As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his poem “Joe Heller”:
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
Money actually has a strong diminishing return on happiness. A lack of money can definitely make you unhappy. More money also makes it easier to be happy, but does make it easy.
That’s actually the hole that the rich can get into. They (subconsciously) assume they would be happy with just a bit more money. They delay or ignore the things that would make them happy in trade for more money/power.
It would actually be quite sad, if it didn’t fuck the rest of us over completely.
I do pity them. I long for a world in which such hoarding, deleterious tendencies were treated as the mental health crisis they are, and that such a thing were made impossible to occur.
It’s not called “retail therapy” for nothing!