696 Your human-size life

I reprint this blog from Dave Winer @davewiner ... for no particular reason other than that I like it, especially the header (no new lessons here; you know all this):

Live a gentle human-size life; it's where happiness comes from

Slightly abridged.

In the early years I wrote a lot about the personal struggles of people who had attained financial independence only to find out that it revealed (the lack of, CB) money was not what was standing in the way of happiness. That's contrary to the message of our society:

• Until you're rich, you're miserable

• Once you're rich, it's all great

I was fascinated with this topic, because a few years earlier I had achieved this independence, and found that I wasn't happy. I felt like I had done all that had been asked of me, and I was promised happiness, and I had been cheated, and wanted to understand why.

Before I hit the mother lode, I was just another gold digger, struggling to make payroll, even though my company had offices on Easy Street (not a joke). I was actually having as much fun as you could have, but didn't know it at the time.

One evening, I was walking around the neighborhood of the office when I met a friend of a friend - let's call him Joe - and stopped to chat. I had heard that he was very rich, and asked why he lived in such a modest middle-class neighborhood when he could afford an estate in Los Altos Hills. He said he preferred to live a modest life, to live within his ability to use his wealth, and just kept the money as a cushion in case something went bad.

I thought then this was puzzling, I didn't get it, but now, with the benefit of almost 30 years of hindsight, I realize he was totally right. One of the biggest mistakes rich people make is to try to live larger than a single human being can. A mathematical impossibility. You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time. You can own twenty fantastic cars, airplanes and yachts, but you can only be in one at a time. In other words, your humanity doesn't increase just because your wealth did. You don't get bigger.

And it's even worse than it appears - the struggle to live more than one life will fail, and it will make you feel like a failure, just as you felt before you made the money! So being rich does not mean success if your goal is to achieve immortal super-human-ness.

I think we all need a struggle, I think that's where our creativity comes from. We need something that feels unattainable, but actually is not. But the struggle to rise above our humanity, that's not going to happen for any of us. And the desire to have it robs your very human life of any value.

Joe had it right. Live a gentle human-size life. Go for a walk in your middle-class neighborhood and run into a friend of a friend and share what you see, and influence their life for the better. That's the kind of thing a human can do. And it is, imho, where happiness comes from.