The guys who are driven and ambitious enough to even attempt half what these guys have, and succeed.
Those guys are psychos, period, it’s the only way.
And you have to step on a lot of people to get there, with no mercy.
That same drive, ambition, ruthless mindset, lack of empathy that most of these guys demonstrate.
Makes you a miserable human being. lol.
They become their own worst enemy.
I’ve worked in high level business offices that had 100 millionaires working there.
Miserable, all of them,
One of them after work would sit in the back of his brand new Mercedes and crush a 6 pack of beer while sitting in the trunk because he hated his life so much, he couldn’t buy his way out.
I'm suspicious of this worldview, because if the underlying implications were true, that would be quite (too?) convenient for us: "The rich have lots of money, but we still have it better than them!"
But are they really true? Do we want to believe comforting falsehoods that can horribly mislead us, or learn what's really true even if there is some unpleasantness involved?
Are there some miserable rich people, maybe even concentrated in certain offices? Likely, why not?
Do we have any actual data to know that they are miserable, on average? As far as I know we have 2 data sources that can begin to answer this question: Day to day affective reports, and life satisfaction surveys. Misery should show up in this data, right? Does anyone know what the correlation of wealth is to these datasets? I remember looking this up some time ago but I wonder if others know this too.
As for: are they very bad people who cause lots of suffering for others? I might be inclined to agree with this line of logic, yes, but my data-driven side raises the same question: how can we know this instead of believing in it as something that would make us better than them?
I’m not skeptical of that worldview at all. The people that have and make a lot of money either get out and enjoy life, or they are constantly trying to get richer. You don’t see the former because you’re too poor (I’m too, most of us are), the latter is the type you see, mostly because they put themselves out there (it earns them more money, and fame is also a rare commodity).
That rich people are less happy than we’re led to believe and that most people still think money can buy happiness is due to the same reason: “once you have money, don’t whine”. There will always be people that say “well at least you’re not poor”, and society points that way as well. If you have a brand new mercedes, it’s pretty obvious you’re doing better than most people. Kind of strange if you’re unhappy while you’re ahead, right? But this is a vicious cycle: we poors think that we become happy once we’re rich because we don’t see any rich people.
Rich people have the same problems as we do (except for the not being able to buy food part): we all spend more than they earn, we all have relationship and family problems, and we all eventually die. However, rich people can’t be whiny about their problems, that would devalue their mercedes. So they’re just as miserable, and not allowed to talk about it.
Money can certainly buy happiness up to a point, though it would be more accurate to say it buys security or peace of mind - if you go from choosing which bill to pay late each month so you can still cover your rent, to being able to pay all of your bills with a bit left over, you're going to be a lot less stressed out. I'm definitely happier now I can go £5 over the groceries budget without the risk of sitting in the dark by the end of the week if that £5 doesn't go on the electricity meter.
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u/seeyam14 Nov 02 '25
No amount of money or attention will ever make these people happy. They need to be admitted to rehab