What you don't understand is that if you hate life, and perhaps if you have money and comforts that you know should help... but you still are miserable, it feels hopeless.
The money traps you. It's so hard to imagine taking a huge pay cut. But that pay cut, and living life the way you want, is more important.
Hating most of your hours each day until you're 45 or 50 and then retiring will leave you such a different and sad person that retirement won't be joyful.
The problem with a human life is that we can only know intimately what we experience. It's so difficult to really know how the other choices would have been (for us). I'm probably not in the financial situation as the quant, but I know the feeling. If I could tell the college me advice, it would have been to do the music degree instead of compsci.
My family has all worked very hard until retirement, and then the lack of income made them hyper sensitive to spending anything. "Never spend your capital; live off the interest." So you die with a few million in the bank. Now you don't want to spend your last 10 or 20 years poor and hungry, but there must be a middle ground.
The money traps you. It's so hard to imagine taking a huge pay cut. But that pay cut, and living life the way you want, is more important.
Hating most of your hours each day until you're 45 or 50 and then retiring will leave you such a different and sad person that retirement won't be joyful.
The problem with a human life is that we can only know intimately what we experience. It's so difficult to really know how the other choices would have been (for us). I'm probably not in the financial situation as the quant, but I know the feeling. If I could tell the college me advice, it would have been to do the music degree instead of compsci.
My family has all worked very hard until retirement, and then the lack of income made them hyper sensitive to spending anything. "Never spend your capital; live off the interest." So you die with a few million in the bank. Now you don't want to spend your last 10 or 20 years poor and hungry, but there must be a middle ground.