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Comment by Xurinos | Hacker News Reader

Yes, of course I do, and the generalizations here are gross and condescending. You will not convince me that I do not want this.

I lean towards the Comfort angle, but I also start tinkering and producing when I am bored, so I could hardly be considered to walk the lazy path. I look for freedom from lower-level concerns so as to begin address higher-level needs. Money provides a layer of abstraction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

I am sure someone can link to the study that refuted the "money can't buy happiness" claim.

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If you're talking about the same study I'm thinking of then its conclusion was that "money can buy happiness but usually doesn't" because you need to spend the money on experiences rather than things, and spending money on things is vastly easier.

I was going to reply myself, but you've basically said exactly what I was thinking.

Some of us enjoy what we do, but would rather have a self-sustaining lifestyle that lets us do what we enjoy doing not because we have to, but because we want to.

"Money provides a layer of abstraction."

Wonderful way of saying it. Maybe it doesn't quite make sense, but I'm a sucker for applying technical concepts to more domestic concerns ;-)

It seems to make perfect sense. Its like storing and retrieving objects in a database. You can do it by hand, but its more of a pain -- better to leave it to something else and use the abstraction: storeData(key,value), retreiveData(key). We can directly map this to nice shirts. Normally one has to buy and iron shirts, which is a pain. (assuming you don't like buying or ironing). Now if you have a lot of money, you can pay someone to abstract that all away. You just look in your closet and grab whatever shirt you want. At the end of the day you just put it in the dirty clothes bin, and poof magically it will appear clean and ironed again in the closet. Money provides the person who abstracts the mechanisms that allow the shirt to exist. We could even do this experiment to harvesting the cotton, producing the shirt etc, which is abstracted away using money as trade for the various levels in the manufacturing.. mmm.

I don't think you could ever have an amount of money you couldn't do anything with. Even if you had $100 billion, as Bill Gates shows their is plenty you can do with it.

I think I would head down the spaceX path if I even became mega rich. If government no longer wish to fund space exploration it would be great to take up that role and push humanity forward. You could never have enough money with a pursuit like this.

"Money provides a layer of abstraction"

This is so true.

For those who say that getting money for the sake of getting money is a useless pursuit, no, it isn't. No one who isn't already rich is getting money strictly for the sake of getting money. They are doing it for an infinite number of reasons. Caricaturing them into rat-racey participants of Lifestyles Of The Rich and Famous, simply because they want to be rich, is despicable. Money is like energy. Just because I'm interested in acquiring a gigawatt of energy doesn't mean I want to use it for smelting aluminium. I can use energy for an infinite number of activities. That's why I want to be rich. It allows me to easily pick and choose what I want to do, without specializing in doing just that.

Pedantry: a gigawatt is a unit of power, not energy. Perhaps you meant a gigawatt-hour? :)

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