What Could Happiness Cost—$10 Million?

How Silicon Valley's wealth culture distorts our definition of "enough," and how ambition might regain its imagination.

Last month, a group of eight girls, all MBA students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, rented a house in a quiet Northern California lake-town called Lakeport for a calm weekend getaway. It was a rainy Sunday morning: half the group still asleep, the rest of us gathered around a gingham- tablecloth-lined breakfast nook, littered with breadcrumbs from the night before, nursing coffee and Greek yogurt. We talked about all of the usual subjects: what we wanted to do, where we wanted to live, how many kids we wanted to have—life after Stanford, where we came to change lives, organizations, and the world, starting with our own. The register of the conversation remained dreamy—each of us counting our imaginary futures like sheep—until someone finally suggested that we add up the bill:

“How much do we actually need to make to live the lives we want?”

“It depends on what you want. Where do you want to live—California or New York?”

“And do you want to send your kids to public school or private school?”

Numbers—all in the millions—were thrown on the table. They seemed at once completely made up and totally plausible—it’s true: the American Dream of homeownership, for example, feels increasingly like a relic of the past, but do we really need as much wealth as we think we do to live the lives we want? Wanting to lasso the fantasy, I pulled out my iPad as a makeshift whiteboard and did the math.

We modeled our ideal lives: two incomes, a house in a high-cost coastal city, occasional international travel, childcare, college savings, money for parents who might need help. We discussed property taxes and 529 plans. Someone insisted on a line-item for out-of-pocket healthcare costs.

The marker squeaked to a halt at $450,000 in annual household income—assuming public schooling for two kids and some cushion for taxes and savings.

In the midst of peak “broligarchy”—on Collins Dictionary’s shortlist for word of the year, describing the plutocratic oligarchy of mostly male, often libertarian tech billionaires whose influence now shapes everything from AI regulation to the cultural zeitgeist. On any given week at Stanford, chatter might include Elon Musk’s negotiating a pay package that could be worth $1 trillion, Jony Ive’s accepting a reported $1 billion deal to advise OpenAI, or a Stanford computer science PhD’s walking away with a $100 million compensation package from Meta.

Against that backdrop, our very bougie dream life penciled out not to the frequently thrown around and completely arbitrary benchmark of $10 million in ten years, but rather to $450,000, across two individuals, per year. Point-blank, this is a lot of money—eye-watering for most of the country and multiple lifetimes of income for many families I grew up around. But, it is nowhere close to the eight-figure entry fee to adulthood many of us had subconsciously presumed we needed to pay.

The question is how we drifted so far from a realistic number in the first place.

I didn’t grow up anywhere near this world. I was born into a cramped house in Flushing, Queens, where my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and parents all lived on the same rented floor. As a kid, “enough” meant parents who got through school by day and work by night so that we could eat a good steamed fish together at dinner. Money was aspirational, as phantasmagorical as the taste of freedom, and painfully concrete, as physical as clipping coupons and counting pennies.

When my parents moved us to suburban New Jersey, I watched how quickly “enough” shifted—how proximity to larger houses and nicer cars rearranged our sense of what a happy life required. I carried into adulthood a hunger for upward mobility: first as a mortgage trader in New York, then as a venture capitalist in Los Angeles, where status was often something you could purchase if you knew where to look.

I came to Stanford hoping for some perspective, a two-year window to rethink the version of ambition I’d absorbed in New York and LA. Instead, I landed in the eye of the storm: the epicenter of tech-driven wealth, just as artificial intelligence turned Silicon Valley into a gold rush running at 2x speed, hiring “10x engineers,” whatever that means.

A classmate once shared a five-year “mission” slide, a personal plan with bullet points like “Make $3M+ with medium-high probability” and “Develop a track record as a CEO.” The “Why” column was noble: buy a home near family, have the flexibility to be present with future children, build something meaningful in her home country, avoid ever taking a job out of financial fear. I frequently hear classmates, many in their twenties, casually say things like, “I need to make $10 million in the next decade,” as if they are talking about a Whoop goal. When I ask where that number comes from, the answers are almost always the same: a shrug, a pause, and then, “I don’t know. Feels right.”

The impulse to aim high is earnest, and here, it feels completely relatable. I’m not criticizing my friend; I could have written the same slide. I’ve put financial pressure on my own partner without ever calculating what “enough” meant for me.

My older friends in venture capital have also talked about a lifestyle maintenance benchmark, somewhere on the order of the double-digit millions–enough to pay for Nueva School (which sits at a comfy $62,560/year before extracurriculars) and Tahoe homes inside gated communities where nothing lists for under $4 million. At one point, my partner asked me, “We’re going to make all this money so our kids can inherit $20 million by 21 and turn into spoiled brats?” Hearing it said aloud made the whole thing feel even more unhinged.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a song performed on the world’s tiniest violin, but there is a universal story beneath it: when you’re sitting inside a wealth maximization spiral, the problem’s constraint is not in money but in imagination. If you decide, consciously or not, that your floor is $10 million by 40, the universe of acceptable careers collapses to a sliver. Your menu of reasonable jobs becomes: big tech, hypergrowth start-up, late-stage private equity, quantitative hedge fund, and a ruthlessly optimized search fund—maybe.

I’ve watched classmates reverse-engineer their lives from a hypothetical payout instead of from the kind of work they actually want to do. People who once talked about teaching, climate policy, or starting a scrappy, non-venture backable business now say, “I can’t afford that path,” not because their current rent bill is out of reach (though here in Palo Alto, it often is), but rather because the path will never deliver on the arbitrary benchmark on the arbitrary timeline they’ve internalized as immutable, ineluctable fact.

The psychological effects are just as corrosive. If you step onto the treadmill, it’s hard to jump off—and meanwhile the treadmill keeps accelerating. Your home in San Mateo isn’t good enough—you move to Hillsdale. Then Atherton. Your Tahoe condo becomes a house in Martis Camp. Then again—skiing in Aspen is much more desirable than anywhere in California. Fractional jet ownership? Soon you realize it’s better to own it outright.

The Lakeport whiteboard session felt vaguely illicit because naming what a life actually costs breaks an unspoken code. Our number was messy—smudged by debates about state and property taxes, and by the private-school dilemma: is it as simple as a preference, or is it an uncomfortable confession that American public education feels broken, and a guilt that opting out perpetuates a system not everyone can escape? It forced us to see how much of our own childhood biases we were sneaking into the math.

People here don’t talk about money directly because it’s “tacky.” But that’s not quite the truth, is it? Ambient fear gets repackaged as ambition. I know people earning more than my parents ever dreamed of who privately panic because someone else landed an equity package that looks like a misprint. It’s easier to pretend you’re immune than to admit you feel behind.

So I left that weekend—in Lakeport, ironically a mildly polluted lake and an hour’s drive but a far cry from Sonoma, where our peers have second, third homes—feeling oddly relieved, and a little embarrassed that my relief required a whiteboard. In a valley obsessed with 10x-this, trillion-that, landing on a number that is high by any nominal measure, yet modest by the broligarchy’s, made the world feel, briefly, back in proportion.

Split between a couple, $450,000 comes out to $225,000 each. I figured: I’d earned around that in my last two roles—the first when I was barely 3 years out of college—and, like most MBAs, I expected my income to rise, not to fall. So the number didn’t feel like fantasy math.

But this number is only my number, a result of my honest assessment of my needs, and, yes, my wants. If you want to try your own version of the Lakeport exercise, try what we call a Financial Visioning activity. This exercise is the prologue that most of us skip in favor of optimizing our Roth IRAs and 401ks right away.

• Step 1: Write down everything you want in the life you imagine. Everything—bicoastal beach homes, every B2B SaaS subscription, healthy knees, love, a year’s supply of pasta, children, annual Christmas trips home, Aesop soap—don’t censor yourself.

• Step 2: Sort every item into 3 buckets: HAVE, WANT, and NEED. NEEDs are non-negotiables, WANTS are self-explanatory, and HAVEs are meant to remind you of what’s already here.

• Step 3: Build your MVL – your Minimum Viable Life. From the NEED bucket, calculate the current cost of the simplest version of your life. Then dip into your desires from there, and know that, wherever you stop, you will already have everything that you need.

Write these down before reading another headline about another person’s windfall. You don’t need to chase somebody else’s dream, you need to know only what’s enough for you.