Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

There are only two inflection points in personal wealth, two points where your life really changes. One is the aforementioned fuck-you money, the other is the even loftier fuck-the-world money. Before that first rung of fuck-you money, when you’re counting your nickels and dimes and shares and bonuses and what all to get to a few hundred K of dosh, all that changes is what I’ll call your indifference threshold to expense. If before you didn’t think about dropping $6 for another pint of beer with your friends (and believe me, I’ve lived through times when I had to think about even that), now you don’t think about the pricey $60 salmon lunch at Anchor & Hope. If previously you thought before indulging yourself with some questionably useful $50 gadget, now you’ll drop $500 on a new phone or ultracompact projector without thinking about it. As if you lived in some dodgy country undergoing a period of hyperinflation, what used to be worth $10 in mental decision cost now takes $100 to trigger. It’s like your mental decimal point of concern has moved over a zero (or perhaps more than one). You’re not even really thinking about costs until you’ve broken $1,000.