Money & the meaning of life: Part 2

From your experiences with people who've made a lot of money, is there something different about the way people get rich today?

The incredible pace of change triggered by modern technology has affected how people acquire wealth. There's no precedent in human experience for the speed, scale, or age at which people today can get incredibly wealthy. When everything is quick and fast and easy, a certain part of ourselves is fed while another part withers away. Worse, we don't even know it.

In the past, wealth tended to be something you built up over a long time, or inherited from your family. Today people are getting wealthy quickly in what used to be a long, hard-earned process.

Let's see if we can make it more specific. Say that I'm a 25-year-old working in a company that just went public, and my options are now worth $10 million. What should I do? How do I keep this money from overwhelming me?

You need to find someone you can talk to. You need to see if there is any wisdom out there beyond the calculus of just getting and spending. Maybe you have a priest, a parent, a professor, or a friend. Maybe there are a couple of other people in your same situation who are also asking, "How are we supposed to navigate this life that suddenly is so weird?"

You need to realize that you are only 25 years old and that you aren't wise enough to know what to do with this $10 million. Think about it: $10 million! Suddenly you can have anything you want. And just as suddenly it is going to be obvious to you that getting everything you want is not going to do anything for you. Pretty soon you are going to feel just as empty with $10 million as you did before (via fastcompany).