Giving up writing: A thought experiment

I found myself in a bar one evening during grad school with a bunch of my classmates. We were just hanging out, casually drinking, when someone posed the question: Would you completely give up writing in exchange for $100 million dollars?

Everyone else in the group immediately said “Absolutely not!” “No way!” “Never!” It was like the question was a bad round of Would You Rather, like they were offended by its simplicity. I didn’t agree at all - I’d probably give up writing for WAY less than that! I thought at least a couple of them might maintain a defiant air in the name of artistic integrity, but I didn’t think everyone there would.

With that kind of money, I feel like you’d be obliged to give up writing. For sure, my writing isn’t worth $100 million. I’m never going to make that kind of money from it, and I seriously doubt that if you quantified the value of my writing to everyone who has read and will ever read it, the number wouldn’t even reach six figures. By implication, even I feel like my writing isn’t worth that anywhere near much!

Say, conservatively, that I could get an average of 3% yearly return on that money. That’s an average of $3 million per year - way beyond early retirement money in one year’s worth of returns alone! If I reserved $200k for living expenses, I’d still be left with enough money to be a small-time philanthropist. Compare that to the alternative of my being allowed to scribble my ridiculous stories.

Personally, I’m pretty sure I would feel the loss in not being able to write, but I’m also pretty sure I’d fill that void with some other meaningful venture.

I’m not sure if I’m writing an indictment of a single-minded, elitist, artsy ethos or if this is an observation of a younger person’s inexperienced mindset (about half of them were early-to-mid 20s, a few of us were early-to-mid 30s) or if this is a roundabout way of virtue signalling my selflessness (I’m absolutely not a selfless person…for better or worse), but I can say that their attitudes felt overly self-centered at worst and hugely overvalued their writing’s worth at best.

As a person who would never realistically have a chance at that kind of money, you’ve got to be selfish as hell not to think for even, like, two seconds about what you could do with it! I mean, come on - what a lack of imagination for a group of creative people. Compared to my lifestyle now, which is pretty darn good as a member of the tech workforce (despite a long layoff period in 2024), $100M could guarantee more than that for my family and for a huge swath of other people.

At the very least, I could fund other (better) writers, and that alone would have more artist value than I could provide through my own work! I could buy small multifamily buildings and allow lower-income families to live in the better public school districts, or start (with some legal help) a universal basic income experiment in my city, or donate it to fund science, or the fight against climate change, or eduacation, or food shortages - any number of things. I could start a charitable foundation that would fund these causes in perpetuity (barring the fall of our democracy, I guess). Any one of those, even if I half-assed it real hard, would be enough to replace the satisfaction I derive from the practice of writing.

There’s absolutely no way anyone with a conscience should turn down $100 million if they could have an impact like that. Unless you had the earning power of, maybe, like, Stephen King. Then you can do whatever.