I know that it's still early on in the piece, but I already have a nomination for Man of the Year, 2010. He is an Austrian man named Karl Rabeder.

Mr Rabeder is moderately wealthy, but he won't be for much longer. He is worth about $8 million, but he is planning on giving it away. He says that money is making him unhappy, so he's going to sell his luxury chalet and successful business, and use the profits to start a charity lending money to small businesses in South America.

I'm not nominating him because his contribution to charity was so great – Bill Gates will no doubt comfortably eclipse him this year – nor because this is a new idea – I believe that someone else suggested it as a path to true happiness about two thousand years ago – but because he is following his conscience rather than doing what anyone else would expect.

There is a lot of emphasis in Western society on money. People often sacrifice a lot of their lives to their careers, to make a buck rather than a difference. Many people will go on accumulating long after they have more than they could ever hope to spend themselves, or what they need to raise their kids and live comfortably. So many people will forgo rewarding careers as teachers or nurses because there's more money in law, accounting or medicine. Those careers have more prestige, to be sure, but a lot of that prestige is related to the money involved.

So much of our lives is dedicated to the pursuit of wealth so that we can afford new cars, expensive holidays and nice homes. We know that money doesn't make us happy (though it is normally only those who are comfortably off who say things like that) but we strive for it nonetheless. It is entirely normal to try to make as much money as possible.

The important reason that I'm voting for Mr Rabeder is that he's breaching convention to do the right thing.

I wonder how many people through history have failed to do the same thing. It can happen on a small scale – failing to disagree with a racist guest at a dinner party because disagreeing would be bad form, or being the only one in a crowd of hundreds who stops to help out someone who is clearly in need. It can happen on a bigger scale, such as speaking out in a public meeting and making an honoured guest who has something to be ashamed of feel uncomfortable. It can be discouraging friends from committing some crime. Or it can happen by altering the way we live our entire lives, or by making something public that some people would prefer was private.

There is a man named Neil Pugmire who worked as a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in New Zealand in the 1990s. He was concerned about the release of potentially dangerous patients into the community. No action was taken by his managers, so he did the only thing that he thought he could: he went public with the concerns. He was dismissed from his job because of this release of information. He was, in a way vindicated: one of the patients abducted a 6-year-old boy, justifying his concerns, if not his way of addressing them.

I have a great deal of admiration for what he did. He surely knew that he was breaking convention, and would be fired, for doing what he did, but he did it anyway. He probably breached his employment contract to do it. I can't condone that, and I don't want to be drawn one way or the other into saying that he did the right thing – there's more than one point of view for this thing. All that I can say for Neil Pugmire is the same as I can say for Karl Rabeder, which is that I hope that, had I been in the same position, I would have done the same.