Tag: life

What would you do if you won the lottery?

~ Veselin ~ 12 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What would you do if you won the lottery?
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A fellow blogger Dr. Victor Bodo wrote about the types of happiness. He identified 4 types of happiness by origin – coming from pleasure, from purpose, from spirituality, and one from following a wise path. Lottery winnings can greatly impact the first type of happiness. However, I don’t think they can make me younger, smarter, healthier, wiser, or more connected to the family and community, leaving the 3 other types of happiness unchanged or at risk.

I once met a lottery winner while standing in line for bread. Those who have lived in communism know that shortages were common, and waiting in long lines for basic stuff was a daily chore. In my case, it was bread. An old man stood in front of me, loudly sharing the story of his life. Years ago, he had won the national lottery, with the prize being a large apartment. Winning didn’t spare him from aging—or from standing in line like everyone else.

So, in case I won the lottery, I think I’d rather invest the winnings and live a normal life than surrender to a life of luxury and riches. I might get myself an electric car 🙂

Last year I blogged that I think money can’t make you happier beyond a certain limit. I still believe it.

Do you remember life before the internet?

~ Veselin ~ 22 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?

I do, I’m old enough. The birthday of the Internet is officially 1983. I was 3 years old in 1982, a first-year kindergarten kid. My parents lived outside of Sofia because of permit issues – socialism regulated who lived where and they didn’t have permission to stay in Sofia. We lived in a rented bungalow in a village nearby that had running water but no bathroom. I was banned from visiting the toilet because my parents were afraid I’d fall in. We had flowers, trees, and a manual water pump. I remember that I ate the dandelions. The puddles had frogs. We were told touching the frogs would cause warts, so the interaction was with sticks and stones (no frogs were harmed). We had a small hill that was good for sleds in the winter. A train line was not far, and we had to walk by the tracks to reach the kindergarten.

The Web was invented in 1994, birthing a prototype of the modern Internet and many supergiant services. I was already hooked to computers by 1994. We had 8-bit computers at school, and I studied programming with Basic (ignore the first paragraph on that post). We also had computer clubs where kids could watch how other kids played, which was almost as good as playing yourself. Smoking was permitted inside so you could cut the thick gray air like cheese. I spent my summers around the chess bridge club in Stara Zagora which had 20-ish XT and 80286 computers.

Both milestones I associate with the freedom to roam around and having lots of free time away from my parents. Sofia and Stara Zagora had fewer cars, and it was considered safe to let your kid play on the street with other kids without supervision. I was allowed to go to school by myself from 1st grade when I was 6, a right my kids are deprived of by law. Culturally, we got our highs from books, VHS videos, and audio cassettes. The influencers existed but spoke from the TV, rather than social media.

I’d say, life was simpler and not necessarily better or worse. I like my hot water and inside toilet, the Macbook Air, and the WIFI but playing football every day was also great. And can we get rid of the cars? That was such a civilisation-level mistake.

What sacrifices have you made in life?

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What sacrifices have you made in life?

I’ve made plenty of choices where I wanted two things incompatible with one another and chose one. I don’t feel like any of that was a sacrifice, I treat it as a choice.

For example, I returned to the university in my late 20s way outside of the ordinary university age because I realized I had too many gaps in my coding & engineering skills. In the following years, I combined full-time office work (with flexible hours, thanks to my former boss) with a relatively demanding education. It’d be common to leave home before 7am for a morning lecture, drive to work, work for 6-7 hours, and then go to the university for an evening session. But although physically exhausting, it felt great and I had a purpose. It was worth the effort.

I’m trying to not look at the loss after a bad choice with too much emotion when possible. The reason is primarily work. When deploying a new change, there’s always a risk that I overlooked something and caused major harm. You need to be willing to do these things despite the possible negative outcome, otherwise you won’t ever move. Many if not all of the beautiful things in life are hidden behind a wall of risk – choosing a career path, falling in love, having kids, investing. So many things can go wrong at every step. This is not a reason to stay home and not make any steps. Once things go wrong, revert (if possible), identify what’s affected, write a plan, execute, learn, and move on. This is an oversimplification taken from the software world but I believe in it.

So no sacrifices for me. Choices.

A risk to regret

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I’ve noticed that the two most common sources of regret for my last 20-30 years of experience are:

  • Missed opportunities
  • Coulda/Woulda/Shoulda thinking when a disaster strikes and I didn’t see it coming

The risks taken that paid off – what would I regret? For example, when taking my first mortgage, it felt like a great risk. The payment was a significant portion of my salary at the time, the period was long, and the apartment we bought was not great but we couldn’t afford anything better. The interest rate was high, and the seller had some non-disclosed debt and some people wanted their money back. It ended up fine, we renovated the property over the years and resolved the issues. Turned it into a home.

When I take a risk that doesn’t pay off, I also seem to not regret it if it was a deliberate informed choice taken without influence. I stopped insuring my previous car for theft and accidents. It got stolen. The saved premiums for 3 or 4 years didn’t cover the loss of value. Did I have regrets? I didn’t. I made a choice based on the amount of time I lost each year to deal with things like paint damage and vandalism. Covering the cost myself would’ve been cheaper and quicker than going through the insurer and the police on every occurrence. The same happened with previous vehicles, none of which were stolen. It didn’t pay off last time but I felt zero regret because it felt like it was an expected, although unlikely result of my math.

Most of the time when I felt regret, I didn’t see the negative outcome coming at all even if there were obvious signs in retrospect. For example, I played basketball. A second later I was on the ground with a dislocated knee. I didn’t see it coming. Lots of coulda/woulda/shoulda followed. However, the outcome was predictable, and the risk was taken when I agreed to play with unfamiliar clumsy kids. I blogged about bias, assumptions, and intuition, a couple of times this year.

Can money make you happier?

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

Lack of money can make you unhappy but does more money above a certain threshold bring happiness? No.

I’ll try to prove that with pseudo-math and book references.

First, can we have a functional relationship between money and happiness? Is there a function Happiness = f(money) where the curve is logarithmic? It’s clear that whatever the relationship is, it is not a curve. Plenty of rich people are on social media and they look busy, and some of them are miserable, not happy. At the same time, there has to be a monk out there with zero money and powerful spirituality close to Nirvana.

Obvious correlations exist elsewhere.

Age

There’s a clear relationship between Age and Happiness. Kids are as happy as a human can be, and so are the elderly (source). Who’s the unhappiest? Working-age adults, and the older they are, the unhappier. The chart with wealth? Almost the opposite (source).

Although correlation doesn’t mean causation, you can say that if Happiness = f(a, b, ...n), one of the parameters is age.

The high of shiny new things

Money can get you items and experiences. More money can get you more items and more pleasant experiences. Purchases make us happy by releasing endorphins and dopamine, and also perhaps by improving our lifestyle a little bit. However:

  • The high we can possibly get from a purchase is limited by our brain chemistry
  • The high from shopping is a function of anticipation and uncertainty. A kid saving a year for an iPad would get a lot more than a billionaire purchasing a new Ferarri. A sandwich tastes better when you are hungry.
  • It’s easy to improve the lifestyle if you’re deprived but hard to do if your needs are met

We can experiment with that – write in a journal how happy you felt from buying different items. An expensive purchase, like a new car, can be no better than a pair of shoes that fit well. A new iPhone can be equal to a cold Coke Zero on a hot summer day or worse. This topic is a can of worms that inspired marketers and philosophers to write books over the last 3 centuries. The satisfaction is measurable, limited, and based on things like goals, needs, risk, and anticipation, not only the price paid.

The curse of the lottery winners

The high increase in income puts people in situations for which they are not prepared to be and pulls them outside of their social circle. A good and very scientific book on the subject is The Winner by David Baldacci. It shows details on the catastrophic impact of quick money on people stating that the vast majority of lottery winners go bankrupt within 2-3 years of their win. The same can be seen with sports stars. Many of them fail once they enter the life of expensive cars, parties, and financially motivated partners in all areas of life – from intimate to business. Another nice fiction book on the subject is Sooley by John Grisham.

So, watching lottery winners and sports stars shows us that the quick exponential growth in wealth comes with changes in social circles and personal life that negatively impact happiness. What about slow growth, that gives people time to adjust and find new social circles? That should work! However, the threshold may never be reached, and the question assumes an imaginary threshold above which no added amount of money makes the person happier.

Before and after ambition

It’s human to compete and strive for more, however, it’s not universally true for all ages.

Would a 1-year-old be happier if they had lots of money, a leather stroller, and servants? They’d likely be happy if they were healthy, dry pants, fed, loved, and slept well. What about a 100-year-old person? Would they be happier if they were the world’s first trillionaire? They’d probably be happiest if they were healthy, well-cared, loved, with good memories of a meaningful life.

Ambition likely is part of the equation for happiness, and so is having a purpose in life.

Recent studies

A great article on the subject was published today that shares the insights by a research group that includes Daniel Kahneman. It mentions two amounts of money that cap happiness – $75K calculated in 2010 and $500K from 2023. Whatever the cap is, the researchers estimated not one but two. I would take the amount with a grain of salt but their overall conclusions matched my expectations.

The search for happiness is related to money up to a point. Other factors have a stronger impact – relationships, health, love, faith, purpose in life, ambition, and so on. Happiness may not be a good life goal at all. I wrote an essay about the Sense of Purpose 6 years ago, and I still believe it.