No, really like. The thing that was probably like. THE BIG radicalizing moment from "I don't like it at all but what are we gonna do, tell people how to spend their money, they worked for it", before I even realized that no one "works for" even a single billion, before all of that fell into place, the thing is that they're so fucking unhappy. Like. They're miserable! They're historically miserable, the ultra-rich! Even a lot of the comic-book fictional ones are miserable! They are not happy people and you'd think. You'd think that having more money than Jesus Christ's Vampire Sister could spend in her younger brother's lifetime would free you up to have hobbies. Shower theaters in grants to put on opulent productions tailored to your tastes. Singlehandedly set up fandom conventions for your personal interests. Go to a movie every night and eat at a different restaurant just because. Take up Warhammer without worrying about the cost of having THE BEST battle setup in your basement. Hell, indulge in my personal dream of having a fully 3D-modeled megadungeon and loot for your personal fantasy RPG campaign and provide all your players with lovingly detailed miniatures. Fund a season of Dimension20 laser-targeted at your interests. Find a fanfic author and say "for the next 3 years, make sure I have a stream of my special interest characters". Joyously indulge in your favorite activities. Learn to paint. Meet people into your kinks, I don't know, ANYTHING. I'm not even talking about "oh, fund 100,000 peoples' college tuition and buy up 300,000 more peoples' student debt per year just to cancel", this is just... personal happiness. They're completely joyless. Utterly miserable people.
Instead the only time I've seen a billionaire remotely happy, on a deep level, more than just a little "haha, ok" smile, is when Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a fistfight and Zuckerberg fuckin, he came to life, it was like someone lit a spark in him, for a brief moment it was "oh my god I'm not alone, someone cares" and just
how terrible is that? How awful, that you're on top of the world, and you cannot be happy? You have everything, you want for nothing, we are literally built for pleasure and you can't find it with everything at your disposal?
This isn't some pseudo-mystic connection to "oh, but suffering is important, suffering is what lets us be human, remove suffering and we are no longer human" or any bullshit like that; my mysticism has a place for suffering but not like that. This is just like.
Realizing that they can't even be happy it's like, where did your soul go? What is the point of your life? Why do you live like this? HOW can you live like this? I may struggle for brief moments of happiness but I have them, how can you have less happiness than I do when you have more of everything else? How have you mutilated your essential humanity like this, to the point where you're unrecognizable to me, where if I look into your eyes I don't know what I'd see looking back at me?
Yeah anyway that was one of the big radicalization moments for me, and the rest toppled from there.
For me, weirdly enough, it was Notch. Notch was kind of a normal human being until Microsoft bought Minecraft out from under him. Notch suddenly went from being a dude with a successful indie game to being probably one of the top 50 richest people on earth overnight.
Two things happened to Notch.
One, Notch tried to spend his billions of dollars on all the dream things we think about. He, for instance, tried to fund Psychonauts 2. On the spot. Right then and there. All by himself. But you can't just give a corporation millions and millions of dollars like you're pulling ten bucks out of your wallet. When he realized how much paperwork would be involved, he backed down.
The second and ongoing thing is that all that money sort of made Notch insane. But then you have to ask yourself: was Notch always insane? Or, more to the point, how much would money corrupt any one of us? Telling us sweet lies, eroding our filters, bringing the worst parts of us into the public where the spotlight never turns off anymore. When you think you're invincible, hiding behind what may as well be a shield of infinite money, what problems would we confidently stride in to? Especially if it's a shield we can't easily get rid of.
Imagine the apathy. Money as a curse. Now imagine the types of people who willingly inflict that curse upon themselves. Who see it as the ultimate end goal of life itself.
It's hard to comprehend.
Its not really the "radicalizing moment" exactly but the thing that made it apparent for me how small and miserable the lives of billionaires are, is that they never seem to ever spend money on the small shit. Specifically, all that shit that doesn't matter that we sort of wish we could spent some money on, but it isn't really possible with what we've got. Things like commissioning artists or funding someone's patreon. Putting out a bounty for a mod for a videogame you like, or donating a fuckton of money to their favorite minecraft server. Or announcing a random tournament with a huge prize pot for some dead multiplayer game. How does someone with that much cash not have the switch flip in their brain that they could personally gift random people videogames...and not just do that for the fact that its simply kind of goofy? A billionaire has never gone "Fuck it I really want more people playing fighting games I'm literally just going to give copies of Street Fighter 6 away to anyone that asks." The suspiciously wealthy furry is never a billionaire.
I guess when you live in the kind of world they do, maybe the idea of spending small amounts of money is like a mark of shame? Everything must be extravagant and the tiny personal meaningful shit that you buy a print of or put on a shelf because you're a nerd isn't extravagant.
The big moral purchases that we really want the rich to make, I kind of get why they might not to an extent. Like, how do you know if you're being charitable in the responsible way? Did you do all the research you could? Is doing something for the moral good going to cause people to masquerade as charity and target you? They should obviously, but I understand the paranoia that drives them into being amoral. But that they can be so immersed in rich-people culture and self inflicted misery that they can't even make purchases that don't mean anything is so fucking sad.
I mean really what I'm getting at is that if I personally had more money then I'd ever be able to spend, I'd probably immediately pay hundreds of people to draw fanart of Evilak. It's not really the most important thing I could be doing with that money but it just seems like an easy decision to make.
Every rich person I've ever known has been the cheapest piece of shit you can imagine. Like "will Venmo you for $1.00 for buying you a cup of coffee" level cheap. They wouldn't find "announcing a random tournament with a huge prize pot for some dead multiplayer game" half as fun as not tipping on a $300 meal. Cheap, petty, god-emperors of their own absolutely tiny, empty little worlds.