> $95k does not seems like enough money to totally upend your life like that for.
That's because most of us here are so used to the amount of money we earn. But for people who literally struggling with month-to-month payments, 100K feels like a life-changing amount of money. If they were just saving month by month, they might have never reached that amount in their entire life.
Our perspectives here on HN are very one-sided when it comes to things like this, anyone who been poor previously (or is currently) could attest to this.
I don't know, the very same comment mentions that the person was earning 6 figures. Less-than-a-year's-salary is definitely a weird thing to throw a comfortable 6 figure income out the window for - it's not like 95k is "never work a day in your life" money.
But the poster said that that was basically his yearly salary. He fled the country and has to spend the rest of his life worrying about extradition (and/or having people find out he's a felon) for a year's pay.
Indeed, a lot of HN readers don't realise their good luck in life. It takes a dose of poverty to bring perspective.
There was a thread here not too long ago about employees getting fired because they were cheating on their expense accounts. C-level execs cheating on pretty trivial amounts. And others brought up star athletes getting paid millions, then getting busted placing thousands of dollars on insider bets. There's a lot of irrationality in these decisions.