Legend has it, it took him nearly an hour to "smile" for this photo.
Years ago, I went to a meet-up at a State Park in Virginia for people who owned BMW 2002's - the iconic car that put BMW on the map as the "sport sedan" maker. Of course, today, they are just another overpriced status brand, like Mercedes, selling plastic cars that cost twice as much as a Toyota, but are far less reliable.
At the meet were two people representing the antipodes of the car hobby. One was a 17-year-old kid who yanked an old 1972 2002ti out of a junkyard and got it running on a budget. No two fenders were the same color, but he had spent hours in their garage at home, putting in a rebuilt engine, and going over every part of the car, fixing this and that, on a budget. It wasn't perfect - far from it - but it was his.
On the other extreme was a guy with a 1976 "big bumper" car that was immaculately restored by a host of mechanics and bodymen, paid for with his Daddy's money. Yes, it was a nice car, a bit over-restored, but in terms of "hands on" experience, the owner had only driven it a few times - he even had it trailered to the event. He won all the awards - or should I say, his cadre of paid assistants did. But when it came down to "people's favorite" the 17-year-old won, and everyone was crowded around his "beater" BMW, much to the chagrin of the rich dude.
You can "win" at life and still lose. People who obsess about being successful and making lots of money are rarely ever happy. I grew up in rich-people places, always on the outside looking in, of course. But the amount of anti-depressants these folks washed down - and their suicide and alcoholism rates, were astounding. Their kids were generally spoiled, depressed, and envious of anyone who was actually happy - which is why rich kids often end up bullying happy people. They want to bring everyone down to their level.
Yea, I went to prep school - for nearly a year before they threw me out, sensing I wasn't one of "them." The kids who went there were not mentally well-adjusted, to say the least. It was kind of sad, actually, so see some kid whose Dad showed up once a year in his Rolls-Royce, so unhappy and troubled. I think he would have been happier with a Dad who cared - and drove a Chevy.
Maybe there is something to this, and some surveys (and I detest survey data!) claim that having "enough" money to get by is the apex of happiness. Too little, you are miserable. Too much, you are miserable in luxury. For rich folks, I think, life seems boring and trite - and too easy. It is like playing Monopoly starting out with Boardwalk and Park Place. Why bother playing? There is something very satisfying about reaping the fruits of your labor - and something very shallow about reaping the fruits of others'.
A reader sent a link about the ongoing saga of this poor fellow who threw away his hard drive that contained some bitcoins. At the time, they were "worth" pennies, but today, he claims they are worth over a billion. He already spent a ton of money digging up a landfill to find this errant hard drive, to no avail. Now he wants to try again, and the local council has better things to do.
How sad. Nothing good ever came of Bitcoin. You never read a story about how it saved someone's life or fed the poor or stopped a war. Quite the opposite - it has been a conduit for arms trading, human trafficking and the drug trade. It made rich people richer, often at the expense of naive middle-class investors who wanted to "get rich." There is a lesson there somewhere.
This is why I don't buy lottery tickets. The $1B ticket would go through the wash and be destroyed. Hell, I put nails through the wash and nearly destroyed my washing machine. Lottery tickets would be easy prey. People have literally killed themselves over things like this.
I used to buy lottery tickets - maybe 2-3 times a year. Back then, they cost a buck and you might win a million dollars - enough money to live comfortably, if not frugally, for the rest of your life, or augment what you already have. It is not life-destroying money.
But then they raised the ticket prices to $2 and added zillions of games. And the jackpots went up to the hundreds of millions to nearly (and over) a billion dollars. This is life-destroying money. If you won, you'd have to sell your house. Better yet, give it away or bulldoze it, as the new owners will sue you for misrepresentation or something, the first time the toilet backs up and once they realize you are a billionaire.
Everyone you ever knew - and legions of those you never knew - will knock at your door asking for money. You have to change your phone number, your e-mail address, and erase everything you ever posted on the Internet. You'd have to move to an ugly house in a gated community and hire a bodyguard to make sure your children weren't kidnapped. That's life as a billionaire, or even a hundred-millionaire.
And I am not joking about this, either. We got a magazine once, aimed at wealthy people. It was all ads for high-end goods, but a surprising number of ads were for security systems, firearms, security services and even a couple of outfits that sold trained German Shepard's who would cuddle with your children and rip-out the mailman's throat, if he approached the house without warning.
Is that any way to live?
Elon Musk has done one good thing for humanity - he illustrated how miserable you can be as a rich person. You read his tweets and you realize this guy has a real anger-management problem and is never happy. His family members - parents, children, ex-spouses - either refuse to talk to him or mock him publicly. That says a lot when your own family members are willing to estrange themselves from you, and walk away from a billion-dollar inheritance. How toxic can that be?
Maybe being miserable is a prerequisite to being a billionaire? As I noted in an earlier posting, "miserable" and "miser" have the same Latin root. A miser is someone who wants to sit on a hoard of money for its own sake. A thrifty or stingy person, on the other hand, doesn't want to spend money unnecessarily because they don't have a lot of it. And the latter can actually be more "fun" in that playing the game of commerce is more interesting when you have skin in the game. When you find a good bargain, you feel like you've won. On the other hand, a Billionaire simply pays - why bother wasting valuable time haggling over a few bucks?
Happy people have no need for billions. Billionaires have no need to be happy, it seems.
Ever see a picture of John D. Rockefeller smiling? Me neither! Legend has it, it took him nearly an hour to "smile" for this photo. I just made that up. But it sounds like it could be true. The very, very wealthy got there by exploiting and crushing other people. Rockefeller bought up oil companies and cornered the market in that business. If someone refused to sell to him, he would make an example of them by crushing their business, so that others would comply. He pitched railroads against one another - and against pipelines as well. Carnegie was no different, just in a different business (Steel). And of course, J.P. Morgan, once a part-time resident of our little island, was as miserable as the rest of them, despite (or because of) being the "richest man in the world." Henry Ford? A cranky old antisemite who tried to control the personal lives of his employees. Not a nice man to be around, from all accounts.
There are no happy-go-lucky billionaires. Even those with inherited wealth (or maybe especially so) are miserable - compounded by the nagging feeling that they really didn't deserve their wealth. Carnegie, when he retired, set out to give away most of his wealth - something that apparently actually made him happy. He gave some to his relatives, who built white-elephant mansions on Cumberland Island, just South of us. Most are in ruins, one is a hotel. The heirs are still picking over the carcass of that fortune to this very day.
The Candler heirs (Coca-Cola) live just North of them on Little Cumberland Island and the few I've met are a stuck-up bunch of arrogant ass-hats who seem to think it is beneath them to even talk to one of us plebes. But again, I've seen this all my life - people who inherit wealth are fundamentally insecure, as they realize they really did nothing to warrant the largess they wallow in. Hence why the "Royals" are so miserable and there is such drama about them. If they were stripped of their ill-gotten riches and forced to have jobs, they likely would be better off, emotionally. Imagine Prince William tending bar at a pub or Prince Harry running a chip-shop. Why not? The rest of us have to!
And we are happier for it, believe it or not.
A lot of young people pine for great wealth. Teenage boys put up posters of exotic cars and exotic women on their bedroom walls (which one they masturbate to, is a good question). Young girls dream of a life of luxury and excess. And life always comes up short for both. But the reality of an exotic sports car is that is an uncomfortable pain-in-the-ass to own, and quite frankly, not many are impressed by the ability to write a check.
A Houston "cars and coffee" group recently created a controversy by stating that only older cars are welcome at their event. No late-model Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers, or Chargers, thank you! If you look at YouTube videos of dilberts in these cars leaving a "car meet" you can see why. They are driven by young men who are insecure and want to show off, so they floor it to burn out, succumb to lift-throttle oversteer and spin out into a parked car, pedestrian, or both.
A car meet is about cars that people work on and restore and love. It isn't a used car lot for idiots who are making monthly payments on a new car. It takes talent and time to restore an old car and care for it. It takes no talent to sign loan documents on a Dodge and then wreck in before the loan is paid off.
And just like with Billionaires, the guy who just spent money isn't really as happy as the guy who struggled to restore an old car on a budget. It is just like the BMW 2002 meet I alluded to above. Talent trumps cash, every time. Well, that, and I can understand why the "Cars and Coffee" people don't want to get sued because some jackalope has to do a fiery burnout while leaving and has no idea how to drive the car he just bought.
We see this all the time in other venues. A "rich guy" buys an expensive yacht and figures that since he paid for it he knows how to drive it. Same is true for Porsches - the rich guy who bought a brand-new one, ends up wrecking it. He can write a check for the car, but has no real idea what the car is all about, other than a status symbol. Such was the downfall of BMW.
It doesn't pay to be jealous of the very rich, because, deep down, they are jealous of the real happiness the middle-class actually has. Maybe that is why the very rich have systematically been trying to destroy the middle-class in this country!
No one should be allowed to be happy while they are so miserable!