How I Relate to My Finances
this ones for you mom :D
Largely writing this to share with my worried family members 😅
Ok so at this point it’s no secret that I’m in a pretty fortunate place, financially, given that I haven’t worked in 5.5 years. I was lucky to save up a decent amount of money from my previous career in software engineering.
Here is how finances fit in with how I’ve lived my life.
I have some amount of money, I spend some amount of money. There’s a million variables that go into the latter number in particular, and the future is impossible to know, but there’s some X probability that I have enough for the rest of my life. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll say 50% chance.
If it’s not enough, there’s some Y probability that making minimum wage on top of what I have would be enough money (also known as Barista FIRE).
I’m lucky to do and have some interests that people do for money. I wrote about some here - stuff like organizing coliving/trips, 1:1 work, running workshops. I imagine that if I did need some supplemental money, I could make a hundred bucks here and there (run a workshop, do a session, organize a trip, maybe I get into busking, who knows, etc.) and get to ~$20k a year. Again for the sake of simplicity, I’ll say 50% chance that the $20k is enough and that I can make it without meaningfully changing how I live.
So there’s some probability (1 - X * Y) that I still need more money, if we use my simplified numbers, it’s like 25% chance. 25% chance that I’d need to make substantially more money, like in the realm of what I made as a software engineer. And software engineering is the only job in which I currently could make that kind of money.
I believe that as AI rapidly improves, the chances that software engineering stops being so lucrative at some point are relatively high. Let’s call it Z probability, and again say 50% for simplicity.
In the case that I need substantially more money in the future, but can’t rely on software to make it, I’d need to make major life changes, but ones that I can’t predict today. If anything, if I had to guess what might be relatively more lucrative in the future, it’d be offering capacities that are uniquely human, the sorts that I’m currently most interested in anyways. But basically, there’s not much to do today (unless I want to be really risk averse and try to cash grab now in the hopes that I’d have enough ahead of time).
So the way I’m looking at it, with the simplified numbers, there’s a 1 - X * Y * Z chance, or 87.5% chance that I don’t need to meaningfully change what I’m doing to make money (where either I’m set or I won’t know what’s necessary til later in the game anyways).
I’ll certainly acknowledge that I could be underestimating the risks (though I’d largely argue that I’m overestimating them here).
In conclusion, I feel good about doing my thing and intend to keep doing so, from a place of having considered the possibilities pretty carefully, rather than negligence.