part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I
guess?
There’s some oft-cited psychology studies that suggest that once your
salary goes above $75,000, additional money doesn’t make you happier.
This sounds like a sage bit of life advice if it were true, the ultimate
rebuff against excessive greed and materialism and sacrificing other
things for a six-digit salary, but it overstates the case a bit. 80,000
Hours’ analysis of money and happiness is probably the analysis I’d
trust the most here; I think it would be more accurate just to say that
you get diminishing returns of happiness from salaries above $70,000. Still, that was enough for me to
decide fairly early on that I wasn’t interested in trying to get a
high-paying job for its own sake, or in spending too much effort trying
to invest my way to a fortune. I wanted my job to be
personally satisfying and good for the world, while paying enough for me
and my family (current and future) to get by, but I planned to treat any
additional money after that as little more than a bonus used for
breaking ties.
I still mostly stand by that decision today, but over the intervening
years I realized there were a whole host of reasons to want money that
weren’t that selfish at all.
I had this 5,000-word draft, but I half-abandoned it for being sappy,
boring, pointless, and impossible to rewrite to be satisfactorily
un-cringeworthy. Instead, let me just tell you a couple random stories
and anecdotes that went somewhere near the start. Maybe posting them
will motivate me to salvage something from the 4,500 words that go after
it and post it. Eventually.
Some time ago, Namecheap had a discount, so I bought a domain name
for 88¢. Unfortunately, the discount only lasted for one year;
afterwards, it would cost $29/year to renew. Even though I bought it on
a whim and didn’t have much use for it, I
found myself
wanting to keep it more and more and had a huge mental struggle over
whether I could afford it, because wow, $29 is a lot!
Meanwhile, during the same school year, more or less:
= within 15 cents of $20,000/7
= NT$88,661, by Google’s current
exchange rate
= 739 hours of Taiwan’s hourly minimum wage or 4.43 months of
Taiwan’s monthly minimum wage
= 317 hours of Massachusetts’s
minimum wage (7.94 weeks or 1.85 months assuming a 40-hour work
week)
= 1.2~1.7 weeks of
a
list of high tech internship salaries as
featured
on Slate
= 2,955 plates of Sushi Express
= 1,478 cheap boxed lunches (at
NT$60 each), which would last one person 1.35 years at 3 per day
=
1,122 Big
Macs, price in Taiwan, or 596 Big Macs, average price in U.S.
(January 2015)
A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re
hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma,
you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that
chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing
there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you
suddenly know what you’re hoping.
— Piet Hein
(By the way, apparently spinning a penny is a terrible
randomization process; studies have shown they
come
up tails 80% of the time. Tossing or flipping is
better but there’s still a faintly biased
51%
chance it lands with the same face it started with (PDF link).
Entirely irrelevantly, is the meter amphibrachic? Nice. I’m sorry, but
the impenetrable English names they give to metrical feet just sound so
cool.)
As May 1 has been coming up, I’ve been half-seriously giving this
advice to others who still haven’t decided. But I knew this wouldn’t
work for me. I knew where I intuitively wanted to go all along.
The reasons holding me back were more… reasonable. Mostly the money.
Call it an id-superego conflict.
I don’t know if the difference between my choices would mean I’d have
to take out loans, or work a lot during college, or both. I don’t think
either of those things would be difficult. I think tech internships over
the summer could just cover the parts assigned to parental contribution
(which I’m not going to let my parents pay, unless they start earning
a lot more money than expected) and I think I have the skills
to get those internships. But of course that’s a tradeoff. Maybe there
will be something more self-actualizing or more helpful to my future
career that I could do during the summer. I’m not so sure that I’ll find
the same drive to program for a job instead of for a personal project I
really want to use myself, or for putting off something more boring. I
don’t know yet.
(Get it? Drive? Program? Um, never mind, I guess that’s a hardware
problem.)
This post, or most of it, was published password-protected once
because… well, I explain that below. (To the one person who actually
bothered asking me for the password, just so you know, I did add and
rewrite parts. More than a few.) I forgot how distinctly powerful a
disincentive a large 2300-word block of text is to the average person,
especially when the subject of half of those 2300 words is teenage angst
(I’ve already linked to xkcd 1370
in enough places so I’m not even going to embed it here) interweaved
with an insufferable amount of rationalist jargon. This will probably
filter my readership more than sufficiently already.
I have still decided to protect one detail of the thought process,
though. But even after that, I guess I do care more about how many
people read this than I do for most of my other posts, so here’s a
primitive attempt to gauge interest; if you choose anything beyond the
first choice, I would also appreciate if you leave a comment, even if
you don’t think you have anything to add:
edit: This poll has been removed, it wasn’t very interesting anyway.
I haven’t posted for a long period again, but I don’t feel too bad
about it.
Well, until I look carefully at my blog draft folder and remember
that I have 90%-finished drafts about the two debate competitions I went
to (November 2013 and March 2014), and winning the previous Mystery Hunt
(January 2014), and my summer trip to Penghu (July 2013). Which will
probably never get posted out of awkwardness.
Oops.
But I’ve been busy, completely righteously busy, with college apps to
write and algorithm classes to teach and speeches to write and a math
club to sort-of lead and all the typical homework besides.
And then (for those of you who don’t have me as a friend on Facebook)
I got accepted to MIT and Caltech early.
And for a few days after that, I checked Facebook about sixteen times
a day for the Class of 2019 group discussion, except for one day when I
really needed not to, thanks to the power of committing to my HabitRPG
party to do something. I am increasingly learning that procrastination
is something that has to be actively and strategically fought. But
that’s not what this post is about.
College.