Relationships, interesting purposeful work, and travel has been what I have found to be the most rewarding. Basically experiences over things.
As someone a hair's breath away from 40 I can tell you it is if you don't have it. I see my body starting to creak and groan, witness Silicon Valley's blatant ageism, take an honest look at my ability to continue to earn into my 60s, take a frightened peek at my wholly inadequate retirement account, and find myself wishing I did more of that "pursuit of wealth" and less "travel and purpose" earlier on in my life.
I'll be happy to do "enlightenment and purpose" when I'm confident that I won't have to choose between dog food and back medicine when I inevitably get old.
I lived on the east coast for years, and I'd happily move back in a heartbeat, but I'd be a nervous wreck every time it looked like another downturn was coming and I might have to scramble to find another job.
The places that scare me are places like Chicago & Atlanta. Outside of Chicago, there's virtually nothing. Outside of Atlanta, it's the same, which usually means moving across the country for something.
You can easily live in SV for under $100k/year. You can earn >$200k as an engineer in SV (and in few other places). SV is almost certainly going to leave you with more money in your pocket than working at the average tech job.
I am a fairly mediocre engineer. I have less than a decade of experience and have never worked at a "top" company. Yet I earned over $200k last year.
You can downplay your expertise, but from reading the About of morgante.net you have plenty of accolades, programming contributions, winning the 2013 ArabNet developer tournament and receiving awards from MIT, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, starting various companies, and even an investment fund. You are very much in a top minority percentage making $200,000 a year with under ten years experience.
I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not the big ones or unicorns.
$111,885 average [1]
$110,554 average [2]
$103,000 average [3]
I know this is HN, where everyone makes $150K and has $1M in savings and a supermodel girlfriend, but in the real world I think things are a little different.
1: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-facebook-dont-pay-the-...
2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
3: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
And how big does your fuck you fund and/or financial stability in general have to be to be able to say No to uninteresting unpurposeful work?
And how much do you need to both pay for travel and to be able to afford the time to travel?
Wealth accumulation is freedom accumulation. You need the freedom to lead a purposeful rewarding life. You can't do that, if your days are consumed by struggling to make ends meet.
A lot of modern inspiremotivationstuff neglects that part.
Would your thirties be as fulfilling as they are if you hadn't spent your twenties in pursuit of wealth? I'd guess not.
Paycheck to Paycheck - getting fired mean, being unable to pay for housing & food.
3 months savings - bills can be paid at once, a lay off puts pressure on one to really jump on the job search.
1 years savings - termination doesn't scare one, but thinking about taking a 1 year sabbatical, while nice, also means that torwards the end of the sabbatical, one must hope /plan apply for jobs after some period of 6-11 months or so. Strict budgeting is paramount.
5 years savings - termination and paying bills has no day-to-day thoughts. One can ponder of maybe dumping that savings into a startup, but if the startup doesn't pan out, one may be in one of the aforementioned states.
10 years savings - one can consider never working again if they reduce their draw down rate to last indefinitely.
20+ years savings - One could try a startup, lose 10 years of savings, and really not worry about anything.
I think people wouldn't necessarily have a problem working indefinitely, if they could participate in a lifestyle business where hours are flexible, workdays are shorter, weekends are longer, commutes are minimized or optional, vacations are plentiful and the pay is above average. For a lot of programmers at large institutions, this is pretty possible if one can find the right boss and company with policies that allow for this. how long these kinds of cushy positions will last is the question.
I make a good living for my area but have nowhere near $1.3MM liquid or even my entire net worth. Getting and extra $500k would not give me any peace of mind or security that I don't already have.
I have not been able to find meaningful/purposeful work in any organization. The life lessons I've learned can basically be summarized as: there is no such thing as purposeful work for which you are paid a wage, and businesses rarely extract meaningful labor out of you. Businesses are rarely punished for being unproductive, and most effort within any organization is spent intensely focused on politics, both internal and external, to ensure the business can create Dutch books and survive any possible outcome without needing to actually be productive.
The closer you get to pure knowledge work, the worse all of these effects become. In my field, machine learning and statistics, it is about as bad as it can possibly be. Because policy is ostensibly supposed to be based on evidence and sound, statistical reasoning, and it's very fashionable right now to try to characterize all aspects of business planning as if they are "data driven", all that it means is that the corporate politicians now hawkishly focus on statistics/machine learning and "science" as the means by which they control politics.
It unequivocally does not mean that businesses are actually shifting to truly be more scientific in their decision making, nor are they less wasteful, less driven by prestige or politics, less hyper-focused on short-term thinking, etc. If anything, firms are worse on all of these dimensions, and waste vast sums of money setting up big data infrastructure than truly does nothing but give glossy data visualization facades that decisions are somehow being made based on hard data.
What it has taught me is somewhat of the inverse of what you say.
I agree that pursuit of material wealth and power is uninteresting and highly unfulfilling. The problem is that pursuit of meaningful work turns out to be even more uninteresting and even more unfulfilling and you simply end up poorer and sounding like a burnt out crank.
You are probably better off (if you can; I unfortunately cannot) sublimating away any desire for creative, autonomous, meaningful, purposeful, or interesting work -- simply delete that from your genome with hardcore unhealthy repression. Then try to amass enough wealth doing horrible, horrible politics as you can to retire early, start your own small business, or something else where you are personally in charge of what you do and where you don't have a need for anyone else to pay you for your labor output.
The one part I will agree with you on is to definitely value relationships. Whether you are burning yourself out chasing the carrot of so-called meaningful work, or you are killing yourself slowly playing political games to get promotions and money, do not allow either toxin to infiltrate your personal life, and really try to slow your brain down and savor the moments you have with family, friends, and loved ones.
I think business == brainfucked by politics. That is literally what you are compensated for. For some, it's a trade-off they are happy to make, and can be very lucrative. But you can't kid yourself that there is any possible way to pursue success in the business world, whether on your own by starting a company or by working up the ranks elsewhere, that does not ultimately bottom out at being paid solely for your ability to endure being brainfucked by politics.