This is long. You have been warned.

> Does anyone have tips on how to enjoy the journey?

Every time in my life I got subdued by my hedonism during my rich perioids I was struck by severely awful series of events that ended up humbling me and making me thankful even if I can only cover bills and food afterwards. EVERY DAMN TIME.

So I guess the answer is: you need contrast, for all your life. Which means a lot of pain and stress, periodically, until you learn to universally appreciate what you have and not eternally moving your own personal goalpost.

The danger of being rich for a long time is that you lose perspective and have no other extremity to compare with. This leads to many mental problems.

Observing myself and others, I noticed that the longer your basic needs are not in danger, the more you lean to doing pretty useless crap: mostly tooting political views of which you know nothing about, or my personal favorite -- looking down on people in ever more and creative ways. I legit heard a former friend of mine say the famous Marie-Antoinette phrase: "No bread? Let them eat cake" when we dicussed the gypsy population of my country. Everybody on the table was baffled even more when we realized that he didn't know about that historical quote at all. He reinvented it right there and then on the spot. Really makes you think what is the common trend that makes people lose touch with reality so severely.

What I am trying to say is: when you are rich for a long time, you either become Lara Croft / Batman, or you become a very plain hedonist (like the rich guys who outbid each other on a rare bottle of wine in Vegas and end up paying $6000 for a glass of it... WTF?).

Our brains always need to solve problems. So if one lacks ambition to solve hard problems still existing out there then they end up inventing their own problems and focus on them, usually until the day of their death. It's no coincidence that many rich people end up taking a lot of drugs. They have no struggle in their lives at all and end up feeling empty and directionless.

Giving example of myself: I am currently in an absolutely horrible period of my life. Lost 3 pretty lucrative jobs / gigs that I managed to juggle for years... basically in 2-3 weeks space (5 months ago), and still cannot recover because I refuse bad jobs and don't want to invite stress and burn out back in my life. (I say I lost them and that's not obscuring reality: I only refused to renew contract on one of them because it was really toxic and stale, and political decisions took the other 2 jobs under my feet basically days later). Long story short, if I manage to stabilize and get to a middle-high-class level again as before, I definitely will be buying myself a few years of break and will just work on trying to invent General Artifical Intelligence. I don't care if I will succeed. It makes me happy and fulfilled to combine workout, walks and movies with my wife, and several hobbies (of which inventing AGI is one).

I know I'll never be a hedonist; I would buy myself a beach house and two good bikes but would never ever reach for a private jet even if I can afford a fleet of them. The poor periods of my life have taught me that many kinds of money come with stress and tons of maintenance attached to them. And that other kinds of money you just spend so you can impress other rich people. I don't want any of that crap in my life.

Finally, I work really hard to maintain a balance between being rich and having to do minimal housekeeping. That I believe is a very good balancing factor to help you stop and appreciate life as well.