my idea of rich

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“My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you’re never around assholes. That’s the two things to really fight for in life.”

John Waters

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“the rot of entropy is an implacable enemy of life.”

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This is a complimentary piece to ‘one must always be careful of books’ or maybe ‘stability’ where I suggest books offer me my stability in life <that isn’t as fragile sounding as one may believe>.

Richness in Life rarely has anything to do with money other than maybe what you can do with your money. I begin there to suggest rich is a value equation.

What I mean by that is money richness has little value until that money richness is used for something. Now. this is where it gets tricky. A shitload of ‘rich people’ think of this value equation as a “composite of transactions.”

What I mean by that is a rich person can buy a massive diesel sucking boat and then turn around and make a massive donation to some cause and they place them side-by-side and call it a “good value day.” Rich, in terms of value, doesn’t work that way. Each rich transaction is of value in and of itself and these transactions are not a balance sheet.

Once again, this is about money, and it is not. It’s kind of a different version of capitalistic altruism. Or maybe, in my words, an attempt to justify one’s personal excess. I imagine a part of it is a battle between “what I deserve” feelings and “it is important that others see me in a good light.” I am kind of being brutal here with regard to altruism, but, I am doing so to pound home the point that rich is a value equation. In fact, life is a value equation. Kind of a composite of return on choices” as it were.

Which leads me to end by suggesting people are not just simple resource allocators, we are also social creatures interacting with other people and finding value in the interactions. In fact, we often make value, and values, commitments to the social interactions. These commitments give legitimacy to moral obligations and options. Complex moral problems are always about ‘us versus them.’ That includes ’our time versus their time’ as well as ‘my money versus their money.’ What that means is life’s richness, especially with richer people, settles into a “our interests versus theirs” or “our values versus theirs” (or both) space. I imagine it is within that space in which a rich person finds ‘my idea of rich.’ I guess I worry about that (for them at least) because all that seems like a lot of energy wasted on some shit that probably shouldn’t take so much energy to think about. It kinda feels like all that thinking simply encourages a weird type of life entropy and, ultimately, some moral rot I imagine.

I feel fortunate my life, and my idea of richness, isn’t that complex or challenging. Ponder.