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‘Why Am I Not Rich and Famous?’ The Delusion of Our Times

58 points by yarapavan 4y ago

nh23423fefe 4y ago
> Once we let go of outcomes, we can look inward and focus on the things that truly matter: To become a good person with values, who has character, and is good at what they do. That’s the biggest reward in life. And it’s 100% in your own hands. As if this wasn't some programmed delusion. There never was a time when people acted normally and then were corrupted by some new thing. Pretending civilization is normal instead of hunting and gathering. pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means. > We’re no longer driven by values, morals, loyalty, or family, we’re driven by what the media emphasizes. "we're not driven by [good words], but instead by [emergent collective attention]" well duh. it was never as you said it was. media is just civilization-level gossip. and people love gossip because its so informative. media isn't an actor, its a mirror.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means. I don't think that's what the author is saying. Being rich and famous is fine(well, plenty of people would disagree on the famous part https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631) , wanting to be rich and famous at the expense of your own mental health, when you're probably not in a position to become so is not, especially when it causes you to disengage with your own desires, rather than engage more fully.
- mrwnmonm 4y ago
  Do you work in the media?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > media isn't an actor, its a mirror. No, media is not a platonic abstraction, it's like 20 companies, tops, with public chains of command. It's not the emergent expression of the collective unconscious.
sokoloff 4y ago
For me, rich and unknown would be way, way better than rich and famous. Even financially comfortable and unknown is better than rich and famous.
- amelius 4y ago
  I think that depends on how you became rich and famous. E.g. if you found the cure to cancer ...
  - WJW 4y ago
    Not at all. Even if you find the cure to cancer tomorrow and it is 100% effective and dirt cheap, there are always enough people willing to make up conspiracies about it and send you threats. There's a semi-well known article from Tim Ferriss [1] where he does the math about prevalence of mental illness in the general population and multiplies that by an audience size of (say) 10 million people. You quickly end up with shockingly large amounts of mentally ill people in your audience. Famous people get death threats pretty much daily, and often their family does too. This doesn't mean that money doesn't have it advantages too of course, but rich and unknown is pretty much always preferable to rich and famous. [1] https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
      Yuuuup. And it's probably 10x worse if you're a woman. And 100x worse if you're gay or bi, and 1000x worse if you're trans.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Even financially comfortable and unknown is better than rich and famous. This is true for the vast majority of people. Our problem is that we allow the bizarre outliers for whom this is not true to run everything.
- paxys 4y ago
  Famous vs unknown depends completely on personality type. Some people want to be left alone to do their thing. Others want to build followings and be cult leaders. There's no "better" or "worse" here, just preferences.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> Person A was born in 1930. Person B was born seventy years later, in 2000. They both start applying the Graham investing strategy at a very early age, let’s say when they were 15 years. >> Person A becomes Warren Buffett, once the richest man on earth, who experienced one of the biggest booms in value stocks when he was young. Person B loses half of their money because value stocks are out of favor in the 2010s Buffet started when he was 10, not 15. His net worth is 97.8 billion dollars, 97.5 billion or so of that was earned after he was 50 years old. His success or failure was not due to whether stocks were in or out of favor in his first 5 years of investing. If you want to be extremely rich, set aside the next 82 years of your life to do nothing but work on that, and you should have a pretty high rate of success.
- schwartzworld 4y ago
  > 97.8 billion dollars, 97.5 billion or so of that was earned after he was 50 years old. To think he started off with a paltry $300 million. How much avocado toast do I need to not eat to get there?
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    He didn't start off with it. That was after 40 years of investing. By the time he was 21 he was up to $20,000.
    - zehaeva 4y ago
      That's the equivalent of ~$240k in today's dollars!
      - rufus_foreman 4y ago
        >> In 1945, as a high school sophomore, Buffett and a friend spent $25 to purchase a used pinball machine, which they placed in the local barber shop. Within months, they owned several machines in three different barber shops across Omaha. They sold the business later in the year for $1,200 That's ~$20k in today's dollars in a few months while still in high school. >> At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly delivering Washington Post newspapers ~$3k a month in today's dollars.
sokoloff 4y ago
The flying private example in the first section misses the entire point (or 99% of the point) of flying private. Flying on a set schedule, arranged long in advance, with 30 strangers, from one major airport to another major airport, is not the point of flying private. Flying on your own schedule, to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted, and otherwise having the airplane to yourself is the advantage that makes private jet travel appealing. Just skipping parts of the TSA checks isn't nearly enough.
- sylens 4y ago
  Isn't that what the author was saying though? These "affordable" private jets were really not providing the perks of a private jet; they were essentially just chartering a standard plane.
  - hindsightbias 4y ago
    He’s saying that because he thinks they want to brag. But there’s a completely 100% rational reason for doing it that he completely ignores. Given the choice of going to a destination for the same price (or at least “affordable”), would you A) fly commercial B) fly private?
    - rr3932 4y ago
      There's also the "to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted" perks, apparently. I've not had the pleasure to fly "private" yet so I wouldn't know. :)
    - sbf501 4y ago
      Bit what is the difference? Just a hundred fewer people, and the knowledge that you're just polluting for a few extra minutes of boarding time? I don't see any positives, even at the same price per ticket. Also, smaller planes are less stable than larger planes, so there's the smoother ride factor too, right?
epicseneca 4y ago
Damn. True that.
immigrantheart 4y ago
I guess it depends on the definition of rich and famous. How rich? How famous? These two doesn't come alone. They come with their own baggage as well. Being rich will make you, and your family targeted, either by criminals, by "friends and families", or by the government. Being famous is tiring. You constantly need to pander with people that you don't know, with papparazis, with friends of friends of friends, people constantly looking to network. Being famous without being rich is even worse. You just get death threats, hate mail, etc without the financial means to fend off those. I want to be rich enough so that I don't have to worry about the future or I can do any work I want without worrying about money, for example, creating music, working on a hobby, etc. I want to be famous enough so that the people that I care remember who I was, who I am, and who I will be, even when I am no longer in their lives, and live across the world.
- schoen 4y ago
  I remember meeting a very famous actor once. I was curious about his life and so I went to check out his Twitter account. It turned out that every day, in response to everything he tweeted about any topic, he got zero-context Twitter replies including marriage proposals, sexual propositions, requests for him to visit random people in random cities, and requests for money. That's just what strangers were willing to send him in public. This made me think that maybe being famous isn't very enjoyable.
hindsightbias 4y ago
> Same strategy, same actions, different times, different outcomes. Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck. Best of luck with that view.
- wpietri 4y ago
  What's wrong with it? Buffett himself acknowledges how lucky he was, so clearly seeing the role of luck is not incompatible with success: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-to-his-success-is-luck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-... You might also look at Richard Wiseman's work on why some people are "luckier" than others. E.g.: http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
- ryeights 4y ago
  And right back at you. To think otherwise is arrogant and self-aggrandizing.
  - chucksmash 4y ago
    Or perhaps it's not quite as binary as "either you believe success is all luck or you're arrogant." There's a lovely book, "The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives" that has a good take on this. I don't have time to find the passage right now, but the idea is essentially this: even if you work in an endeavour where success is overwhelmingly driven by luck, success still requires: taking a chance to have the opportunity to become lucky, an open mind and preparation to recognize the good luck that has occurred, and the skill to exploit the opportunity that luckiness has brought. One must make chances for luck to occur, and one must have a prepared mind to take advantage of luck when it does occur. I wouldn't necessarily read the replier as saying they have succeeded and luck had nothing to do with it (i.e. the binary view). The problem with a view point of "it's all luck," IMO is this will lead you down the path of learned helplessness and even if you do get lucky you won't be in a position to capitalize because if you thought it came down to a roll of the dice, why would you bother skilling up in the first place?
dougmwne 4y ago
I think this is very relevant to many people I’ve known who try to start their own business. A successful business is a reality test. You can’t profit if your customers all live in your fantasies. If you create products for those imaginary people, no one will buy them and you will fail. That’s why product-market fit is the #1 advice given to entrepreneurs. It recognizes that you will need to leave behind your own ideas of what you should build and who your should build it for, which are probably made out of a lifetime of TV and Social Media bullshit and actually take stock of the real world, the real people in it and what they will pay real money for. Sadly, quite a few people I know were able to run their fantasy business all the way to the poor house.
Invictus0 4y ago
Getting rich isn't that hard. Just be born in America or Europe, most careers will afford a comfortable lifestyle. If you want to be richer than that, study engineering or business. Your average businessman does math at the 8th grade level. Getting famous also isn't that hard. Do something funny or creative and post it on TikTok, it's not that hard to get a video with 1e5 or 1e6 views. Hell, you can post cute videos of your pet and get 1e6 views.
- sschueller 4y ago
  You may be rich compared to someone in the poorest of nations but you can still be struggling to get by while working 3 jobs. Getting an engineering degree is also not that easy and for example in the US you will be jailed by huge dept for the rest of your life.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    > you will be jailed by huge dept for the rest of your life. Even $100k in student debt is not that huge on an engineer's salary. People regularly take on multiples of that debt to buy a house. "rest of your life" is an absurd exaggeration - and I'm saying this as someone who thinks the deck is totally stacked against students today.
  - tristor 4y ago
    Also, you don't need an engineering degree to get a job in tech as long as you're lucky enough to be born in the West to start with. Things like MIT Open Courseware and similar programs have made it possibly to learn everything needed to know in order to get and excel in a tech job for nearly free. There is absolutely no need to be "jailed by huge debt". Being born in the West is pretty much required though because decks are stacked hard against immigrants.
sbf501 4y ago
In the Buffet example, OP left out that once you cross a certain threshold of wealth, it is almost impossible to NOT make more. There are hedge funds, exchanges, shell corporations, ways of diffusing assets across businesses, and other strategies that only people with hundreds of millions can access. Not to mention many laws basically stop applying to you once you achieve a certain level of wealth because the vehicles are so complex it is hard to prosecute.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  Its irrelevant in the example, because the Buffet-like person is only using one strategy in the example, available to everyone.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbf501 4y ago
    It isn't irrelevant because Buffet didn't use that strategy.
    - betwixthewires 4y ago
      Which is why I said "buffet-like person." We are talking about different things. I'm talking about the article in the OP at the top of this thread, you're talking about what you wish we were talking about.
      - sbf501 4y ago
        > Which is why I said "buffet-like person." You edited your post to say "buffet-like person". At least have some integrity.
        betwixthewires 4y ago
        I did not. It's impossible to do so after an hour or something. But even if I would have, I'm going by the example being discussed here in the OP, not IRL buffet, you're still trying to steer the discussion toward your preferred topic instead of discussing what we are actually discussing. Anyway, throwing insults at each other like children is not what this site is about, let's have substantiative discussions like adults and keep this site fun and interesting and not turn it into reddit.
ISL 4y ago
> Ask 100 ten-year-olds what they want to do, and I’d guess 99 of them will say something that’s related to becoming rich or famous: A musician, YouTuber, actor, NBA player, Elon Musk, and so forth. People actually do ask this question of large numbers of kids regularly. Here's one: https://www.approvedcourse.com/when-i-grow-up/ https://www.approvedcourse.com/when-i-grow-up/ Top three in that survey were doctor, teacher, astronaut. (I have read other surveys where YouTuber was high on the list -- my point here is that there actually are surveys, no need to speculate about their results.)
- somenameforme 4y ago
  That wasn't asked of kids, that was asked of adults to recall what they wanted to be when they were kids, which is going to result in different answers. Lego, through Harris polling, ran this poll [1] internationally not that long ago and the results were stereotypical. Respondents were allowed to pick multiple dream careers: --- China: Astronaut - 56% Teacher - 52% Musician - 47% --- US: Youtuber - 30% Teacher - 25% Pro Athlete - 21% --- [1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-astronauts-survey-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-a...
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    I've always wanted to be an astronaut musician. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...
theandrewbailey 4y ago
Rich and famous? I don't care. I'd settle for a wife and 2.1 kids right now.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Which body part would you rather have for that 0.1 child? Or do you just share time with 10 other parents?
  - theandrewbailey 4y ago
    A healthy child 1/10th the size of a normal child would suffice. Women would say 'he's so cute!'
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      Ah yes. Often known as a cat
ohgodplsno 4y ago
People want to be rich and famous because they toil their entire lives and struggle as a middle class person, while they see bumbling idiots flying around doing what is the easiest job in the world. Every example that we are shown is that the rich and famous do about one month of real work in a whole year. It's a feeling of unfairness, of injustice.
lakevieew 4y ago
A bit tangential to the main point covered in the post. >> Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck. I am not sure if I agree with this completely. I recently watched a Netflix movie "Look both ways" with my wife. The movie shows parallel timelines in which the protagonist despite facing different scenarios ends up with a very similar fate in the end. That movie got me thinking if our life's trajectory is based on a few defining moments, or if it is more about the small decisions we make everyday. For example, if Amazon/Meta didn't work out for Bezos/Mark, where do you think they would end up. My guess is they would still be running some big successful companies, as founders or CEOs or VPs.
triceratops 4y ago
> Ask 100 ten-year-olds what they want to do, and I’d guess 99 of them will say something that’s related to becoming rich or famous : A musician, YouTuber, actor, NBA player, Elon Musk, and so forth. For crying out loud, every generation from the 20th century onwards would have given a similar answer at that age. Heck, I wanted to be a Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne type of person when I was 10. Or a famous writer. I am neither. I'm still quite successful and happy. Yes modern culture is vapid and shallow. Most things that people are into are vapid and shallow, and always have been. It's the essence of the human condition. That doesn't have much impact on the lives people ultimately go on to lead. Your local environment is far more important.
papichulo4 4y ago
If it's going to take concentrated effort to get out of, that to me implies that the default is "broken," and while I agree with the sentiment in the article, I don't know how we address it systematically for society. Something draconian like banning social media doesn't sound right. As I pose the question of how we "fix it," I can't help but question how we know if it's something to be fixed at all. I agree that it's making our lives today harder to bear socially and mentally. But, it could also be a natural part of the evolution of our species, perhaps this is the way to get to the trillion-people across multiple-planets scale? Perhaps we individually suffer, mentally or otherwise a bit more than the previous generation, to allow for the maximum number of humans to succeed at a given time. I too miss being able to focus and long for the now seemingly serene world of the 90s. I too feel distracted by gadgets, apps, politics. But I'm also intrigued by the idea of a future where there are 100 x Einsteins alive, which may come at the cost of having 10000 x Kardashians.
HereIGoAgain 4y ago
batshibstein 4y ago
Somebody from 1930 might posit the average American today is rich (if not famous) based on the average household with private bedrooms, air conditioning and central heat, multiple vehicles, multiple TVs, computers and electronic gadgets, kitchens stocked with food and gadgets, closets full of clothing, etc. Sure people have problems and poverty still exists but at baseline its a pretty comfortable lifestyle. Mostly bemoaning about not being rich and famous comes down to desiring better (or perceived to be better) versions of items listed above -- or the ability to have "fuck you" money and the fantasy that buying people off will isolate you or solve all your interpersonal problems.

58 points by yarapavan 4y ago

> Once we let go of outcomes, we can look inward and focus on the things that truly matter: To become a good person with values, who has character, and is good at what they do. That’s the biggest reward in life. And it’s 100% in your own hands. As if this wasn't some programmed delusion. There never was a time when people acted normally and then were corrupted by some new thing. Pretending civilization is normal instead of hunting and gathering. pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means. > We’re no longer driven by values, morals, loyalty, or family, we’re driven by what the media emphasizes. "we're not driven by [good words], but instead by [emergent collective attention]" well duh. it was never as you said it was. media is just civilization-level gossip. and people love gossip because its so informative. media isn't an actor, its a mirror.

mikkergp 4y ago
> pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means. I don't think that's what the author is saying. Being rich and famous is fine(well, plenty of people would disagree on the famous part https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631) , wanting to be rich and famous at the expense of your own mental health, when you're probably not in a position to become so is not, especially when it causes you to disengage with your own desires, rather than engage more fully.
mrwnmonm 4y ago
Do you work in the media?
pessimizer 4y ago
> media isn't an actor, its a mirror. No, media is not a platonic abstraction, it's like 20 companies, tops, with public chains of command. It's not the emergent expression of the collective unconscious.

sokoloff 4y ago

For me, rich and unknown would be way, way better than rich and famous. Even financially comfortable and unknown is better than rich and famous.

amelius 4y ago
I think that depends on how you became rich and famous. E.g. if you found the cure to cancer ...
- WJW 4y ago
  Not at all. Even if you find the cure to cancer tomorrow and it is 100% effective and dirt cheap, there are always enough people willing to make up conspiracies about it and send you threats. There's a semi-well known article from Tim Ferriss [1] where he does the math about prevalence of mental illness in the general population and multiplies that by an audience size of (say) 10 million people. You quickly end up with shockingly large amounts of mentally ill people in your audience. Famous people get death threats pretty much daily, and often their family does too. This doesn't mean that money doesn't have it advantages too of course, but rich and unknown is pretty much always preferable to rich and famous. [1] https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    Yuuuup. And it's probably 10x worse if you're a woman. And 100x worse if you're gay or bi, and 1000x worse if you're trans.
pessimizer 4y ago
> Even financially comfortable and unknown is better than rich and famous. This is true for the vast majority of people. Our problem is that we allow the bizarre outliers for whom this is not true to run everything.
paxys 4y ago
Famous vs unknown depends completely on personality type. Some people want to be left alone to do their thing. Others want to build followings and be cult leaders. There's no "better" or "worse" here, just preferences.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> Person A was born in 1930. Person B was born seventy years later, in 2000. They both start applying the Graham investing strategy at a very early age, let’s say when they were 15 years. >> Person A becomes Warren Buffett, once the richest man on earth, who experienced one of the biggest booms in value stocks when he was young. Person B loses half of their money because value stocks are out of favor in the 2010s Buffet started when he was 10, not 15. His net worth is 97.8 billion dollars, 97.5 billion or so of that was earned after he was 50 years old. His success or failure was not due to whether stocks were in or out of favor in his first 5 years of investing. If you want to be extremely rich, set aside the next 82 years of your life to do nothing but work on that, and you should have a pretty high rate of success.

schwartzworld 4y ago
> 97.8 billion dollars, 97.5 billion or so of that was earned after he was 50 years old. To think he started off with a paltry $300 million. How much avocado toast do I need to not eat to get there?
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  He didn't start off with it. That was after 40 years of investing. By the time he was 21 he was up to $20,000.
  - zehaeva 4y ago
    That's the equivalent of ~$240k in today's dollars!
    - rufus_foreman 4y ago
      >> In 1945, as a high school sophomore, Buffett and a friend spent $25 to purchase a used pinball machine, which they placed in the local barber shop. Within months, they owned several machines in three different barber shops across Omaha. They sold the business later in the year for $1,200 That's ~$20k in today's dollars in a few months while still in high school. >> At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly delivering Washington Post newspapers ~$3k a month in today's dollars.

sokoloff 4y ago

The flying private example in the first section misses the entire point (or 99% of the point) of flying private. Flying on a set schedule, arranged long in advance, with 30 strangers, from one major airport to another major airport, is not the point of flying private. Flying on your own schedule, to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted, and otherwise having the airplane to yourself is the advantage that makes private jet travel appealing. Just skipping parts of the TSA checks isn't nearly enough.

sylens 4y ago
Isn't that what the author was saying though? These "affordable" private jets were really not providing the perks of a private jet; they were essentially just chartering a standard plane.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  He’s saying that because he thinks they want to brag. But there’s a completely 100% rational reason for doing it that he completely ignores. Given the choice of going to a destination for the same price (or at least “affordable”), would you A) fly commercial B) fly private?
  - rr3932 4y ago
    There's also the "to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted" perks, apparently. I've not had the pleasure to fly "private" yet so I wouldn't know. :)
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Bit what is the difference? Just a hundred fewer people, and the knowledge that you're just polluting for a few extra minutes of boarding time? I don't see any positives, even at the same price per ticket. Also, smaller planes are less stable than larger planes, so there's the smoother ride factor too, right?

epicseneca 4y ago

Damn. True that.

immigrantheart 4y ago

I guess it depends on the definition of rich and famous. How rich? How famous? These two doesn't come alone. They come with their own baggage as well. Being rich will make you, and your family targeted, either by criminals, by "friends and families", or by the government. Being famous is tiring. You constantly need to pander with people that you don't know, with papparazis, with friends of friends of friends, people constantly looking to network. Being famous without being rich is even worse. You just get death threats, hate mail, etc without the financial means to fend off those. I want to be rich enough so that I don't have to worry about the future or I can do any work I want without worrying about money, for example, creating music, working on a hobby, etc. I want to be famous enough so that the people that I care remember who I was, who I am, and who I will be, even when I am no longer in their lives, and live across the world.

schoen 4y ago
I remember meeting a very famous actor once. I was curious about his life and so I went to check out his Twitter account. It turned out that every day, in response to everything he tweeted about any topic, he got zero-context Twitter replies including marriage proposals, sexual propositions, requests for him to visit random people in random cities, and requests for money. That's just what strangers were willing to send him in public. This made me think that maybe being famous isn't very enjoyable.

hindsightbias 4y ago

> Same strategy, same actions, different times, different outcomes. Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck. Best of luck with that view.

wpietri 4y ago
What's wrong with it? Buffett himself acknowledges how lucky he was, so clearly seeing the role of luck is not incompatible with success: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-to-his-success-is-luck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-... You might also look at Richard Wiseman's work on why some people are "luckier" than others. E.g.: http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
ryeights 4y ago
And right back at you. To think otherwise is arrogant and self-aggrandizing.
- chucksmash 4y ago
  Or perhaps it's not quite as binary as "either you believe success is all luck or you're arrogant." There's a lovely book, "The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives" that has a good take on this. I don't have time to find the passage right now, but the idea is essentially this: even if you work in an endeavour where success is overwhelmingly driven by luck, success still requires: taking a chance to have the opportunity to become lucky, an open mind and preparation to recognize the good luck that has occurred, and the skill to exploit the opportunity that luckiness has brought. One must make chances for luck to occur, and one must have a prepared mind to take advantage of luck when it does occur. I wouldn't necessarily read the replier as saying they have succeeded and luck had nothing to do with it (i.e. the binary view). The problem with a view point of "it's all luck," IMO is this will lead you down the path of learned helplessness and even if you do get lucky you won't be in a position to capitalize because if you thought it came down to a roll of the dice, why would you bother skilling up in the first place?

dougmwne 4y ago

I think this is very relevant to many people I’ve known who try to start their own business. A successful business is a reality test. You can’t profit if your customers all live in your fantasies. If you create products for those imaginary people, no one will buy them and you will fail. That’s why product-market fit is the #1 advice given to entrepreneurs. It recognizes that you will need to leave behind your own ideas of what you should build and who your should build it for, which are probably made out of a lifetime of TV and Social Media bullshit and actually take stock of the real world, the real people in it and what they will pay real money for. Sadly, quite a few people I know were able to run their fantasy business all the way to the poor house.

Invictus0 4y ago

Getting rich isn't that hard. Just be born in America or Europe, most careers will afford a comfortable lifestyle. If you want to be richer than that, study engineering or business. Your average businessman does math at the 8th grade level. Getting famous also isn't that hard. Do something funny or creative and post it on TikTok, it's not that hard to get a video with 1e5 or 1e6 views. Hell, you can post cute videos of your pet and get 1e6 views.

sschueller 4y ago
You may be rich compared to someone in the poorest of nations but you can still be struggling to get by while working 3 jobs. Getting an engineering degree is also not that easy and for example in the US you will be jailed by huge dept for the rest of your life.
- triceratops 4y ago
  > you will be jailed by huge dept for the rest of your life. Even $100k in student debt is not that huge on an engineer's salary. People regularly take on multiples of that debt to buy a house. "rest of your life" is an absurd exaggeration - and I'm saying this as someone who thinks the deck is totally stacked against students today.
- tristor 4y ago
  Also, you don't need an engineering degree to get a job in tech as long as you're lucky enough to be born in the West to start with. Things like MIT Open Courseware and similar programs have made it possibly to learn everything needed to know in order to get and excel in a tech job for nearly free. There is absolutely no need to be "jailed by huge debt". Being born in the West is pretty much required though because decks are stacked hard against immigrants.

sbf501 4y ago

In the Buffet example, OP left out that once you cross a certain threshold of wealth, it is almost impossible to NOT make more. There are hedge funds, exchanges, shell corporations, ways of diffusing assets across businesses, and other strategies that only people with hundreds of millions can access. Not to mention many laws basically stop applying to you once you achieve a certain level of wealth because the vehicles are so complex it is hard to prosecute.

betwixthewires 4y ago
Its irrelevant in the example, because the Buffet-like person is only using one strategy in the example, available to everyone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sbf501 4y ago
  It isn't irrelevant because Buffet didn't use that strategy.
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    Which is why I said "buffet-like person." We are talking about different things. I'm talking about the article in the OP at the top of this thread, you're talking about what you wish we were talking about.
    - sbf501 4y ago
      > Which is why I said "buffet-like person." You edited your post to say "buffet-like person". At least have some integrity.
      - betwixthewires 4y ago
        I did not. It's impossible to do so after an hour or something. But even if I would have, I'm going by the example being discussed here in the OP, not IRL buffet, you're still trying to steer the discussion toward your preferred topic instead of discussing what we are actually discussing. Anyway, throwing insults at each other like children is not what this site is about, let's have substantiative discussions like adults and keep this site fun and interesting and not turn it into reddit.

ISL 4y ago

> Ask 100 ten-year-olds what they want to do, and I’d guess 99 of them will say something that’s related to becoming rich or famous: A musician, YouTuber, actor, NBA player, Elon Musk, and so forth. People actually do ask this question of large numbers of kids regularly. Here's one: https://www.approvedcourse.com/when-i-grow-up/ https://www.approvedcourse.com/when-i-grow-up/ Top three in that survey were doctor, teacher, astronaut. (I have read other surveys where YouTuber was high on the list -- my point here is that there actually are surveys, no need to speculate about their results.)

somenameforme 4y ago
That wasn't asked of kids, that was asked of adults to recall what they wanted to be when they were kids, which is going to result in different answers. Lego, through Harris polling, ran this poll [1] internationally not that long ago and the results were stereotypical. Respondents were allowed to pick multiple dream careers: --- China: Astronaut - 56% Teacher - 52% Musician - 47% --- US: Youtuber - 30% Teacher - 25% Pro Athlete - 21% --- [1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-astronauts-survey-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-a...
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  I've always wanted to be an astronaut musician. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...

theandrewbailey 4y ago

Rich and famous? I don't care. I'd settle for a wife and 2.1 kids right now.

ohgodplsno 4y ago
Which body part would you rather have for that 0.1 child? Or do you just share time with 10 other parents?
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  A healthy child 1/10th the size of a normal child would suffice. Women would say 'he's so cute!'
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Ah yes. Often known as a cat

ohgodplsno 4y ago

People want to be rich and famous because they toil their entire lives and struggle as a middle class person, while they see bumbling idiots flying around doing what is the easiest job in the world. Every example that we are shown is that the rich and famous do about one month of real work in a whole year. It's a feeling of unfairness, of injustice.

lakevieew 4y ago

A bit tangential to the main point covered in the post. >> Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck. I am not sure if I agree with this completely. I recently watched a Netflix movie "Look both ways" with my wife. The movie shows parallel timelines in which the protagonist despite facing different scenarios ends up with a very similar fate in the end. That movie got me thinking if our life's trajectory is based on a few defining moments, or if it is more about the small decisions we make everyday. For example, if Amazon/Meta didn't work out for Bezos/Mark, where do you think they would end up. My guess is they would still be running some big successful companies, as founders or CEOs or VPs.

triceratops 4y ago

> Ask 100 ten-year-olds what they want to do, and I’d guess 99 of them will say something that’s related to becoming rich or famous : A musician, YouTuber, actor, NBA player, Elon Musk, and so forth. For crying out loud, every generation from the 20th century onwards would have given a similar answer at that age. Heck, I wanted to be a Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne type of person when I was 10. Or a famous writer. I am neither. I'm still quite successful and happy. Yes modern culture is vapid and shallow. Most things that people are into are vapid and shallow, and always have been. It's the essence of the human condition. That doesn't have much impact on the lives people ultimately go on to lead. Your local environment is far more important.

papichulo4 4y ago

If it's going to take concentrated effort to get out of, that to me implies that the default is "broken," and while I agree with the sentiment in the article, I don't know how we address it systematically for society. Something draconian like banning social media doesn't sound right. As I pose the question of how we "fix it," I can't help but question how we know if it's something to be fixed at all. I agree that it's making our lives today harder to bear socially and mentally. But, it could also be a natural part of the evolution of our species, perhaps this is the way to get to the trillion-people across multiple-planets scale? Perhaps we individually suffer, mentally or otherwise a bit more than the previous generation, to allow for the maximum number of humans to succeed at a given time. I too miss being able to focus and long for the now seemingly serene world of the 90s. I too feel distracted by gadgets, apps, politics. But I'm also intrigued by the idea of a future where there are 100 x Einsteins alive, which may come at the cost of having 10000 x Kardashians.

HereIGoAgain 4y ago

batshibstein 4y ago

Somebody from 1930 might posit the average American today is rich (if not famous) based on the average household with private bedrooms, air conditioning and central heat, multiple vehicles, multiple TVs, computers and electronic gadgets, kitchens stocked with food and gadgets, closets full of clothing, etc. Sure people have problems and poverty still exists but at baseline its a pretty comfortable lifestyle. Mostly bemoaning about not being rich and famous comes down to desiring better (or perceived to be better) versions of items listed above -- or the ability to have "fuck you" money and the fantasy that buying people off will isolate you or solve all your interpersonal problems.