When you get rich, your life becomes much more interesting - You get more opportunities and you get 'lucky' more often. Also, your work actually makes your feel good about yourself. In effect, life feels like a game; you actually get to win from time to time.
The richer you get, the more you win.
When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life.
Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.
I wonder if my theory explains why games are so popular these days (and so lucrative).
Our economic system is taking away opportunities from poor people and giving them to rich people - Games are like a drug to keep poor people sedated and docile.
Because all of those things you listed are about passive consumption. Games are active consumption: they have you actively participate in them.
What happens in movies, books, sports games, etc. are determined by others. You simply watch. In games however the outcome is tied (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) to your own actions. That's why they can be addicting, especially for people who otherwise feel like they don't have any agency in "real life."
I read a book by looking at contents, notes, bibliography, and index. Then the intro and conclusion. If the meat is worth reading, that.
This means reading for information rather than pleasure, for the most part, though for me, reading for information is pleasure. Yes, there's some fiction I'll read, but that's different.
There's also note-taking and organising my own thoughts as a consequence of what I'm reading.
Very interesting theory - I think I agree. I would add though that a good portion of the causality is going the other way, where people who find work fun and stimulating become more successful, and those who are bored by it stay poor.
These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
I think that your argument assumes a certain level of job attained already. Sure, software engineers who enjoy it more become more successful. I doubt that people finding stocking grocery stores correlates with their success at all.
I had a checkout clerk at Target the other day with Down Syndrome who seemed to LOVE her job and was very good at it. Unfortunately I don't see her working her way up to CEO.
"When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life."
I know a lot of poor people that have interesting jobs, super-cool trips during their 7 weeks of vacation (French here :-) ). I have colleagues at my well-paid software engineering US office that have delayed their "dream" 3 weeks vacation for years now. Who is happier here ?
"Life feels like a game" really resonates with me. I've actually used that phrase before. I don't play video games much because I find tons of math and programming stuff fun and interesting. So I just "let" myself pursue those interests, and thankfully, those interests happen to be financially rewarding.
That's not true. The returns in happiness are just logarithmic with respect to income (diminishing returns but still positive at each level). The story about no benefit beyond a certain threshold was generated by journalists misreading the plots in those studies.
I'm "rich" in the sense that I have a good job and don't have more responsibilities in life than I can afford/handle.
I make good money which means my employer thinks highly of me and invests in me. And this means that because there's money behind all this, they can afford to send me on business trips which are inherently more interesting (a few times a year) than sitting at my desk during that same time. And because I don't have more responsibilities than I can handle, I can just bail on my home life for a week or two to be away. And because I'm not on a shoestring budget, I can afford to do interesting things while I'm away on business.
I can't help but think if I was working at a subsistence level, I wouldn't be able to afford to leave my wife behind for a few weeks, my employer wouldn't be paying me to do work that could even require travel, and the trips would be out of the question because they'd represent a relatively large % of my compensation. And even if I went, I wouldn't be able to afford to do anything fun, so I'd dread it.
Just like when I've worked for poorer companies doing the same job.. sure, the work is roughly the same, but they can't afford to invest in hardware as much, so we don't get to do things "right".
I know it's somewhat tangential but I just feel like the very fact of having a higher-paying job opens up all kinds of opportunities that aren't necessarily so easily represented.
Yes (though not exactly related to money in my case; but I've seen firsthand how money affects other people). I've experienced this pretty strongly after my open source project got some traction - And it's not even the most popular one in its category.
I often think that if the effect was so strong in my case (with such a relatively minor win), it must be far stronger for the 'big winners'.
My open source project got popular almost entirely because of luck. I worked really hard on it for many years but if it hadn't been for a single event (which came about because of pure luck - AKA "Good timing"), it wouldn't have gone anywhere.
After my project got some traction; people started treating me better at work, I started getting more (better) job opportunities, founders of various promising SV startups started reaching out to me with job offers.
Also, in the past 2 years, I got in contact with 3 people whose open source projects I liked (back when they only had a few hundred stars or less on GitHub) and now all of them have over 2K stars each on GitHub - One of those people (whom I met in person) raised over $1 million in seed funding for his project (several months after I had met him). It all seems oddly related though I can't quite put my finger on it.
That said, none of it has translated to financial success for me personally (aside from maybe a few really good job offers).
The richer you get, the more you win.
When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life.
Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.