5 ms·

Perhaps it is stupid to want to be rich? Few people are stupid enough to take the chance, so a few rich people are no thread to the mental health of society at

Perhaps it is stupid to want to be rich? Few people are stupid enough to take the chance, so a few rich people are no thread to the mental health of society at large. Whowhat?

jerf 7y ago
I'm being totally serious: The more I learn about riches & fame, the less I want them. I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100 million. Or really wish I had about a year later. (In "reality" I might try to do something where I take it but dump it into causes I approve of really quickly; for the sake of this argument I'm assuming that I'd have to actually step into that level of wealth permanently.) That level of wealth forcibly inserts you into a class of games that I don't want to have to play.
- katmannthree 7y ago
  It really doesn't force you into anything. You could just throw it into a savings account at your nearest national bank, lose a bit year over year to inflation being higher than the current interest rate, and have a whopper of an emergency fund. That would give you peace of mind if nothing else. If you wanted to be smart you could invest it in any number of ways to not lose wealth to inflation, but that's by no means necessary.
  - olcor 7y ago
    I guess what the OP is trying to say is that throwing a million or more into a savings account, not having to worry, and peace of mind is in itself a class game. Few people have that luxury; I got a chance to be a bit better off and immediately felt much differently and more attuned to class differences than I was before. I now have the luxury of time, choice and pecuniary freedom I did not have, and a lot of my peers don’t have. If I had a billion dollars I can’t even imagine the effect it would have on how I think about things. I feel I have that mentality of valuing the security the money gives me because I read books like Millionaire Next Door, Intelligent Investor, FIRE subreddits, etc and come from a family that has similar ideals.But I’m also aware that a lot of people are very different from that, and are known to end up playing differently with their money (status symbols, lifestyle upgrades, etc). Cultural aspects of many societies value the latter more than the former.
    - isoskeles 7y ago
      That comment says "class of games", and you've started writing about "class games" and then "class differences" in your interpretation of the comment. Not saying you did something bad here, but it sounds more like the telephone game than discussing what was written, all because of the omission of the preposition "of."
      - jerf 7y ago
        This is correct. I mean that having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or are they just after some money? Probably the latter. It basically takes you out of the normal run of human affairs into a very isolated environment. It solves a lot of problems that, frankly, I can solve well enough now, in return for handing you a whole lot of problems that are basically unsolvable. And there are other levels that become very easy to accidentally blunder into, like blackmail, and you become the target of some fairly sophisticated actors, possibly even including state actors, looking to influence you, or drain your accounts. Rich people tend not to talk about it as much from what I've seen, but you can, if you look a bit, find a number of accounts of people who got very famous talking about this, especially if they later fell from grace. When I was younger, I kinda thought this was sour grapes or rich/famous people trying to feel bad for themselves, but the consistency of the stories, plus my increasing understanding of human nature and group dynamics as I get older and gather more data and think more about the data leads me to believe this is the expected outcome rather than some exceptional surprise. I also thought, eh, that's no big deal, those are the soft problems and money solves the hard problems, but now I rather significantly feel the other way around. (There is a class of money problems that is hard, especially in the medical area, but they are not all that hard.) I'm sure there's some people who pull it off, but I'm not sure I'd be one of them. (As a bonus observation, when you are born into and grow up in this environment, I think it produces certain characteristic pathologies that go a long ways towards explaining why elites act so consistently in certain ways throughout history. Same environment -> same result. It is not good to have leadership populated by people who have never really deeply connected with another human being, yet, the very act of being in leadership inhibits those connections, and being born into it effectively destroys them entirely.)
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    You could also give most of it away to a favorite charity, keeping however much you feel comfortable in owning. There's a really interesting documentary called "Born Rich", which was made by one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, where he interviewed a lot of his friends who were all also born in to very wealthy families. They all had different ways of dealing with their circumstances, and I remember one of them did reject his family's fortune and tried to live an "ordinary" life.
- semiotagonal 7y ago
  You should take the $10 million. That's "fuck-you money"; with that amount, you're beholden to nobody. $1 million doesn't cut it. $100 million is unnecessary.
  - jerf 7y ago
    If I could completely conceal its presence from anyone else, maybe. If I was completely capable of keeping it from corroding my sensibility and connection to the world. But honestly, even at my low-end Silicon Valley salary living in the midwest I sometimes end up a bit more detached and cavalier about some things than I'd like.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mch82 7y ago
  On a city tour the guide shared that a local billionaire hired the Navy Seals to break into his home to test the security system. He doesn’t want his family hurt by people who want his money.

Perhaps it is stupid to want to be rich? Few people are stupid enough to take the chance, so a few rich people are no thread to the mental health of society at large. Whowhat?

jerf 7y ago

I'm being totally serious: The more I learn about riches & fame, the less I want them. I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100 million. Or really wish I had about a year later. (In "reality" I might try to do something where I take it but dump it into causes I approve of really quickly; for the sake of this argument I'm assuming that I'd have to actually step into that level of wealth permanently.) That level of wealth forcibly inserts you into a class of games that I don't want to have to play.

katmannthree 7y ago
It really doesn't force you into anything. You could just throw it into a savings account at your nearest national bank, lose a bit year over year to inflation being higher than the current interest rate, and have a whopper of an emergency fund. That would give you peace of mind if nothing else. If you wanted to be smart you could invest it in any number of ways to not lose wealth to inflation, but that's by no means necessary.
- olcor 7y ago
  I guess what the OP is trying to say is that throwing a million or more into a savings account, not having to worry, and peace of mind is in itself a class game. Few people have that luxury; I got a chance to be a bit better off and immediately felt much differently and more attuned to class differences than I was before. I now have the luxury of time, choice and pecuniary freedom I did not have, and a lot of my peers don’t have. If I had a billion dollars I can’t even imagine the effect it would have on how I think about things. I feel I have that mentality of valuing the security the money gives me because I read books like Millionaire Next Door, Intelligent Investor, FIRE subreddits, etc and come from a family that has similar ideals.But I’m also aware that a lot of people are very different from that, and are known to end up playing differently with their money (status symbols, lifestyle upgrades, etc). Cultural aspects of many societies value the latter more than the former.
  - isoskeles 7y ago
    That comment says "class of games", and you've started writing about "class games" and then "class differences" in your interpretation of the comment. Not saying you did something bad here, but it sounds more like the telephone game than discussing what was written, all because of the omission of the preposition "of."
    - jerf 7y ago
      This is correct. I mean that having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or are they just after some money? Probably the latter. It basically takes you out of the normal run of human affairs into a very isolated environment. It solves a lot of problems that, frankly, I can solve well enough now, in return for handing you a whole lot of problems that are basically unsolvable. And there are other levels that become very easy to accidentally blunder into, like blackmail, and you become the target of some fairly sophisticated actors, possibly even including state actors, looking to influence you, or drain your accounts. Rich people tend not to talk about it as much from what I've seen, but you can, if you look a bit, find a number of accounts of people who got very famous talking about this, especially if they later fell from grace. When I was younger, I kinda thought this was sour grapes or rich/famous people trying to feel bad for themselves, but the consistency of the stories, plus my increasing understanding of human nature and group dynamics as I get older and gather more data and think more about the data leads me to believe this is the expected outcome rather than some exceptional surprise. I also thought, eh, that's no big deal, those are the soft problems and money solves the hard problems, but now I rather significantly feel the other way around. (There is a class of money problems that is hard, especially in the medical area, but they are not all that hard.) I'm sure there's some people who pull it off, but I'm not sure I'd be one of them. (As a bonus observation, when you are born into and grow up in this environment, I think it produces certain characteristic pathologies that go a long ways towards explaining why elites act so consistently in certain ways throughout history. Same environment -> same result. It is not good to have leadership populated by people who have never really deeply connected with another human being, yet, the very act of being in leadership inhibits those connections, and being born into it effectively destroys them entirely.)
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  You could also give most of it away to a favorite charity, keeping however much you feel comfortable in owning. There's a really interesting documentary called "Born Rich", which was made by one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, where he interviewed a lot of his friends who were all also born in to very wealthy families. They all had different ways of dealing with their circumstances, and I remember one of them did reject his family's fortune and tried to live an "ordinary" life.
semiotagonal 7y ago
You should take the $10 million. That's "fuck-you money"; with that amount, you're beholden to nobody. $1 million doesn't cut it. $100 million is unnecessary.
- jerf 7y ago
  If I could completely conceal its presence from anyone else, maybe. If I was completely capable of keeping it from corroding my sensibility and connection to the world. But honestly, even at my low-end Silicon Valley salary living in the midwest I sometimes end up a bit more detached and cavalier about some things than I'd like.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mch82 7y ago
On a city tour the guide shared that a local billionaire hired the Navy Seals to break into his home to test the security system. He doesn’t want his family hurt by people who want his money.