You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

hyporational comments on How can I spend money to improve my life? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: jpaulson 02 February 2014 10:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (230)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ThrustVectoring 02 February 2014 05:44:12PM 15 points [-]

Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious "spend money to pay people to do things you don't like doing but want done" route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there's a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here's what I'd start with:

Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.

Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I'd start at a lake.

Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).

Racing. You'd probably want to start with go-karts and the like.

Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.

As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.

For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You'd have to do the math to see how much you'd wind up paying for your time.

Getting rid of stuff to maintain is a freebie. Things are option-priced: owning something gives you the right to use it later. It also forces you to either maintain it or lose it. Keep track of the time and money costs as well as how often you use your car, and compare to the costs of renting a car instead.

I'd also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day. And as for clumsiness, well, a significant amount of that sort of thing goes away when things are the same shape across your field of vision. It's anecdotes, sure, but all four people (myself included) that I know that got lasik have better hand-eye coordination and significantly reduced clumsiness. It's hard for me to overstate how valuable laser eye surgery has been. My sister rates it as the third best decision she's ever made, behind marrying her husband and buying a house she loves the daylights out of.

Comment author: hyporational 03 February 2014 03:14:31AM 5 points [-]

I don't remember the exact figures, but the risk of getting a persistent dry eye problem from laser eye surgery was significant enough to make me forget about it. My eyes are already pretty dry, and it's a very annoying inconvenience to have.