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Honestly, unless you have expensive hobbies you are passionate about, if you have enough money then you should shift your focus away from money and more towards finding happiness in your life. There's nothing wrong with making lots of money, if you're also happy with what you're doing. But if you think you'd be happier doing something more worthwhile, then go for it. It doesn't have to be medical research. You could work on developing tools that support scientific development - things like programming tools or machine learning technology. You can still make a lot of money in those areas. You don't even have to focus on science, there is intrinsic value in politics, art, culture, education, communication, etc. Or sell everything, keep as much as you need to set yourself up doing something you enjoy and give the rest to cancer research. Whatever you want to do, just making money for its own sake doesn't make any sense from a pragmatic point of view.
Once you've ensured a stable modest lifestyle, extra money does not really increase your ability to enjoy life significantly. I am not very rich, but I have learned to cook, and I cook to my own tastes. So I get really great food every day.
Alcohol is pretty cheap if that's your pleasure. Drugs less so - but spending a lot of money on drugs is bad for you in the long term.
Having money helps attract sexual interest, but confidence and social skills work just as well. Money only helps get more frequent lower quality sex. High quality comes through deep mutual understanding and accommodation with you partner. You're way better off spending time investing in personal development so you can learn to build good quality relationships. The one thing money can reliably buy you is status. It's very easy to cling to the notion that status has significant intrinsic value, but it doesn't. Status doesn't help you make friends or find love or solve your emotional problems or be happier. You might think having low status will make people ignore you or look down on you, but if you're confident, if you believe in yourself as a smart guy, that will never happen. True self-belief renders status obsolete. Money based status is ultimately just a social competition that some people care about and some people don't. It's a shared obsession that means about as much as any other shared obsession. Your bank balance is like a high score on World of Warcraft. To some people it's the most important thing to them. But, to those on the outside, it's obvious that the obsession is unhealthy and adds little to the obsessed one's life. |