Paperclip Billionaire

Make paperclip. Find realization.

The game starts simple enough. You press the one button at the top of the screen:

Then you press it again, and again. If you click it enough, and toggle pricing to adjust margin vs. demand, you can save up enough money to buy your first automatic paperclip maker. You don’t get to see it or anything, it’s all just text on the screen.

“Alright,” I thought, “I get it but doesn’t seem very fun.”

Yet, two hours later I was still playing. I bought more automatic paperclip makers and started upgrading them. I increased demand with marketing to move excess inventory that started stacking up from all my automatic paperclip makers. Then, I purchased an automatic wire buyer so I wouldn’t have to manually replenish supplies any longer.

With production and supply automated, I started tinkering with strategy. I pushed price up and down, purchasing more automatic paperclip makers to the meet increased demand while I searched for the perfect price point. At some point, I unlocked metrics that allowed me to track the revenue I made per second. This became the focus. I celebrated when I broke $5 per second; that’s a fair number of 15 cent paperclips!

I saved money to complete other projects, helpfully arranged in a list at the bottom of my screen. I earned enough to start a side-game where the money I earned could be invested. Made-up ticker symbols and their value started flashing by in a little table. The money began to add up faster. I stayed up too late, transfixed, but finally went to bed.

I got up early to write, like I always do. The tab was still open and while I drank coffee, I leveled up that $5/second revenue to $200/second. I marveled at the power of compound interest as I kept investing my returns at low risk and watched my net worth climb to $1,000,000. I bought out my competitors which drove sales even higher.

I didn’t get much writing done. Though I clicked over to my Novlr tab a couple times and put down some thought sketches, I kept returning to the game. What was next? What new abilities would unlock as I hit different levels? What new projects would appear?

Suddenly, I had the idea to write a post about the game and opened Substack in a new tab. Then twenty minutes later I found myself back in the game, completely forgetting what I had wanted to write about. Meanwhile, I increased to $82,000/second in revenue. I blew past my paltry first million dollars, seeming now like a silly little milestone, as my investments climbed to $245,000,000 on their ticker.

Finally, I remembered what I wanted to write. It was this:

What the hell am I doing?

I’m spending real time making fake paperclips! This game taps into the exact same energy that drove me through my 20s — doing for the sake of doing. I recognize the feeling well. Everything moves so fast, and there’s so many exciting milestones, that I don’t spend a lot of time exploring the why of the whole thing, or really anything. I have just one job: Make paperclip. And I’m damn good at it.

I return to the game. There isn’t much to do now. The entire system is automated, including the investments. The only project left is some side gambling game, the last button I still get to click myself. I’m watching my numbers go up, up, up. The number of paperclips is over 120 million, thanks to investments the number of dollars is over half a billion. But the thrill is gone. I realize that I only have fun during the uncertain parts of the game, much less so once the building is done.

I start to convince myself that this game is a social research project to see how long people will sit at their computers, watching numbers change that are disconnected from reality. I make a note to not check my retirement savings so often. Still, the game continues to run on another tab.

I feel myself getting close to the end. I’m saying things like, “Wow I remember when the cost of wire was only $20 a spool! Now it’s seven times that!” nostalgic for those halcyon days, only a couple hours earlier, when life was simpler.

Every now and then, I click the old “make paperclip” button just to feel like I have something to do. The numbers fly by in such a blur that I can’t tell if clicking the button even does anything anymore. The money keeps piling up. I gave away hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to my fictitious factory workers, but my net worth climbed faster, crossing a billion dollars.

Here I am, a paperclip billionaire, with nothing to do except try to give the money away faster than it stacks up. But that’s impossible, there just aren’t enough buttons for that. I kind of want to close the tab and start over, see if I can do it differently.

I missed working on the book today, though I suppose I got some writing in. I’m thankful for this reminder of my propensity to become a useful cog, and for a new realization as well: I just lived the arc of someone’s 30-year career in a few hours. In a weird way, I got to see what it was like to build a vast fortune and experience small doses of the emotions that might come along the way for me.

That’s what I want more of — space to fall down other (hopefully more interesting) 30-year wormholes over a cup of coffee. That’s why I love nonfiction so much. Reading memoirs and biographies is a way to experience a small part of countless lives I’ll never live, and could never live, but which still contain lessons for this one life I do get to live.

I also want to keeping sharing some stories from my own thirty-year pursuits in the hopes that others might take their own lesson and perhaps, working together, we all avoid fates which amount to nothing more than the endless making of paperclips and the endless growing of numbers on a screen.

Btw, if you wanna play, here’s the link :-)