TL;DR: Yes. Get that money. Get lots of it. Poverty sucks.

I left rural Jamaica to come to Kingston, the capital, in 2005. After my first year in college, I got a summer job with a telecom startup run by an American. My student loan was not renewed for the 2nd year, so I had to drop out, and got a permanent position as a sysadmin at the company. The pay sucked, but I didn't care: The family member I was living with wasn't charging me rent, and I was having tons of fun setting up IPSec VPNs with other telecom providers, configuring pfSense firewalls, creating SIP trunks, etc. I'd sometimes stay at work till midnight, just exploring and learning, and be back at work at 8:30 the next morning.

I was transferred to another arm of the company 6 months later, but wasn't getting along with the management there, and was fired. But it was ok (I thought): I had no living expenses. I spent the next two years pottering about, trying my hand at a few different freelance initiatives, none of which really stuck. That was also when I discovered that I was very creative, at least design-wise. After those 2 years, my father died. No life insurance.

This, dear reader, is when reality started to set in. This is when I got the slap upside the head that said, "Hey! Fool! You need to start making money."

I'd applied for a job a few weeks before his death, and I got the job, doing a mixture of bizdev, system administration, and graphic design (perhaps I'm one of those fabled 'designgineermarketers' :) ).

Immediately, I began getting strange brown envelopes in the mail, containing sheets with tabulated data on them, and a strange claim that somehow, I owed them money.

I was later to find out that they were called 'bills.'

The family member also started charging rent. About time.

The student loan people called. Time to pay the piper.

I'd been bitch-slapped. By reality. It hurt.

I was 23.

I looked back at all the time I'd wasted. All the money I'd wasted. How I'd been a burden to family.

I'd been a typical HN-reading, Ayn Rand-quoting, John Galt aspiring-libertarian. Slowly, I began to realize the role of luck and circumstance. I used to look down on the poor, writing them all off as lazy and not willing to work. "How dare they be poor and have a TV!", I used to think.

I changed my tune. A bitch-slap will do that to you.

I knew what real wealth looked like. The startup I had worked for had tanked, but the founder and I were good friends, and he was independently wealthy. He owned 4 Mercedes, and lived in a house so far up in the hills that the road wasn't even paved. We would drive around and he would tell me about his life, how he had been rich as a teen pop star in Britain, but squandered it all and was broke by 20. He went to America with nothing, but built himself up through determination and cleverness. He built a telecom switch for the cost of a PC, and loaded Asterisk (open source telecom software) on it. Re-sold it for US$6,000. It felt 'wrong' to me, but he taught me that it doesn't matter what you think it's worth, it only matters what they think it's worth.

He died 4 months after my father. His family didn't know where all the money was. To this day, he has not been buried. That was over 2 years ago.

Money.

Money affects our lives in so many ways that it's difficult to overstate. Wanna help out that friend? It's gonna cost ya. Wanna take care of your parents? Ditto. How many great relationships have been ruined because one party had to leave due to work? How many marital squabbles are about money? How many friendships are ruined? And don't gimme that crap that if they were good relationships, they would last. If you have a friend that is down on his luck for an extended period (say a year or more), that gets old real fast. He'll expect you to pay for dinner. And movies. And gas. And liquor at parties. Soon you're gonna start resenting him. If he had money, it wouldn't be a problem. It's just circumstances.

How many lives are wasted in poverty?

Is it any surprise that I want money? Is it any surprise that I have dedicated the next few years to the getting of money?

Whew. I need to stop. Or this will happen again:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025537

Edit: grammar