Comment by panarky
6 months ago
Wealth makes it even more difficult to figure out what to do with your life.
It's almost as if you can either have wealth/comfort or purpose/fulfillment, but it's vanishingly rare to have both at the same time.
6 months ago
Wealth makes it even more difficult to figure out what to do with your life.
It's almost as if you can either have wealth/comfort or purpose/fulfillment, but it's vanishingly rare to have both at the same time.
This is such an American thing that I find it hard to respond to, because these cultural things feel universal when you're swimming in them.
Wealth doesn't make it difficult to figure out what to do with your life if you never thought wealth is the goal. The problem is that the sole life goal for this person was to get rich, and now that's the endgame, and he doesn't know what to do.
If the goal, instead, was to have fun, to foster a strong social circle, good relationships, to do things for and with them, to have hobbies, to learn new things, to challenge yourself, etc, he'd just think "oh cool, now I can do more of those without having to spend X hours a day working".
>> This is such an American thing that I find it hard to respond to,
It is actually a thinly veiled sociopath/psychopath/narcissist that has fully bought into hyper-capitalism being the endgame of humanity thing.
Yes, feels like the invisible hand selects people to get rich based on how unfulfillable they are and thus how likely they are to keep working after they get rich.
I understand this serves an inflation control mechanism in our highly unequal system. The wealthy have comparatively so much money that the system cannot afford them to spend like normal people would. It would put too much currency in circulation and cause massive inflation. The system needs the wealthy to keep investing in ventures to create more busy-work, filled with NPCs and insatiable people who will also create more busy-work if they get rich.
The system needs to keep the money circulating in a very tight loop. Its journey from the money printer back to government hands needs to be very short in order to allow the government and corporations to retain the increasing degree of control that they need to maintain the status quo.
They are unrelated. You can have purpose and fulfillment regardless of your wealth. A life of pain and misery are not required.
For the record, the implication here is, put pithily, you have to sell your soul to get rich.