Comment by matheusmoreira

From my perspective, they aren’t making it.

It have a sense of relief that I’m content with so much less. Yesterday I made some sourdough bread and it was so gratifying. They cost around 70 cents CAD when you break down the costs for flour, salt, and energy to cook them. When you pull them out of the oven they do this incredible thing where they crackle and pop as they cool, and the rock-hard crust gradually softens. The smell is incredible. The first slices are always this impossible combination of crispy, glass-like crusts with a chewy, pillowy, delicious interior. It’s so good.

I’m in the worst financial condition I’ve been in my life. I earn less than half as much as I used to. Yet I enjoy things like this, I love my job, I can afford to take care of my family, there are countless things I want to do that I can still afford to do. Explore the outdoors, swim, dive, read, fish, spend time with friends.

That stuff is making it. I don’t need to exploit anyone to enjoy those things. In fact, I can make people’s lives better! I can give my neighbours nice bread. I can share fish I catch. I can take someone to an amazing spot I found.

The world doesn’t ask anything of us beyond that. It’s a choice to pursue more, and it’s a choice to pursue more at the expense of others. I really believe that choice comes with a consequence, too. My impression is that people who choose poorly tend to live hollow and discontented lives. I don’t think there are many exceptions, and when there are, these people tend to share a lot of traits with psychopaths. I don’t envy them either.

Let me ramble about this: in your position you have to pay a moral price to make more money. It's just logical. But it creates a systemic incentives problem, especially when the cost of living is going up, making the price you have to pay relatively lower, or in other words making you can't afford to not pay it.

I hate this kind of people. But some of them simply can't afford not acting this way, more than you do. Instead, people of power, who can and do set the agenda, don't care about it, because again, incentives problem - they won't change the system to one in which they make less money.

Part of this in my opinion is the fact that the western world ideology, the trash can we are all eating from, is simply money.

I wonder what Slavoy Zizek would say about this.

> It makes me wish I was one of them.

Imagine feeling starved no matter how much you have, knowing the vast majority hate you and would gang up on you, so you form close alliances with others who (like you) would mercilessly betray you if they felt it would benefit them.

Society doesn’t reward every sociopath or even most of them. It rewards people who are smart, disciplined, charming, and (in other ways) lucky.

But society is not the true reward granter, the self is. The real winners are those content with what they have.