Pelontrix

I HAVE MANY RAGE

  • it/its, he/him, whatever's funny

20, probably has adhd.


amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

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.


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

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.


IncredibleMeh
@IncredibleMeh

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.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

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.


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in reply to @amaranth-witch's post:

The robber barons only did philanthropy when they thought public opinion was about to turn murderous against them, but at least they did it. Carnegie was a union-busting monster, who we mostly remember for a vital public good (libraries). It was an enormously successful PR campaign. I've been wondering for a long time why the tech billionaires (especially ones who seem to crave love like Musk) haven't done anything like that. Like if he wanted, this dude could ensure his name is remembered fondly forever, without meaningful sacrifice on his part, and he just chooses not to. But his ilk are philosophical freakshows. The longtermism stuff he's purportedly into is pretty bananas.

It’s like the world hunger shitshow from a while ago, where the ability to go down in history as a foundational hero was literally served up to musk on a platter and he said “lol nah but I’m gonna say nah by ghosting you so you all remember I COULD HAVE saved the world and chose to do it MY way” yeah. There’s this fundamental disconnect where I can see the shape of it, I can map out the reasons why, but I can’t understand, can’t grok it on a deeper level.

A good comparison: like the gilded age barons, his foundation actually only serves to enact his will. Mostly it gives gifts to big corporations, "to convince them to invest in" developments which supposedly help. So, free funding for, say, MasterCard to get its claws into Kenya.

The Carnegies created libraries and funded schools to create the myth of the job creating, wealth creating capitalist. It's all scam all the way down, right into their souls because they are in fact deluded enough to believe their own hype. Nobody around them dares to tell the emperor he's naked, after all.

To be honest I feel like Gates managed to rehabilitate his reputation quite a bit with his foundation. Like I was around in the '90s, everyone actively hated Bill Gates. Now most people are a lot more neutral toward him, which feels like a huge improvement.

Does remind me that anyone with that much money has definitely done some shady things, things that cannot be forgotten. The sort of stuff that'd kill your compassion and soul, a death of your humanity.

what also got me is thinking about how money can be treated as the tokenization of time. if you have more money, you can pay other people to save you time and spare yours (hiring a maid, hiring a cook, hiring a gardener, etc.) which lead me down the path of how we’re all prisoners to the clock. it’s wild how miserable capitalism makes literally everyone miserable

It's not time, though that's part of the equation. It's spent life. Money is, in the form used nowadays, commoditized death. Quantified enmity and distrust and violence. This is because the issuance of the credit at its base is held as a monopoly by the state, which also claims the right to imprison or kill those who don't acquire enough of it to pay for food and shelter. The international value of the dollar especially is based on the strength of the USA military. See also: petrodollar diplomacy.

But in short, as things stand, money for most people represents how much life you must give up to win back a portion of the life you haven't yet lost. All to stave off the violence of being denied food, shelter, and medicine, which would end life even quicker in themselves for the lack.

This is not how money always worked even in societies with trade and markets. It is peculiar to our historical context; it could be changed.

I think it is not so much "billionaires cannot be happy," but rather, "people capable of being happy cannot be billionaires."

Like, you don't need a billion dollars to do any of those things. Ten million and you'd be set for life, hundred million if you have extravagant tastes. Myspace Tom took his money & walked away. He practices amateur photography now.

In order to become a billionaire, you need to keep grinding, even after the rewards flatten off. You're seeing no material impact, but you still need to actively choose to fuck over your employees, often in a way that'll kill a few of 'em. Number Go Up is your only god. You're playing for a high score at this point, not to have fun.

I've debated this with similar terms before (whether wealth and power corrupt, or whether they only come easily to the corrupt), and I think it must be both. What we do shapes who we are, and so does our context. It's possible billionaires once knew how to have fun, but gave up too much time into making billions to ever go back.

In the Muslim world of the middle ages (~600ce-~1450ce), it was indeed normal for the rich to retire to enjoy the comforts they had laid up for themselves. Many societies have had wealthy people who didn't catch this addiction, and this makes me believe it could be changed in ours too.

I sincerely believe that wealth accumulation should be looked at as a public health epidemic, the cure for which is divesting the wealthy of their assets. But talking about this makes me feel like the guy that wanted doctors to wash their hands when everyone thought that was crazy talk.

I think the fact that most of us think of it in terms of what we would do with the money means we're fundamentally on a different wavelength than billionaires. Is it their personality that made them the kind of person who can accumulate money like that, or does having too much money mess up your personality?

It feels too generous to me to imagine billionaires miserable, too sour grapes. Take infamous dead-eyed lizard man Zuck. Sure, he looks miserable when we see him (best case) giving a public presentation for his company or (worst case) being interrogated by the government. But the guy's married with kids, loves working out, learned a bunch languages, wears $400 t-shirts. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the 90% of his life that we don't see, he's utterly euphoric.

On the other hand,

married with kids, loves working out, learned a bunch languages, wears $400 t-shirts,

sounds like the start of a monologue in Fight Club about how the things you own, end up owning you. By which I mean, having the socially-accepted markers of success and happiness doesn't actually mean one is happy. I think rich people's deep-seated unhappiness comes from the fact that no amount of wealth creates satisfaction. Reaching #1 on the capitalist scoreboard does not leave one feeling accomplished. There is no end to the meat grinder. They never have enough. It is a hunger that can't be satisfied.

sometimes i think about the '90s Richie Rich movie with Macaulay Culkin and how utterly detached from reality it is but there is a thing that sticks with me and it is the fact that the incident that incites the movie's plot, the thing that makes Van Dough determined to murder Richie's family, take control of the company, and plunder the family vault, is that Richie's dad buys out a dying tool company and declares his intention to spend resources getting it back on its feet and making it fully worker-owned

I don't think ive gone from "UGGGHHHHH"
to "a damn good post" so fast because it isn't about just demonizing another person. Its actually getting into a little bit of, "hey whats going on?" and thats honestly a lot more helpful to fixing the problems that both they have, and they represent than... actually like half of the comments to the post itself.

As I said, its because, even if it IS just venting... its CONSTRUCTIVE. its HEALTHY. its POSITIVE. it isnt just... mindlessly throwing violent things into the world.

its a fucking blessing, and I hope seeing a lot of positive response has improved your day, like you improved mine

What baffles me a lot at this point is when a modern billionaire does something that shows they might remember being normal. For example, Mark Cuban setting up that generics minimal profit pharmacy and fighting for insulin(also somehow remembers how to dress like a normal human, something I can't believe has a column to be positive about). It honestly feels like they are addicted to power/wealth accumulation and are afraid of losing even something infinitesimally small amount. The closest I have seen to this phenomena in non wealthy people has been people addicted to their numbers on social media.

I remember when Frankie Muniz got a ridiculous payout for Cody Banks 2 and retired to live in a big house and drive silly cars in circles for the rest of this life, and thinking "ah, the only person to ever get rich and stay normal" because why not! Simply fuck around!

we don't see happy billionaires because they're partying all day in exclusive, heavily fortified joy rooms built for their personal use, miles from any camera that isn't a security camera

i'm exaggerating, but only a little. the billionaires that get photographed in public on a regular basis are the ones who can't live happy lives just quietly messing around with their hobbies.

sometimes they can't do it because they deeply desire a level of fame and worship they can't just buy. sometimes they can't do it because their wealth is based entirely on theoretical investment value, and they have to constantly make public statements to pump the stock because they'll "lose" billions of dollars off their paper net worth if the stock price drops a couple bucks. either way, of course they're miserable

the happy billionaires aren't making public statements or public appearances on a regular basis. they keep their private lives well out of the public eye, and they can afford to live a life heavily isolated from us regular folks, leaving their isolation only occasionally to make obligatory social appearances at rich person events

I think it's also worth noting how much of the wealth of billionaires, and ~the economy~ more generally, is entirely illusory. They don't have their billions in a bank account (though they may have millions, perhaps), they don't generally have vast tracts of productive land (well, Bill Gates does but that's another story), hell half of them don't even own meaningfully productive companies, they're generally billionaires only in the sense that they own companies or shares in companies that with stock prices such that if you multiplied the number of shares by the current trading price you would get a billion dollars (vast oversimplification of how these net worth figures are arrived at but you get my meaning), and while to some extent this is completely meaningless they still control more wealth than anyone has any right to and more than enough to live happily and in plenty for a thousand years, there's a degree to which they can't really do anything other than 'perform billionaireness' because their net worth is so deeply dependent on the perception of investors that they are a smart successful billionaire whose numbers will always go up.

idk I hope that made sense I'm very tired

Off the top of my head, Edward VIII abdicated because he couldn't marry the woman he loved (a divorcee), Napoleon divorced his wife with whom he had a happy, kink positive relationship because she couldn't give him an heir, and Pedro II iirc had depression from handling his duties

Vajiralongkorn seems happy though, maybe you just need to not actually give a shit about ruling your subjects well

in reply to @blazehedgehog's post:

I think about the candy wall a lot, just a real Aesop's fable of a moment. The number going up truly becomes meaningless at a certain point when it can't be used effectively in the normal world, but the inertia just pushes everything else aside. Like cosmic horror knowledge or something. Awful system top to bottom

in reply to @IncredibleMeh's post:

Not a single one of them has an RPG party of personal OC's with their own animated season intro, individual theme songs, and a gallery of fake anime screenshots in cel-shaded style for moodbooks and emotional moments and I do not understand that.