I Spent 15 Years Confusing Money with Happiness

For almost 15 years, I worked in the finance industry. The people I worked with had a number of things in common: a taste for Gucci loafers; a predilection for the $39 Lever House breakfast. And we all believed in a kind of holy grail. We referred to it as The Number. Everyone in finance had their own individual number—the amount of money we had to have in the bank before we could quit our jobs and spend the rest of our lives traveling the world or tinkering with entrepreneurial ideas or spending time with our kids or otherwise devoting ourselves to what we really wanted to do. The Number was a silver bullet for all the problems in our lives. It was what would make all the grueling hours worth it.