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?
Whowhat?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I've never been rich. Most so-called "friends" have wanted something from me while having little or nothing to offer me in return.
This became crystal clear while I was homeless for years. People continued to want something for me, continued to act like I deserved nothing in return and used my poverty as justification for why the things they wanted from me "weren't worth anything" and shouldn't lead to money.
Wealth just makes it apparent you can't trust people. People tend to be assholes. It's not like poor people are all surrounded by wonderful, loving, caring friends who would go to the ends of the Earth for them.
My life mostly worked when I was a military wife, but a lot of the values I was raised with only really work if you are in a position that involves a. Responsibility for a larger community and b. Somehow provides for you so you can look out for other people.
Looking out for other people is a real skill, but it doesn't automatically come back to you. Many people feel zero obligation to do anything in return for you when you do something for them and this seems compounded by being a woman. "Social contract" seems like an alien concept for far too many people.
I think I could do good things in an urban planning or economic development type role. That would sort of be the modern equivalent of what European nobility did.
Historically, merchants had a terrible reputation because they just wanted money and felt no obligation to the community. So it was socially problematic for wealth to be controlled by rich merchants rather than nobility. The nobility were beholden to the lower classes and held responsible for using their privilege to serve society by filling roles that required a certain level of privilege and education.
This is why our legal system uses the term "court," which is the same word used for audiences held by the nobility. Originally, nobility heard and settled complaints amongst the townspeople "at court."
One is that if you widen your view to not just being about you and how you cope with or are affected by that wealth, and consider how it might be used to help or influence those around you, the conclusion of whether to accept or seek such wealth might be different.
There was an article on HN recently about Jeff Bezos and his quest to get humans out in to space. Elon Musk has a similar ambition. Their goals, should they achieve them, could significantly change the destiny of humanity, and it would be unachievable for them without their great wealth.
Or look at what Gates has done with his foundation, or Warren Buffet's pledge to give away his billions when he dies (and all the other millionaires and billionaires he's managed to convince to do the same). None of that, which could and already has significantly helped the world would be possible without their wealth.
Or look at the Carnegie endowments, the Nobel prizes, the MacArthur awards, etc.
Very positive results could be achieved through charitable and philanthropic endeavors which would not be possible without the great wealth of their founders, even if the cost of that wealth to themselves and their families might be great.
It's much easier to make the world a better place by securing the proliferation of good ideas than to become fantastically rich. Ideas are after all what turn paper into money. I hope to raise a very large family of like-minded sons.
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.
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.