This shows the author, his father and grandfather had the wrong end of the stick. His grandfather, wanting security, had traded his time and independance for security, and got neither. His father, wanting to ensure he had both security and longevity, got neither. The author, apparently seeing this as a failed experiment, walked away from it.<p>What he failed to realise that neither his father or grandfather ever got control over their situation. The continually worked for money by trading their precious time for security. It's that which made them unhappy, not the actual money.<p>The author, to me, is making the fundamental mistake of thinking that you have to work 40 hours a week for 40 years to have 'money', so the choice is between working like a dog or having nothing, not realising that their is another way. Can money set you free? Of course it can, but not if you're trading your free time for your money.<p>For most people, it is a choice between security of income and freedom to spend your time as you want. The most secure people on the planet are prisoners, but they don't have the freedom to do what they want. If you're prepared to accept a less-secure income (by being risky, ie, startups) then you're going to gain the benefits of freedom when/if it does work out.<p>Bottom line : if this guy's Dad had cashed out at a younger age and spent the last 20 years of his life doing things on his own terms, he wouldn't have died an unhappy man in a short retirement.
While reading, I hit upon this sentence:<p>"Dad’s example made me feel that, if I wanted to write for a living, I had an obligation to try and do it, and I’ve been writing full-time since 1996, when my first novel did well enough to let me quit my day job as an editor at the London Review of Books."<p>particularly "my first novel did well enough to let me quit my day job"<p>... so, the money he made set him free from his day job so he could do what he was interested in. :/
I'm having trouble seeing what the author's definition of freedom is. Financial "security" is one definition I hear people use, and he brings up. But that can be gone in a moment or you can die and it doesn't matter, as his father did.<p>Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? I think that has to be defined first.<p>The freest people I have met are those who don't worry about what they can't control, work hard at what they can, and are content with the ups and downs of life. Money seems, to me, to be uncorrelated-- at least above a minimum threshold.
nice quote buried in there:<p><i>...the profound truth of Seamus Heaney’s elegy to Robert Lowell: “The way we are living/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.”</i>
This quote was interesting to me, "That would be the end of the world for serious writers, who are not performers and who can’t earn a living giving concerts and selling T-shirts. Nobody knows how this is going to play out."<p>There isn't an audience for successful writers to be speakers?
>On the one hand, I have no boss, so I can’t be sacked – everything about every single aspect of my day and my work is entirely up to me. From that point of view, I’m about as free as it is possible for a person to be. On the other hand, I have no job security or protection of any kind. If people don’t want to read what I write, I have no income .<p>We always have "boss". It doesn't matter if it's my manager at my day job, or my customers at the startup I'm working on. We all serve a master. Even the hobo on the street looks for food when his stomach directs him to do so.<p>I don't think money itself is freedom, or that it could buy it. Though it does buy nice things. Freedom is being able to pro-actively direct your life, move your life. Freedom is being the boss, freedom is being the hobo. They are equal in my book.
I very often enjoy theatantic, but it has a script somewhere that locks up my browser. I've been trying to track it down, but no luck yet as it downloads a lot of stuff from all over the place.<p>Anybody found it already?<p>oblig: I've noticed that people who attain financial freedom often end up continuing to work in that field (after a year or two of feeling useless). We need a purpose more than we need "financial freedom". So you might as well do what you love in the first place; that passion is the best way to be excellent, which is not a bad way to be financially successful as an incident. The challenge is having the courage to <i>live</i>. Money isn't courage.
"So Dad was a banker but he couldn’t bear talking about money..."<p>I think bankers deal more with "debt" than "money." I don't know if this has any relevance to the article and what the author is saying.