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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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."

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.)

Your view is one that I'm partial to myself, but there are some other factors which you don't mention in your analysis.

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.

These guys are shallow sleezebags. Bill Gates blew up the population of Africa as a PR stunt for his wife, which we see here has been successful. Nothing Bezos has done is morally praiseworthy, and many things questionable. Musk is a cool guy but clearly just a flashy narcissist.

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.

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?

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.

This is a good point. However, if you insert yourself among people who all have a certain level of material comfort to lack material ambition, it is much, much easier to forge authentic relationships. The prevailing social aim becomes to experience joy, learn interesting things, and grow as a person. Of course, this dynamic is still rare. Even when people aren't fighting for money, there's still an urge to fight for status, which only rarely perfectly manifests itself in a competition to create beauty. This is partly why conspicuous consumption is frowned upon by certain factions of the upper classes. It reveals you're playing the wrong game.

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. She was a full-time military wife for a lot of years, as was I.

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."

Aah yes, I misread it; totally my bad, I apologize. Definitely feels like a telephone game now that I read it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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