[adventured]

> Why trying to become rich?

Because there is an unlimited number of things you can do with it. You're limited only by time and your imagination.

I've never understood the premise I'm responding to, it doesn't make sense, unless a person has zero ambition and zero creativity - and I don't think that's true of anyone.

I could never have enough money. I could never run out of good things to use it on. Give me $100 trillion and a thousand years, please.

You could spend $100 billion and 60 years of your life on just going after Malaria and you might not manage to vanquish it. You could spend tens of millions of dollars and decades on trying to eliminate homelessness in a small city and still not eliminate it (swap out homelessness for any number of problems that need fixing in most any nation, or city). There is what might as well be an infinite number of good uses for money, at every possible scale. I'd run out of time long before I'd run out of positive uses for large amounts of money.

[brownbat]

Yeah, the DOT has some value to baseline effectiveness of programs: if they have $30,000 they can improve some intersection or stretch of highway and save one life a year. They can always turn extra cash into lives saved, so they use that to measure the effectiveness of spending. (Preventing malaria deaths is much much cheaper, maybe the conversion rate should be lower, but let's go with 30k for now.)

If someone says they don't want $30k because they live comfortably, even though they could immediately donate it to GiveWell, it's like saying they don't value saving other lives because their life is fine.

Substitute in anything else you value. You could sponsor modern art competitions, or film preservation, or buy land for ecological preservation, or help fund policy research on key issues from think tanks...

People reflexively associate money with consumptive hedonism, so it can seem like a negative, but it can also support almost any value you have.

Money can build you and tacky gold lined apartment and buy you a loud sports car, but money can also cure the sick, feed the hungry, and house the homeless.

[eru]

Yes. The more proper way to see this is that consuming leisure is perfectly fine as well.

[speedgoose]

Sure being rich is nice, you can do more things than most people.

My point is that you will probably never be rich. The concept of rich people is to be more healthy than most people. So you should probably not have a shitty lifestyle because you want to be one of them but you aren't succedding. If you enjoy trying, good for you.

Ambition and creativity is different than wanting to be rich. A researcher usually does not care about money but would love the frontpage of Nature or a Nobel price. A musician is usually more thinking about its art and the people than the sales. A politician wants power. Lots of examples.

Saving the world and making the society better with a lot of money is good, but thankfully rich people are not the only solution.

[engineeringwoke]

The structure of this comment gives the (very American) idea that you want to become rich so you can save the world. You really just want power.

[imgabe]

It's not usually helpful to tell people what they're thinking. Assume they know their own thoughts better than you do.

[forgetfulusr]

It is a useful illusion to have while destroying it. Hey, we will fix this in 10 years with our billions. It is a huge pill we incidentally forget we swallow daily. No need to remind.

[SummerlyMars]

> You really just want power.

How do you know this?

[burntoutfire]

If you don't become rich, the money that you would've earned will land in somebody else's pockets and presumably they can also use it for some good (possibly even greater one).