LEGO Castles and Retirement Plans (Or How Adults Forgot How to Want Things)

Ask any eight-year-old what they'd do with a billion dollars and you get an immediate avalanche of specificity: every LEGO set ever manufactured, a pet monkey (probably named Steve), a house made entirely of trampolines, a waterslide that starts in the kitchen and ends in the neighbor's yard, a room full of couch pillows just for fort-building, and a spaceship that only goes to planets with dinosaurs. And this is the part adults seem to forget: zero hesitation. They don't pause to consider tax implications or insurance premiums or whether trampolines make sound architectural foundations1. They know what they want2. They don't even wonder if they're allowed to want it. The child dreams in motion. The adult plans in retreat.

Ask an adult the same question and watch their face perform this fascinating little pantomime of fiscal responsibility. "Well," they'll say, "first I'd pay off my mortgage and student loans"—because of course they would, because we're all good little economic units who understand debt service3—"then maybe put some aside for retirement, and, um, travel?" The travel part always sounds like a question. It's like they're reciting it from a brochure someone else handed them. The whole response has the vibe of a voicemail left for a life they forgot they wanted.

Here's what's genuinely disturbing about this pattern: we've become so fluent in the language of scarcity that abundance renders us functionally aphasic4. We can discuss mortgage rates and 401(k) matching with the precision of actuaries, but ask us what we'd do if money evaporated as a concern and we start making sounds that barely qualify as language5.

The problem, and this is where things get psychologically interesting, is most of us spend our adult living in Abraham Maslow's basement. You remember Maslow: the hierarchy-of-needs guy who suggested humans operate on this neat pyramidal system where you handle food and shelter before you get to worry about, say, self-actualization6. Which sounds reasonable until you realize that our entire economic system is designed to keep most people frantically maintaining the foundation, never quite secure enough to start building upward7.

We become archaeologists of our own survival, experts at excavating just enough resources to keep from falling off the bottom rung. Meanwhile, the upper floors of human potential: creativity, meaning, transcendence, whatever you want to call the stuff that makes consciousness worth having, remain as foreign as Martian real estate.

But here's the thing (and forgive the therapeutic jargon, but it's useful here): this isn't actually about money8. The billion-dollar question is performing surgery on something much more fundamental. It's asking what you'd do if you had permission to want what you actually want9.

Think about your last Monday morning. What dragged your consciousness back from wherever it goes during sleep? Odds are it wasn't inspiration or clarity or the haunting scent of possibility. It was your phone vibrating with a calendar reminder for a 9am meeting that could've been an email. It was a blood test you've been putting off, a child with a dietary restriction that turns school lunch into a logistical puzzle, a barely-tolerated boss who passive-aggressively uses "per my last email" like a weapon. Your inbox had 41 unread messages, two marked "URGENT," one of which involved someone's idea of an emergency and the other an email thread you got CC'd on and have no idea why. The point is: you got up not because you were pulled by purpose, but because you were nudged by things that punish you if you don't respond. These are valid reasons to exist. They are. But they're also placeholders. Provisional scripts. Life lived in "inbox zero" mode. Strip away the survival theater, and what's left?

This is where most adults discover they've been living their entire lives in response mode10. We've become so practiced at reacting to circumstances that we've forgotten how to generate our own agenda. When someone asks what we'd do with unlimited resources, we freeze because we've never asked ourselves what we'd do with unlimited freedom.

In theory, freedom should feel expansive. In practice, it often feels like drowning in open water: no direction, no resistance, just endless possibility and no clue where to swim. Psychologists call it "choice overload." But it's deeper than that. It's not that we have too many options. It's that we no longer trust any of our preferences enough to choose. We've spent so long obeying the logic of necessity that the logic of desire feels like a dead language.

The psychology here gets genuinely weird. There's this concept called "hedonic adaptation," where people return to their baseline happiness level despite major positive or negative changes11. Lottery winners, after the initial euphoria wears off, often report feeling no happier than they were before their windfall. The money solves their scarcity problems but doesn't magically generate meaning. Without a sense of purpose beyond survival, they find themselves adrift in abundance12.

Which brings us to Viktor Frankl, who spent time in Nazi concentration camps thinking about meaning and survival. Frankl argued that humans can endure almost any suffering if they can find meaning in it. But the inverse might also be true: humans struggle to endure even comfort if they can't find meaning in it. Remove the struggle, and you'd better have something else to get up for13.

The children understand this intuitively. When my hypothetical eight-year-old lists their billion-dollar wishes, they're not just naming consumer preferences—they're describing who they are. Someone who builds (LEGO sets), who seeks adventure (trampoline houses), who forms unlikely friendships (Steve the monkey). Their answers reveal character, not just desires.

What happened to that clarity? When did we start editing our deepest wants through the filter of feasibility? When did we learn to translate "I want to build something beautiful" into "I should probably focus on marketable skills"?

The tragedy isn't that most of us will never receive a billion-dollar windfall. The tragedy is that we've stopped asking ourselves what we'd do if we could do anything. We've outsourced our dreams to our circumstances— and blamed them for the shoddy work14.

This connects to what psychologists call "eudaimonic well-being" (happiness derived from living according to your deepest values and realizing your potential). It's different from hedonic well-being, which comes from pleasure and the absence of pain. The billion-dollar question cuts straight to eudaimonic territory: if pleasure were guaranteed and pain eliminated, what would make your life feel meaningful?

Most career advice focuses on finding something you're good at or something that pays well. But rarely do we ask: what would you choose to spend your days doing if compensation and competence were non-issues? What problems would you voluntarily wrestle with? What would you create, explore, or nurture simply because it felt important?

People who can answer the billion-dollar question—and I mean really answer it, not just mumble something about travel—tend to make different choices even within their current constraints. They're more likely to take calculated risks, to say no to opportunities from misaligned with their deeper purposes, to invest time in developing skills with no immediate payoffs but which serve their longer-term vision.

They also tend to be more resilient during difficult periods because their motivation doesn't depend entirely on external circumstances. When someone knows what they'd do with unlimited resources, they can often find ways to do smaller versions of it with limited resources15.

The question also reveals something about how we relate to work itself. If your answer to the billion-dollar question looks nothing like your current job, what does this tell you? Maybe you're in the wrong field. Maybe you haven't yet discovered how to bring your deepest interests into your professional life. Or maybe you've just become a really convincing actor in the survival theater, so good at the role you forgot it was a performance.

The most fulfilled people I know don't see their jobs as separate from their identities. They've found ways to make their daily work express something meaningful about who they are and what they believe matters. They've figured out how to smuggle their billion-dollar answer into their thousand-dollar reality16.

So here are some questions worth sitting with: If you couldn't fail and money wasn't a factor, what would you spend the next year learning? What problems in the world genuinely bother you—not because you think you should care about them, but because you actually do? What did you love doing before anyone told you it wasn't practical?

And perhaps most importantly: why are you waiting for a billion dollars to find out?

Maybe the real question isn't what you'd do with a billion dollars. Maybe it's what you'd want to do if you trusted your wants were worth wanting. What if the thing you'd choose to do with unlimited freedom is actually the thing you should be figuring out how to do with the freedom you already have?

The children have it right, I think. They know what they want because they haven't yet learned to want what they should want. They haven't developed the adult skill of talking themselves out of their own desires before they've fully examined them.

But here's the part no one wants to acknowledge: you already know your answer to the billion-dollar question. It's sitting there in your chest right now, probably has been for years, wrapped in layers of practicality and postponement and "maybe someday when..." You know what you'd do. You've always known.

The question makes you uncomfortable not because you don't have an answer, but because you do, and you've been ignoring it so long you've started pretending it never existed17.

Think about what just happened when you read that. Did you feel the flicker? That defensive voice rushing in to explain why your answer is naïve, impractical, selfish? Did you start to argue with a blog post?

That defensive voice—the one talking right now—is the same one that left the voicemail all those years ago. The one that whispered, "maybe someday," and hung up before the beep.

This time, you're finally listening. And what you're hearing is the cost of every day you didn't call back.

Or maybe you'll keep pretending you don't know, because pretending is easier than starting. That's your choice. Just don't pretend you didn't hear the question.