I live in India and I am pretty poor, I hope to be middle-class/upper-middle class someday, but I have noticed something sinister from some people who are extremely privileged, they can be still be bought with money.
Lack of money makes you desperate, and paranoid, and comparison drives you crazy, hard to be morally perfect as a poor man, but I see actors who have made insane amounts of money on the backs of their Indian fans like Shahrukh Khan, Canada Kumar, Ajay Devgan, Hrithik Roshan and many more who are well-respected in the industry and who still can sell their own fans financial ruin (gambling) or death (Tobacco) in ads. I thought the point of being rich was that you could be more moral, what is the use of getting rich if you use your influence and fame to do more harm than good?
Also, all the actors mentioned above have made numerous movies about patriotism, many in their private conversations like to brag how much they “love their country… blah… blah… blah”, but yet they feel ok selling Tobacco to their fans who made them what they are.
I have a cousin who worships Shahrukh Khan and who took up Pan(Tobacco) because he was naive and because he probably thought it was “cool” since his favorite actor (on whom he has modeled all aspects of his life was selling tobacco), thankfully we were able to get him off that a few years ago, but he spent money like water and he gained worse health for it. He got off easy, many suffered financial ruin or even death. So, when is it fucking enough!? When will these people have enough money?
edit: It’s just not India, it happens everywhere (just watch CoffeeZilla to see more prime examples of this) Also, I am not saying I am perfect, if someone gave me an insane amount of money to sell Pan, I will, judge me if you will. But, I like to think if I had “enough” money, I would be immune to the attractions of blood money, I like to think I can try to be as moral as I can be then, but these people almost make me think that there is never “enough” money.
Bollywood actors are hypocritical and never use their platform for good. Stopped watching them in theatres long time ago.
Money is power. Power corrupts.
Frankly, I think 5 million USD should be enough for anyone pretty much anywhere in the world to live the rest of their lives comfortably. Taking 1 million out to spend immediately and leaving the rest in a savings account, even at 2% interest per year, you’re getting 6666 per month, or 80k per year.
For me, personally, living in Brazil, 600k dollars would probably keep me afloat for the rest of my life with my current expenses and comfort. That’s roughly twice my current salary for the next 25 years.
So, when is it fucking enough!? When will these people have enough money?
For many, it’s never enough, because they see it as a competition, one about showing off “wealth” in the most cringe way possible (just look at all the assholes that love to show off their expensive car collection) and also where they interpret rules like in the Munchkin card game: it’s ok to cheat, so long as you don’t get caught.
I think we can put a specific maximum for a comfortable western lifestyle. You can certainly argue that a comfortable western lifestyle is already far and away better than most of the people on Earth will ever see. This is something of an arbitrary point where past this, most of us are going to agree that it’s excessive.
It’s USD 10 million.
Why? Let’s start with the Trinity study:
https://thepoorswiss.com/updated-trinity-study/
The original looked at a standard retirement portfolio and asked how much you can withdraw over a thirty year retirement. It took market data from 1925 through 1995 (the updated version linked above goes to 2023) and then checked a thirty year window over that entire period with various withdrawal rates.
What it found is that if you withdraw 4% of the portfolio the first year, and increasing it by inflation each subsequent year, it’s highly unlikely the portfolio will run out in the 30 year window. The time period covers has market ups and downs, high inflation and low, and this 4% stays.
The updated study above says a 3.5% withdraw had a high chance of lasting 50 years.
Lets play it ultra safe and put it at 2.5%. With $10M, we’ll have $250,000/year to play with, and our rules adjust that for inflation.
(Median household income in Manhattan is $128k)[https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Demographics.html]. We’re pulling almost twice that. I feel comfortable saying a person can live nicely in any city on this income.
So there you go: $10M. If you want a 100% tax bracket, that’s a good place to put it. Any more money past that is just a game that hurts everyone else.
So is that $10M per person or family or family generation? I think the part where things start to spiral is when someone has a few kids who themselves have a few kids each and then add in the spouses. Even at 2 kids per generation and only the first Gen kids have spouses and you’re up to 10 people or $100M.
It’s harder to think about “enough” in places like India (or even the US) where there is so much inequality.
But I would define “enough” as comfortable. Not worried about bills, buying whatever groceries you want, a good living situation and enough cushion that an emergency won’t make you homeless.
The addiction to more, more, more is a disorder like hoarding is.
I think acquiring money can be an addiction, in the sense that it’s a behavior that allows escape (it’s a simple goal that’s easy to define, allowing a person to stop looking around and just go forward). Just like video games provide an orienting direction, hence provide dopamine, hence can be addicting, money can do the same thing.
Because money is a number, it’s inherently gamified. You can just set “more money” as the objective and you never have to change it and it’s always a direction to go that can produce dopamine.
Now, if it’s not the best, most meaningful direction. the dopamine flow decreases but doesn’t stop. Just like the video games getting boring, or your brain adapting to the cigarettes or cocaine. You still get a little jolt of dopamine, but not as much as before, so it’s this tired, boring life.
The thing is, there’s a lot of uncertainty and withdrawal and relearning you have to go through to get away from the repetitive small-hit dopamine cycle and into the more organic, less repetitive, large-hit dopamine cycle of … being a real person doing valuable things.
So yeah. Money as addiction. Source of small dopamine hits, that are easier to obtain and more familiar and hence comfortable, than the messy and uncertain process of seeking dopamine through real-world accomplishment.
ALSO, there’s the problem of how markets work. When a person is relative low in the market structure, their only way of getting profit is to really produce a lot of value. The higher a person gets in that structure, ie the more they advance financially, the less value they’re adding. The ultimate asymptote they approach is when they have sufficient money to live on the interest, and it’s totally automatic, and their contribution to economic value is zero.
This means that as a person follows the path (one of many paths) from worker to entrepreneur to pretty bourgeoise to elite, they steadily lose the natural, organic meaning that comes from actually providing value to others.
The person who used to love and be sustained by the smiles and appreciation of their coffee customers, probably isn’t getting much juice out of sitting there looking at spreadsheets of their 5000-coffee-shop empire.
But along the way, they’ve already switched their dopamine source to be from a combination of value provided and money received, to be just the money.
Which is like sitting there lighting up a cigarette to stave off the discomfort for another hour, or to prevent having to think about something that makes you anxious or uncertain. Just light up a smoke: dopamine.
Just like me with this damn website. Addicted. Small dopamine hits, comfortable stand-in for actual meaning.
