Sunday, August 30, 2015

Notch is Sad

Notch -- Markus Persson in the non-digital world, but forever Notch to all fans of Minecraft -- is now very rich. At 36, he sold his company Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. He has a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills, for which he supposedly outbid Jay Z and Beyonce. But he is not very happy. Saturday he sent out a stream of tweets like this:
The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.

Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.

In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor.

When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.

Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead.

I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of assholes that made me sell minecraft again.
I have to say that Minecraft always seemed to me like the creation of a melancholy mind, so this doesn't surprise me at all. Maybe Notch will adjust and find new ways to spend his time, but I have a sad feeling that he will always look back on the insane time when he was creating Minecraft as the happiest part of his life.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

Past a certain point, more money just makes you more miserable, as you feel compelled to do something with it.

What I think Notch should do is put away enough money to keep him comfortably well off for the rest of his life via monthly stipends or whatever, give away the rest to various charities or causes he believes in, and then settle down to finding a full time "job" to be his hobby.

People are happiest when they work - the problem is that most people work at jobs they don't like. But when you don't have to worry about money, you can do any job you want to - you just need to figure out what you'd like to do.

I think far more problematic is celebrity. Money alone doesn't isolate you from other people, celebrity does - being lifted up on a pedestal, being treated vastly differently than others despite being just as human as everyone else. People build up weird expectations of celebrities, and they often treat them in the most callous and unpleasant of manners. They feel like they "know" a celebrity, and then when reality doesn't meet their unrealistic expectations they can get upset and feel betrayed somehow, driving them to behave even more unpleasantly.

I've never once wanted to be famous - it seems like a hellish sort of thing to suffer from. I'm quite happy not being the center of anyone's attention, enjoying the quiet, comfortably company of my friends and loved ones.