What money and status won’t give you

I recently attended a panel focused on discussing the research process, inspired by Richard Hamming’s legendary talk “You and Your Research”. I asked the panel members: how do you balance spending time on research passion projects vs. research that is more legible to industry or academia. A famous professor responded with what I’ll paraphrase as: “look, as an AI PhD student I know you’re probably looking at jobs in frontier AI labs getting paid a ton of money to train language models. But if you’re already feeling doubts about doing the kind of research that will get you there, maybe it’s worth reconsidering whether that’s where you wanna work at all? Is the money really worth it?”

Her assumptions about me were not entirely correct, but she correctly identified that I’m not immune to the allure of a high-paying, high-status AI research job. And this pull often feels at odds with pursuing esoteric research ideas that aren’t as legible as “standard” research on scaling language models. This tension has led me to question what exactly I think I’ll find in one of these super sexy jobs. Obviously, status and money, but then what? What will these two things provide that I can’t get otherwise?

Writing this feels kinda vulnerable, but judging by the games I see many like me playing, I bet I’m not the only one that would do well to explore my implicit beliefs around money and status. We live in times of unprecedented wealth, where more people than ever before have lives even kings could not dream of. And yet, a good chunk of the conversations around me smell of desire and pessimism. Desire for more: a better apartment, a nice car, more followers or better clothes. And pessimism that “things” (politics, the economy, culture, dating, etc.) are in a bad place and getting worse.

I am guilty of this too, obviously. Half the reason I write these posts is so I don’t forget what they say. But even though I’m very aware of the truism that “money does not buy happiness,” it still blows my mind how often I need to remind myself of that.

Go online and check out any tabloid (despicable businesses, by the way), and you’ll find they have no shortage of terrible celebrity happenings to report on. Even the richest and most popular people among us are not safe from unfortunate situations. In fact, you could argue that fame and money often led to their unfortunate situations.

Another example: Houston, TX is known for its world-class medical care. But take a stroll through the Medical Center district and you’ll see how many hospitals and research buildings are named after extremely wealthy donors. I don’t doubt many of them donated out of the goodness of their hearts, but I also know that many of them did it because they or a loved one had some terrible disease, and they wanted the best medical care money could buy. It often wasn’t enough.

So my point is that money and status will never fix a fundamental uneasiness with life—one that requires control over life’s inherent uncertainty, and doesn't acknowledge that, as powerful as you are, everything changes and anything can happen to you. But there’s good news! And it’s that somehow, there’s a kind of pleasantness that can be found within all the uncertainty. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, only that I’ve found it through meditation, love, and creative pursuits.

So back to the original question: is the money worth it? Is it worth trading the research you actually want to do for another session on the hedonic treadmill? It isn’t for me… or so I say.

Post 43 out of 100