick to motorcycle sport-touring; I could afford a top-of-the-line sport-touring bike, and riding/maintaining it was something that wouldn’t break my budget.
Career? My dad’s advice was to choose a career that promises a decent income, and maintain your less lucrative passions as hobbies. You like acting? Instead of getting a BA in theatre arts and then struggling to make ends meet, maybe pursue a business or nursing degree - something that will let you get a job and start earning money right away - and then get involved in community theatre on nights and weekends. You’re still pursuing your dreams this way, but you’ll also be able to live comfortably and squirrel away money for the future. You like sports? Play on the school team, but don’t abandon your studies, because the odds of you turning pro are very, very slim.
It’s one thing to accept some risk in pursuit of your dreams - life is pretty bland if you don’t take some risk - but it’s foolhardy to pursue your dreams with wild abandon and an unrealistic/nonexistent plan for how to navigate through the rest of your life with a high probability of financial security.
slow clap
That’s really cool man. As a kid moving into real adulthood, its hard for me to imagine what real life after college would be; what I’d spend my time doing, if I’d actually get that job I’ve been looking at, what type of woman I’ll find. While I’m not wild, out-of-this-world crazy for the job I’m pursuing, I’ll be happy doing it and it’ll give me more than enough funds to DJ and rock climb my heart out. I just see the people around me in the area I live in who always claim they’re gonna get out of this town when they get older, and then they just never do. Its always about money or making ends meet right now. I feel like there, at a certain point, you may just need to make sacrifices to be in a place where you can really prosper and do something good.
This was an important plot point in the movie Collateral. Jamie Foxx’s character is a cab driver who has a dream of starting his own luxury cab company someday…except someday is always indefinitely far away, and he always has some reason not to make the leap.
Wow… I have a hellacious and dead-center reply for you, but it’s still several months from publication.
In very very short, you can do something that is meaningful or important to you with your life, and not suffer consequences like being broke at 65, if you abandon the idea that the purpose of life is to continuously acquire more. The idea that there is a choice between “doing what you love” and some ill-defined “real life” comes only from the notion that we have to strive for every possible dollar that could be captured.
Live a less-expensive life, “work” only as much as you need to support that - not overlooking your late-life financial needs - and spend the rest of your time at what you prefer. Chosen well, it should not be hard to combine “work” and “love.”
I used to want to get rich so I could do the things I wanted to do. Then I discovered the means of getting rich available to me was not what I wanted to do. Then I realized money wasn’t really that important. Since then I’ve been falling over backwards into money. Had I continued to consider money important I would have made it multiply and become quite rich. But I’m sure that my luck would turn if I did that, so I didn’t. I’m now well off, got to do most of the things I ever wanted to do, and I’m still not happy. I doubt I’ll ever be happy anyway, it’s just not in my personality. So the moral of the story is… well, I have no idea. Things aren’t supposed to work that way. Which is maybe the moral of the story, you’ll have what you have, and you’ll have to live with it.
Obligatory link to The Fisherman Story.
There is also a saying that the best way to ruin a perfectly good hobby is to turn it into your career.
Our society seems to place an emphasis on aligning your dreams with your career. But who really dreams of working in accounts payables in some giant corporation? I do know people who have made careers out of being full-time professional musicians or Broadway performers. But these are careers with relatively short windows for figuring out if you will be successful or not. If you are still in your 30s scraping by while waiting tables, maybe you should start thinking about going back to business school.
Making money is pretty nice though.
The Fisherman Story overlooks one thing – the villagers have something that the tourist desires. It’s not like everyone can lay back and just enjoy themselves in such an environment.
I’d utterly disagree; our society places almost 100% emphasis on maximizing our lifetime earnings; anyone who chooses any lesser rung at any point is looked at as an oddball.
Probably no one, even those slogging through business school with precisely that aim… because it’s among the highest-paying options within their grasp.
Choose a less-expensive life that isn’t based on spearing every dollar that might blow your way, and the possibilities become endless.
I don’t think you can follow your dream and make the most money (unless that is your dream) but you can certainly do it and make enough money, even plenty of money. It all depends on what your dreams are. Mine have been things that I can only do within a big company, but which have paid me pretty well.
You also need to adapt as you see what your dreams are really like. I had this fantasy about being a big exec, but when I got a chance at playing at second level manager, discovered I hated that kind of stuff, I gave up money, no doubt, but I am a lot happier this way.
Sure, some dreams are impractical, some are out of reach of the dreamer (I can dream of being Eric Clapton all I want, but there would have to be a cure for tone-deafness before I could get close), and some might mean you are poor. But it is possible to be happy and reasonably well to do.
Actually a lot of tech companies have dual rungs, one for management and one for technical. There are more spots on the management rung, but those who eschew it for the technical rung are not looked down on at all, in fact even envied.
Not quite what I meant; I don’t imagine there is too much overlap in career paths between those who prefer tech over management, or vice versa. Certainly many careers branch into “management” at some level.
I mean rungs on an individual’s ladder - and choosing any next rung but the one tied to the highest possible income, er, outcome is almost never regarded as anything but a failing, a noble sacrifice, or the act of a wacko. Certainly as unusual and requiring explanation.
I don’t know about that. I started taking martial arts lessons for fun and exercise and general health. I just got promoted to Sixth Degree Black Belt and have been accepted as a candidate for Master training. My goal is to grow my school large enough to where I can cut back, or quit, my daytime job as a database administrator (which I also love) and teach Taekwondo pretty much full-time.
There’s some truth to it. You might really enjoy baking fancy cakes for friends and family, but going into business doing it for a demanding public could easily make it a bore and a chore. Or you might be an exceptional home handyman, but doing it as a trade might be a living hell.
I do believe people should choose a career path that follows some genuine talent or interest. I’ve known too many people who essentially spend 8 hours a day in a torture chamber and live only to get away from work - and I don’t think it has to be that way, for anyone. It’s often a result of having the wrong priorities hammered into you.
I think when you are young you tend to align “work” and “happiness” on the same plane. You want to do what you studied in school, perhaps. However, as you get older, and layers of responsibility get layered-on, you come to realize that you can find things that make you happy outside of work, and if you are fortunate, you can pursue those things while work continues to provide security for you and your responsibilities. Then, work becomes just a means to an end. I am not saying that happens for everyone, but I think most people make this transition in their career at some point.
“There is no better than here. When your there has become a here, you simply obtain another there than again looks better than here.”
Your job may just be an enabling mechanism to your dreams.
One of my dreams is to put my kids through college with no debt. Yeah, it isn’t a very exciting dream to a twenty something starting out, but let me tell you, it’s a dream that rocks the world of a lot of parents. That means I do a job that isn’t exactly my dream, but lets me live comfortably and achieve the other dream.
Another dream is to be able to travel when I retire. It isn’t practical to do so now (those kids make travel really expensive), and will involve some savings.
Those kids themselves were a dream. As was my marriage. Keeping the kids and the marriage secure involves financial security. Maintaining that dream means a job.
You aren’t suppose to follow your dreams all the time…if you are really lucky, you might. But most of us follow our dreams in evenings and weekends. Or our dreams are broader in scope than “how I spend my days.”
In all the places I’ve worked, the managers all came from technical backgrounds - and mostly they were very smart. But in general the technical ladder stops at a lower level than the management one, so someone staying on it is probably giving up money.
A lot of companies have flattened their organizations so much that there are a lot fewer management than their used to be. The average manager has 16 high level engineers.
Now refusing a promotion might be considered dumb. But that’s something else.
Money may not buy happiness, but poverty buys a whole lot of misery.
I think that finding happiness and fulfillment through pursuing one’s dreams works for only a few people. For every Oprah Winfrey there are millions for whom life is a series of compromises (and actually, Oprah has had to make compromises, too). And if you think about it, things have to be this way. It’s no one’s dream to be a supermarket clerk, but the world needs supermarket clerks. It simply isn’t possible for everyone to achieve all of their dreams. In fact, many people don’t even have any particular dreams. They have things they like, but a lot of people never find some grand purpose to their lives.
I worry that the ideal of “pursuing your dreams” has put a new name on an old societal neurosis, where people are looked down on or made to feel guilty for accepting that life requires compromises, or for simply being average. This is similar to the goal of “having it all” that came with the feminist movement - a goal that made many women miserable as they tried to achieve the impossible.
You’re a guy; why would you pull the feminist movement into it? Women wanted to work. Some had to work. There’s sympathy for single dads but women do that kind of thing every day. Are we over-reaching if we strive to meet our responsibilities? One of those responsibilities is to ourselves.
That being said, because of various threads about What Would You Do If…? I’ve come to realize that, given the money, I’d basically be doing the same thing but on a larger scale.
I had a hard time in my mid-twenties when a few good friends of mine moved away to Montreal to earn their masters in music. I chose instead to stay home and teach in the public school system. They were having so much fun and it seemed their skill set was becoming much better than mine. Fast forward seven years, and now they pine for the things I have had, a steady job and regular income. They even question what they learned in school and if it really got them anything (except for debt).
The beauty for me is that I have the resources to study music with anyone anywhere on my own without going to school due to the miracle of skype. In a sense I can have my cake and eat it too. I often wish I had gone into a more lucrative career than education because I would be even further ahead in this regard (having a steady income and pursuing my dreams). Like others have said, there needs to be a balance in our lives regarding our commitments, familys, careers, and dreams. I am very glad though I decided to have a job and pursue music in my spare time (even though my job still includes music! I guess that is a bonus!)
I must be feeling better about my job these days. Funny how things change over time.