Reaching de minimus
Money is mutable. As it travels upward, it loses value.
Most people in the world work hard to get enough to eat. Once you get enough It’s less work to get too much. It’s less work than that to get better food. At the very top, the difference between a great restaurant and a great private chef in terms of money is great, in terms of better food is de minimus.
If you don’t have a car, transportation can be difficult. You must work very hard to get a car that runs. Once you make enough to get a car that runs, you can more easily get a good car. Once you get a good car, you can more easily get a luxury car. Once you get a luxury car, getting an exotic car is de minimus. There’s nowhere you can drive it at 200 miles an hour. You are stuck in traffic with pick-ups full of lawnmowers, blurping along in second, fouling your plugs.
Finding shelter if don’t have it, is very difficult. You depend on a tent, or a lean to, or a favela. Once you have shelter, You can now live and work more comfortably, you are able to get better shelter. Once you have a house with seven bedrooms, you can’t use them all. Once you have seven houses you can’t occupy them all.
When you have more money than you can spend for human needs, you buy silly things. You buy status. You buy things bigger, better, more expensive than your peers. You spend your time on status, on flaunting your privilege, on outspending your rivals, on showing up your neighbors.
In your seven room mansion you could have a nice painting on the wall. You spend a hundred million on a Picasso. Is it a better picture, or just more expensive? Or is it just a way to lock away useless wealth?
You could take that hundred million and actually create jobs, not just lie about doing it. You could give twenty of your servants, assistants, agents and friends five million dollars each. But then they wouldn’t need to work for you. You’d lose that key attribute of wealth, your separation from the rest of humanity, your status.
Do you buy seven Ferraris so you can drive them? Is one better to drive than another, or are you just a collector of useless things. A car too expensive to drive is useless wealth. Houses too numerous to occupy are useless wealth.
When you have enough useless wealth, you can change wives like sheets. You can father useless children. You can buy exotic pets. You can spend your time trying to find something, anything to spend it on that would improve your life just a little. Or you can just watch the zeros add up in your accounts.
Once you have enough useless wealth, you… Wait…Okay. There is never enough.
Once you have enough useless wealth you spend your life trying not to lose it. You pay expensive experts to diminish your taxes. You buy politicians to make laws to prevent anyone else from getting your wealth. You want to keep others down. Because all you have left is your exalted state.
Because like wealth and the material it can buy there is only so much happiness one human can have. You could try to spread it around. You could make other’s lives easier. Or you can try to keep it all to yourself. Then it’s de minimus.