Thats not the mentality of the mega wealthy, thats a childs mentality (it applies to the simplest/cheapest of things all the ssame, and you can recognise the same behaviour in adolescent animals as well) - however the rest of us are forced to grow up.

And it’s also why some people are able to stop working (and stop investing too) once they have enough for a normal life with reasonable comfort … which is often financial security & personal health (ie less or no stress) more than things like having 5 maids/a new boat/showing off money for the sake if it.

But what I just described I feel like should be the goal of humanity, a goal for us to collectively achieve for all humans. We have enough production power I’m sure, it’s our cultural stagnation that betrays us.

I thought these paragraphs addressed that:

To own and run a 35ft boat of that kind, you need to be extremely rich. It retails at about £300,000, on top of which are the extraordinary costs of mooring, winter storage, maintenance and fuel. Isn’t money of that kind supposed to buy you pleasure? If not, what’s the point?

Extreme wealth can severely hamper enjoyment. As Michael Mechanic documents in his book, Jackpot, there are two groups of people who have to think about money all the time: the very poor and the very rich. Immense wealth possesses you just as much as you possess it: managing it becomes a full-time job. You don’t know whom to trust; you can start to imagine your friends aren’t friends at all; it can dominate and poison your family relationships. It can hollow you out, socially, intellectually and morally.

But I think there might be a further corroding aspect of wealth that hasn’t been widely discussed. Great wealth flattens the world. If you can go anywhere and do anything, everything is over the horizon. You speed past the local and the particular, towards an endlessly escalating ideal of luxury: the better marina, the bigger yacht, the private jet, the super-home. The satisfaction horizon can retreat before you. Place has no meaning, other than as a setting that might impress the friends you no longer trust. But anyone who is impressed by money is not worth impressing.

I think the latest insights are showing that it is more than just that though.

Extreme wealth also leads to mental health issues. Paranoia (leading Zuckerberg to build a $260M bunker in Hawaii), god complexes (people like Trump and Bloomberg running for president) and just general anti-social tendencies, like Musk buying twitter and impregnating SpaceX employees.

Pedophilia also deserves a special mention. Look a level deeper at the Epstein situation. Note that they were mostly after post-pubescent young girls, so it wasn’t the “I am attracted to pre-pubescent kids” type of pedophilia, but the “I am so powerful, I’m going to eat the forbidden fruit” type of pedophilia.

There should definitely be a cap on wealth.

So true. My boss makes about a million a year and gets whiny whenever we deal with clients that make more than him. He has plenty of money but that will never buy the parental love that he didn’t get as a child.