Day 226

What do old rich people think, when they are just a few years (or hours) from death, full of nothing but memories of working for the extra zeros in their bank account, and a nicer car than other people's cars, and so forth? They must not be thinking happy thoughts.

Everything is about money! It can't be escaped!

Have you ever known rich people before? I have. I once taught piano to the two daughters of the people who own a 10 million dollar house at the end of ten mile point - the house way at the end, that's massize and almost all glass windows. Anyway, life is the same for them. The only differences - square footage, car horsepower, couch quality, the number of TV channels - really are the only differences. The people are the same, with the same desires and same miseries and same conflicts and same everything.

They gave me a present for christmas. It was wrapped and handed to me directly. It was an ugly, kitchy, loud, motor-powered mini-fountain. Turns out the present was bought, and pre-wrapped by someone they hired; it wasn't personal at all.

Money distances people from each other.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nicely put. (And a good reason why my family tries to put as little emphasis as possible on the purchasing of holiday gifts, and to focus instead on how we can have the most fun with the time we get to share together.)
12:54 PM
Anonymous said…
A few points:

Your understanding of people with money, from my perspective, is rather misguided and uninformed. Your presumption that people work hard to add a few extra zeros to their income may be true for some, but it not for many many people. Many work hard doing what they enjoy and a larger salary happens to follow. Others, innovative and creative, begin a business. Ten years down the road, a million dollar offer is made to buy the rights to their idea.

A person that dies with loads of money is not any happier than one who does not have much to his name. This is by all accounts true. But to think that "old rich people...must not be thinking happy thoughts" is a far cry from the truth. I guarantee that their thoughts are not of the nicer car that they may have or the designer clothes they wear, but of their memories that they have shared with their family and friends.

Maybe they do speak of material more
possessions, but in their social realm that is part of the game. You know, just as you, with not so much money, speak of wealthy people as "shallow." Oh, and of course, not any bit happier than you. We all say and do things to appeal to our peers (recognized or not) and your discussion could be pulled from any conversation I've had with so many starving students and struggling parents. If you come into money I would bet on my daughter that your tune would change. At least in how you view money and those with money.

Basically, just because people are rich does by no means mean that they are shallow and simply care about money.

So, until you walk to walk, you should refrain from making such sweeping statements. Make them for the family you worked for perhaps, but even then you don't have the whole truth.
8:08 PM
Max said…
I think you may have misunderstood my entry. I did not say (or intend to say) that all rich people are shallow, or that all pursuits that incidentally lead to wealth are bad. In my opening, I was attempting to say that a person for whom /all/ there is to remember is financial pursuits and material wealth will not be a happy person in his or her old age. I know people who've spent thier lives accumulating wealth to the detriment of their marriages and children, and they aren't the happiest of folk as a result. Is this not an intuitive and uncontrovercial statement?

As for the remainder, my idea was to elucidate the danger that wealth has to separate one from others by a wall of materialism. Of course this danger does not materialize (her har) for every person of means, but it certainly isn't uncommon either; my example was the wealthy couple whose children I taught.

As for your effort to somehow invalidate my thoughts by positioning them within my allegedly deterministic social and monetary position, I say posh. I am reminded of the radical feminists at UVic trying to shut me down: "you're just saying that because you're a white male," they'd say. And your comment, which is essentially to say "you're just saying that because you don't have much money" is equally useless and dodgy. And it's the 'perfect' argument: you don't have to respond to a thing a person says, because you can just point to their skin, or gender, or bank account, and call victory by default.

It is a corollary of the "you can't say anything unless you're in such-and-such shoes" argument. Cops use it to justify or excuse brutality. Religious apologists use it to fend off rational argumentation. Conspiracy theorists of all stripes pull it out all the time, blaming our disbelief in their silly conspiracies on government brainwashing or some other alleged unenlightment.

So now, I allegedly have to literally be a millionaire in order to gain the ability to notice how many rich people live, behave, and treat others? How on Earth does that follow?

And frankly, I do consider myself rich; after all, my income and lifestyle puts me in the top 5 or 10 percent of the world already. I can already buy, within reason, just about anything I could ever want; food and a roof are never concerns. The disgusting and excessive materialism even our middle class indulges in warrants the claim that the middle class has /much/ more in common with millionares than it does with the poor.

I feel as though you read my post too quickly, and responded not so much to it directly, but instead to a certain sentiment or prejudice that you mistakenly apply to me. I'll leave it up to other readers to decide whether that is true.
12:11 AM
Anonymous said…
My main point of contention is that your discussion, though perhaps with no intention, seemed to generalize excessively.

As for saying that if you are not in a certain position (poor, rich, male, female) you cannot say anything about that position, I believe either you read my statement too quickly, or I failed to adequately convey what I meant. It is fine and welcomed to comment on positions which you are not in. Where the one of the problems arises is when you take your personal experiences and generalize the hell out of them and make statements with no words such as "many" and "some" - just look at the first line of your entry.

A second problem arises when you pave over the materialistic drive of many of your peers and attribute poor behavior to "rich" people. I've known several people who would, by western standards, not describe themselves as rich. These people gave impersonal gifts, spent money on trial things, and wanted to increase their zeros in their income.
9:56 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 58

I do fear, sometimes, that the act of pondering aloud has become a cathartic experience and nothing more . It is hard in this town to find a diversity of thought, because we've all been raised in very similar ways with the same norms, experiences, and conventions. I find that the mightiest opinions of some of the the twentysomethings I know are so damningly narrow that they cannot possibly stand to the slightest breeze of doubt. Often the biggest theory is the thinnest. Our shadows grow long and starved moments before they disappear under the sunset. The natural world has cursed us with its indifference, its vaccuum of conscience in which deeds neither good nor evil subsist. I find the urge to view our species of conscious and conscientious beings as alien. It is as though the world we inhabit was never intended for us to inhabit it. In short, this town is a box. This country, political system, individualistic ideology, humanist dogma, faux rebellion against imagined authority; it ...
Read more

Day 212

It is very true that the best people in the world at any discipline, skill, sport, instrument (etc). are never particularly well-rounded people. There should be, as my grandma mentioned over dinner last night, a competition for "well-roundedness" with international competitors. In order to win you'd have to be physically capable, perhaps musical and mathematical, moral and charitable, very learned, and so forth. And that's the interesting thing, the jacks of all trades get absolutely no attention from the peanut gallery. But on the contrary, they typically have the healthiest and happiest and most fulfilling of lives. I can't tell you how many young pianists I've met, for whom piano was the sole self-measure of pride and value. And, like all people who have themselves judged for one thing, they are utterly miserable, feeling highs and lows that appear and fade as quickly as do the passing opinions of strangers. --- On a tangent: some of the most miserable girl...
Read more

Day 168

You hear non-religious people say it all the time: "If only there was a God! That would honestly be great, if there was a supreme moral arbier in the universe looking out for my every action and running the universe with me in mind. It's really too bad there isn't." I used to say that, until I came across a few authors who vehemently claim that such a wish is, in reality, a wish for slavery. When we ask for the comfort of a god (or fantasize for it anyway) were asking for a kind of absolution that only the slave can have. And the price for that is extremely high. And still, there times when I do wish I were this sort of slave, though I no longer say so with a smile.
Read more