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John_Maxwell_IV comments on How can I spend money to improve my life? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
A friend of mine got Lasik and deeply regretted it. So you should do lots of research and be sure to get it from someone competent.
Why does she regret it, specifically?
Since we're already at the anecdote level: A friend of mine saw a LASIK surgeons conference at his university and he says they're all wearing glasses.
To get away from the anecdote level and bring in an empirical source, LASIK satisfaction rates are at 95.4%. [non-paywall pdf]
Thank you for a very interesting read, and especially for thinking to provide a non-paywall link.
That's the most impressive list of declared conflicts of interest I've ever seen.
That is good evidence, but I'd disbelieve its reliability a bit because it is so funny. Like obese dieticians, or non-rich investment brokers, or divorced marriage counselors.
Excellent point. I'd have difficulty believing this guy too, if he hadn't predicted millimeter wave full-body scanners wouldn't work before anybody in the media knew they wouldn't, based on the fact he'd been building them.
He says the main problem with LASIK is that when you correct myopia with it, your presbyopia (inevitable hyperopia from being over 40) is going to be worse by the same degree that the operation made the myopia better, and you're going to be stuck with it for much longer. Glasses or contacts for myopia you can just take off when you reach that age, but LASIK for myopia will need to be countercorrected. He didn't object to LASIK for hyperopia.
One possible reason is that (reputedly, among opthalmologists) one of the side-effects of Lasik is thought to be fractionally worse colour discrimination. Which might be fine for Joe Public, but very bad for people who spend their careers identifying and manipulating sub-milimeter structures.
How much of that is age-related? LASIK doesn't remove the need for reading glasses - it pegs your eyes to 20/20 if done properly, but as you age you lose the ability to alter focal distances, so you're only 20/20 at a particular distance(usually far-field).
Well, hindsight is 20/20.
Because my myopia is too high, laser surgery was deemed unsafe. I had permanent implants instead (they call them phakic intraocular lenses). It has much fewer secondary effects. It cost me 5x what the laser surgery would have, but I had recently got a windfall and it was the best of all things I did with that money.
What else did you do with the money? (If the answer is 'I blew it all on a Vegas weekend I can't remember', I will be much less impressed by the implants.)
Two words: book fair.
Also, I lived three months without working and helped a roommate with her share of rent during her rough spot (she eventually paid me back). I bought furniture and cold-weather clothes that I needed.