I have a sincere question. When is enough enough?
Especially for rich people who have more money than they could easily spend in several lifetimes. Like is it really money that motivates them?
See, you think money is a thing people acquire because it has uses, such as paying for stuff.
Imagine you're a hollow, misanthropic bag of shit with lots of money. You have no purpose or personality, so you make the wealth your personality. You thus have to keep acquiring more to exist.
I've been saying this for a while:
The ultra-wealthy are dragons. They don't want all this money so they can spend it, they want it so they can *have* it. If given the option, I'm sure more than a few would actually sleep on piles of money like Smaug in The Hobbit.
I've been thinking the same for a while. I remember a saying from an old Farm Banker (small town bank that worked with lots of farmers). "Money is like manure. It is only any good when it is spread around."
These wealth hoarders to the opposite.
I refer to it as "billionaire's psychosis." I don't use "psychosis" there as a joke: upon acquiring so much money it's no longer an issue, many people appear to genuinely lose touch with reality. Every dream in their head is good and true; every dollar leaving their possession is evil and a waste.
At that level of wealth your social circle also gets smaller, and it’s harder to trust people. So you need to fill that emptiness up with something, and the pursuit of money and power and STUFF feels like a good substitution.
That level of money also does a number on the relationships within your family. You exert vast power over everyone's lives even if you are trying not to, and that becomes the center of family life.
Snorting cocaine with rolled up $100 dollar notes is redundant, when the money becomes the cocaine in its own right. It also brings to mind what the late great Robin Williams once said: "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you're making too much money."
Also, for those in Britain who still have chips on both shoulders about the breakup of the Empire, having billions of £ is a stand-in for the empire they've lost.
I’d be curious to see if there are any peer reviewed articles about patterns among the ultra wealthy in terms of how they use or save their cash. There must be some diversity in attitudes re wealth and how they use it.
There is some research on the ultrawealthy being less nice basically. I'll dig out the research after a call but they think it's because the rest of us need to rely on other people for help in things that the wealthy can solve by throwing money at it.
I’ve sometimes wondered how hypothetically becoming a billionaire would impact my personality. I hope I’d see it as an opportunity to connect with (and help) a broader circle of people. But who knows. Could also see it magnifying my inner jerk.
Honestly, and sadly, I would fortress up. I'd go from homebody to disgusting feral recluse if other people could be removed from my daily equation with all that money.
The question is: does HAVING the money break their brains, or do they naturally have brains broken in the way that makes them need to accumulate endless money?
I knew a lawyer for the rich and stupid who explained that money has no real value to them anymore. It's simply their sport to get more of it than the next guy.
I think when your system is designed to reward sociopathic money grabbers, what happens is that sociopathic money grabbers end up getting a lot of rewards. Then they, of course, tweak the system to further reward themselves.
We need systems that don't reward the worst ones. Easier said than done.
I think some of them (especially Bezos) get off on knowing how miserable the people who work making their fortunes for them are. Seriously believe that dude gets a boner from thinking about his warehouse workers running their asses off or delivery drivers pissing in bottles.
