Incorrect Blitz Input

A friend and I were sitting on the G train and waiting for it to wind its usual slow way through the seedy underbelly of Brooklyn when I noticed a copy of the New York Times magazine lying on the seat beside me. There not being a conversation to distract my attention, I started flipping through it quietly. One of the first pages that caught my attention had an ad for a condo development with a floor plan that looked something like this:

(Click the photo for access to the listing.)

Just in case you’re curious, the price of admission to the above apartment is $6,650,000. When I first moved to New York a year ago, I was both overwhelmed and seduced by the density of wealth here. If I had seen this ad at the time, I imagine my mouth would have watered and I would have spent a good five minutes imagining what sorts of awesome things I would do if I could afford such a sum.

Let’s see. I might spin around until I got dizzy in my massive living room. Then I’d run around the apartment just for the sheer kinetic enjoyment of so much space on such a small, crowded island. I would do this to remind me of how successful I was. Then I’d probably sit down, panting, at my computer, and go read my favorite blogs, then play with some programming projects I had going at the time, and maybe pick up a book and go read.

This is where my fantasy ends, but it’s not the end of the blog post. The point I’d like to make is that the above situation could never happen, seeing as a) I did not and am not going to inherit (and not have to work for) large sums of money, and b) I’m not willing to devote very much time and energy to making buckets of money.

Let me talk about b), since I think a) is fairly self explanatory. Yes, if I worked hard for many years, I might be able to afford a $6,650,000 apartment. I could stay up late pouring through the WSJ, Harvard Business Review, Conde Nast Portfolio, and watching CNBC. I could agonize over ups and downs, discuss and argue with close friends about which stocks I thought were undervalued, and use terms like liquidity and market cap when talking about my securities, ETFs, and CDs. But this isn’t what I want. I’d be miserable. I find pleasure only in **spending** money, not in earning money for its own sake. So it’s not for me.

To be rich, to build wealth, and to afford the kinds of apartments that push people like me out to Bed-Stuy, you have to love earning money, rather than the things you can obtain with it. So it’s very much a catch-22. If you WANT the apartment for its own sake, you probably won’t be able to afford it (unless, again, you were born into money). But if you truly enjoy earning money and building massive quantities of personal wealth, the surroundings in which you build such wealth are immaterial.

EDIT: It seems that the price of this property has increased to $6,650,000 within the span of a day. I wonder what that is all about? Is the exposure on my tiny little blog worth a cool 150k? Hell, are they tracking the number of linking pages and adjusting the price in proportion to the property’s web exposure? Certainly easy to disprove, but I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader.