Hate Your Job
For those of you in industries like software: it’s very easy to stop working. At $1m saved, you can comfortably withdraw 3%&#x2F;year forever. $30,000&#x2F;year stipend on top of whatever passion thing makes you money is more than enough to live a modest life almost anywhere in the world. You won’t be eating at Michelin star places and you won’t have a palace, but you can comfortably live a decent quiet life in an out of the way place with a tiny rental, home cooked food, and maybe a cat. Want to be a tour guide in Iceland? All the other tour guides are surviving without that $30k stipend. Want to plant trees and sell homemade pots on Etsy? Same deal.<p>If you save to $2m, then that’s $60,000&#x2F;year, already you are beating the median American <i>family</i>. This is the point where, for me, I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn’t working like a dog to survive. I was doing it to have more stuff.<p>If you graduate college at 22 making $200k&#x2F;year and never get a raise; $1m by 30 should be no sweat.<p>So now that we’ve disposed of engineers, finance folks, and a few other white collar disciplines, what about everybody else? It seems clear that the big problem facing us on an economic perspective is that most people are economically extremely low value. Somehow, before <i>all</i> people are economically extremely low value, we have to figure out how to get to the Star Trek future. That, I have no idea how to do.