My daily anxieties are "I need to find time to make dinner/shop.", "I need to fit in a run into this crazy day.", "Do I have enough money for retirement?", "My co-workers are stressing me out.", "Can I get this project done on time?"
I literally can't think of a common daily anxiety or frustration that would not just evaporate if I was a retired multi-billionaire.
The difference that I see immediately is that all of your anxieties are focused on yourself, while this article is specifically about providing medical care to Mr. Page's son.
My own anxieties have largely to do with my children, and while some can probably be bought away (is my kid getting an OK education at this public school?), there isn't an amount of money to instantly solve "my kid is sick".
I agree on the whole with the sentiment that the situations of the super rich are not comparable to ours, but there are some things that money won't solve, and likely some problems that you and I cannot conceive of that money creates.
> I’m sure Larry has many of the same daily frustrations and anxieties that you and I do.
This is the comment I was responding to. Sick children are not a daily frustration and, even then, Page can pay for the best health care available anywhere in the world for his child, many others have to decide between keeping their house to medical treatment.
The amount of bootlicking on HN can be staggering. Class solidarity seems awful far off when so many temporarily embarrassed billionaires are awaiting their time to shine.
“The human condition” is called that because it describes the set of innate features (or bugs) of human existence. There’s nothing more bootlicking than believing money will let you escape it.
You’ve focused in on some subset of what makes life interesting for humans, without understanding that as money dwindles a very new and quite real set of problems materialize for people.
Have you ever been poor? I have. I’ve also made fairly exorbitant amounts of money in a year later in my career. Money does not fix problems, but it absolutely removes a great deal of inconvenience, trouble, and stress from life.
The working poor who are otherwise trapped in a web of debt and crushing hours with low pay are much closer to the average worker - tech or otherwise - making several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, than that worker is to someone like Page.
But folks often don’t realize this. The fickle trappings of the “middle-class” create a false rug of comfort that can be readily yanked out from underneath someone given an injury or illness.
This is not a worry billionaires have. Nor most millionaires. But many Americans do have it.
Money doesn’t break you out of the human condition, but it absolutely changes life radically.
Which is fine, I’m happy to let the rich do what they will. As soon as we no longer have citizens bankrupted by medical or educational debt, or have their retirements wiped out by an injury or illness. Once citizens can rest easier, then they can have their absurd displays of wealth. Until then, they are begging awfully hard for violent revolution.
Yes, I have been poor and am now decidedly not. Guess what: Death still approaches. Money still appears finite and insufficient. Nagging sense of incompleteness remains. Relationships of all kinds are challenging in all kinds of ways.
And this is all coming from someone who is deeply satisfied with life and essentially always has been! That’s the trouble with the human condition.
Is this a defense of allowing uncapped accumulation of wealth? No. Is it a defense of the ultrarich being able to do whatever they want? No. It’s the simple observation that while money buys solutions to many conditions, “the human condition” is not one of them.
I recently watched a short mini-doc about Notch, of minecraft fame, and it seems he really went through it after selling MC for $2.5 billion. He talked a lot about isolation and an inability to connect with other people, despite becoming well known for insane parties and stating he has the ability to do whatever he wants.
Other people who have come upon sudden riches have expressed the same sentiment. There was a great post on reddit years ago from a guy in wealth management who talked about the severe lack of "human experience" when you achieve maximum wealth.
Notch could have put 99.95 % of his riches i to helping to fix and save the world without imactong his living standard. He could have made lives of a lot of people better. I know I would.
If he chose not to, and he feels empty, thats on him. He probably is empty.
Thats a fair price to pay for being rich beyond what a single person needs. No sympathy from my part, only understanding. I wouldnt want to hang out with a rich guy as well. These people are creepy.
> Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
> The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.
This quote from Einstein always comes to mind when I hear of people that get a lot of "success" with money but then feel empty as a result. I feel like it has to be, at least in part, a knowledge that they aren't giving back what they know they should be for the amount they are taking, but you can't really blame them too much because it's what everyone is "supposed" to do :/
In reply to the other comment, the parent. I think maybe with an overly literal and limited reading you arrive at that conclusion, but nevertheless this is a very interesting thing.
Yeah. This kind of delusional hand-waving of the material conditions of billionaires is terrifying. Their wealth is upon our and our children’s backs. With their capital they could push to revolutionize healthcare or housing for the poor.
But they’re not. They’re hiding from a pandemic in Fiji and buying their way into quarantined nations that aren’t even letting their own citizens in.
Let me know the next time Page or Schmidt has to worry whether they’ll ever be destitute due to an injury or accident out of their control.
"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."
"More simply, satire serves to remind those who’ve placed themselves above us that they, like us, shit and they, too, will die." [1]
The super-rich aren't gods, they just have something people want. However rich Bezos was, his junk is still on the internet for anyone to go see, so money really can't solve everything.
An unusual life path leads to a unique experience: A life of a professional politician, or an olympic sportsmen, or a Nobel laurate might look very different from a life of an ordinary person. But saying the "human condition" is diffetent? Let me disagree, I think it's too much-- all people all Earth have the same basic condition: sometime we are happy, we suffer, fight addictions, look for purpose, struggle, experience betrayal, overwork, worry for kids, look for a significant other, get disappointed, get excited... that is just like the rest
Super rich people have the same phone as me. They got the same vaccine as me. The same flue as everyone else can knock them down every winter. On average their kids die with the same frequency and for the same reasons as mine.
Once you get a decent salary utity of money decreases badly.
