The Trouble With Wealth

[kimberlysteele]

Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich bring a concrete image to my mind. In this vision, I see an aging con artist, their good looks long in the past, their waistlines expanding as old-people waistlines tend to expand. They sit in mammoth living rooms that would have made a medieval king’s castle look like a shack in comparison, watching television with a blank stare while absentmindedly planning their next stab at relevancy: a comeback, a new marriage, a new surgery to puff up what sags, a new car to pinch a last bit of dopamine from their jaded neurons.

People Who Consume Too Much

We modernites are a well-fed people. We all have at least one drawer of stuff we will never use. Some of us have entire basements, garages, and storage units full. We all need to downsize, present company included, yet the people with the most stuff are almost invariably the ones who clamor for MORE, MORE, MORE. For this reason, we have multilevel marketing companies and other sucker pyramid schemes to exploit the middle class. One of the most grotesque examples of multilevel marketier shamelessness I have seen are the companies that have sought to capitalize on the COVID scamdemic overreaction: now that every middle and lower class person is out of work and/or looking for work, the pyramidmeisters are out in full force, recruiting the credulous for their uplines.

Lack of money is cited as the number one cause of depression as well as the number one reason couples get divorced. “If only I had the money, I could do whatever I want,” is the common refrain.   Money is the perceived panacea of our time.  It is the balm that heals all wounds.

Napoleon Hill will be remembered primarily as a huckster who went bankrupt multiple times with multiple marriages, but his philosophies are essentially sound.  Unfortunately, in Hill's case, one has to weed out the good advice from a sea of rapacious greed to get at it.  In some ways, he was Donald Trump before it was cool.   Osteen never once opened the doors of his megachurches or McMansions to the homeless or the needy. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas in 2017, Osteen closed the doors of his megachurch and tweeted that he was praying for everyone’s safety. In other words, he answered the question What Would Satan Do: Deluxe Mammon Edition. As far as Byrne, she has written multiple sequels to her original tome and has never been photographed without her signature, only slightly desperate poop-eating grin.

Paris or Bust

I once knew a young man who had a bad case of lack-of-money-itis. He was reasonably bright and articulate. When he was happy, he was delightful and witty. His more regular state was black-pill depression. “If only I were rich” he said over many bitter cups of all night diner coffee. Being rich was his ticket out of depression. If he were rich, he would move to New Zealand; Italy. If he were rich, he would have a much better house. If he were rich, he could afford a nicer piece of insert popular electronic doodad here.

Therein lies the rub: he was rich. His grandmother left him a three bedroom house with a very nice yard in the suburbs. His mother bought and prepared all his food despite the fact he was in his early thirties. His stepfather bailed out his struggling business ventures and paid for his continuing college education. He was one of those people I call a “Paris or Bust”, meaning that he is one of the many who will never be happy unless they have the work-free lifestyle of hotel money heiress Paris Hilton. Paris or Busts marry for money and regret it. They also easily end up homeless because money burns a hole in their pocket, whether it is real money or credit debt money.

I find it interesting when Paris or Busts say they would be more altruistic if only they had more wealth. This is simply not the case. Altruism is now, not later. Joel Osteen didn’t open the doors of his church or his homes to hurricane victims in 2017 because his ministry was never focused on altruism in the first place. Joel Osteen has always been more about making an empire for himself than helping his congregation be like Jesus. Joel Osteen is not like Jesus; he’s more like the opposite of Jesus. The proof is in the pudding. By their fruits ye shall know them.

A young Paris or Bust man who says “If I were rich, I would host Christmas for the orphans and give them tons of presents and a wonderful party every year” is lying. He who does not donate $10 to the local food pantry while he is middle class can become richer than Roosevelt — the embedded habits won’t change. The appetite for material wealth is like a drug addiction. If you grew up rich, you might remember being miserable and ashamed because of it, but there will always be that craving left behind of when things were easier. This is the way it was for me for a long time, and it is only my religious practices that got the monkey off my back once and for all.

A Minute on the Lips...

Material wealth is a Wendigo. Once a taste is had, the yearning to consume isn’t likely to stop without a fight. That’s why for every fantasy I have of earning a billion dollars, I counter with a fantasy of becoming penniless and homeless. I argue that people who addicted to wealth actually worry about becoming homeless all the time, but since they do not admit it in any honest way, it becomes a much greater fear for then than for a lower middle class person, who must always confront the specter of homelessness whenever a bill arrives or the car breaks down. The only people who don’t live in perpetual fear of being poor are poor people.

For many in this age, the concept that infinite independent wealth might never arrive like a rescuing knight on a shining steed is downright intolerable. Our lives of luxury have only served to whet our appetites for more. This is how you get a young man who lives on his parents dime and inherited a suburban house to think of himself as “middle class” or (if he is in a foul mood) “poor”. I’ve known a person who complained that her parents could not afford to finance her film career — her artsy, honors student upbringing gave her an inferiority/superiority complex and a hopeless, debased obsession with the type of celebrities who frequent the pages of W Magazine.

For such a person, there is no world outside the Bubble, where the prosperous must always compete for jobs, grants, mates, attention, photo opportunities, and apparent virtuousness. The longer one lives in the Bubble, the more blind one becomes to its soapy walls closing in. The Bubble in the US is often lily-white, so its residents become self-conscious when confronted by a black person. They immediately become the picture of fawning obsequiousness, their pandering training from news channels, popular movies, and sitcoms kicking in. They doth protest too much. Confronted by a white poor person, the hatred of the poor black person that has been viciously repressed rears its ugly head as bigotry towards the white poor person. Hillary Clinton’s moment of christening the poor as Deplorables did more to unite the poor and working classes of all races than Che Guevara could have ever dreamed: the class war was revealed in its naked, ugly, warty glory. Jesus said the poor are blessed and it is true in at least one sense. Though it will never be easy to be poor, it at least forces you over the hurdle of fear of being poor.

Comments

[brendhelm]

Essentially - yes, it would be greener if you were building it from scratch, but it already exists. The environmental price of its construction has already been paid, and is not unpaid by taking it down and building something else... that just adds to the bill.

[kimberlysteele]

There's also the issue of building new when there are so many decrepit and underused buildings in the same area. My area of suburban Illinois is plagued by this phenomenon. 95% of the wild land has been eaten up by developers, but that doesn't stop them from chasing down the last patch of non-forest preserve meadow to put up a new house or strip mall. Around the corner from where I work, a developer tore down a modest house that was definitely worse for the wear. Tearing it down wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but unfortunately they put up a hideous, modern McMansion that looks like an army barracks as imagined by the Addams Family. The exterior walls are grayish brown that reads as black unless it is broad daylight. It's freaking enormous and has a 3.5 car garage. Of course they had to tear down most of the trees in the yard to put it up. Every time I drive or walk by it, I literally apologize to the land there for the stupidity of humans. The energy of that corner makes me shudder.

[(Anonymous)]

This describes so many places. The part that really gets me is that so much sane land use has been made illegal: the house I grew up in, for example, is too small to be legally built today. My apartment is right over a store; this is an old building, and modern ones can't do that. In fact, renovations on old buildings can be a nightmare: my landlord is putting off necessary repairs as long as possible, since he'd either legally need to ditch the apartments or the store; the store gives him most of his revenue, so he needs it, but he hates the idea of evicting people who've lived here for decades...

[kimberlysteele]

I tried SO hard to buy a storefront with an apartment above it instead of a house. I incorporated my business, went to the local SBA, got mentors, took seminars. Two years of working and scheming... Nada. We ended up in a small house in a dilapidated yet functional lower middle class neighborhood. Nobody gives a crap if you cut hair or teach lessons out of your house here, so at least I won out in that respect. There's a certain mentality here in the suburbs that would rather see vacant buildings rot or burn to the ground than to have them populated with commercial tenants who live in modest apartments above the store. Of course in the very same luxury mansions where the big corporate landlord CEO hangs his hat, the kitchen walls will be festooned with artistic renderings of quaint Parisian boulevards and Italian seaside villages. The villages pictured are actual places where the city streets are full of small businesses like mine, with shopkeepers living above their stores.

[(Anonymous)]

That's the part which I find richly ironic: so many people love to travel, and love the areas they visit, but make it utterly impossible for anyone to try to create such built environments here....

[kimberlysteele]

Exactly. They want to stroll down the boulevard to buy a baguette in their pipe dreams, but in real life if the neighbor tried to set up a bakery storefront for a small business they were running out of the house, they would go full Karen and cry bloody murder to the homeowner's association.

[methylethyl]

And yet... we lived in Lima for a time. The house across the street ran an internet cafe out of the front, which we depended on. At the corner, two houses down was a bakery, a tiny restaurant, a tienda, a stationery shop that served the schoolkids at the school next door, a ferretereia (sort of like a tiny hardware store?), a closet-sized shop with fresh produce, and people living in all those buildings. It was fantastic!

It is so irksome that we can't have anything like that here.

[kimberlysteele]

We can have something like that here, I would just argue that most of us choose not to, including me... I'm still shopping at Walmart and Target and my books are for sale on Amazon. I'm supporting monopolies and modern robber barons that undermine small businesses:

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/515/unfair-advantage

[methylethyl]

People make the same mistake with cars. Most of a car's emissions happen during the manufacturing process, so if you have to drive, the most ecologically sound thing you can do with a car is take good care of it, don't get in wrecks, do the scheduled maintenance, and drive it for 20+ years until the wheels fall off.

Instead, in the popular perception, conscientious driving is a new Prius...

[kimberlysteele]

I have that car! I have a 14 year old Toyota. I hope to get 14 more years out of it.

[methylethyl]

Us, too! 21-year-old Honda, 300k miles. Best car ever.

[kimberlysteele]

Love that. I hope I have lots of miles to go... I've only put 70K miles on in 14 years.

[methylethyl]

Nice! We bought the thing at 180k miles, and have been driving it 10 years now. Wish we didn't have to drive so much, but for us, it's the price of affordable housing. I am really hoping that once husband finishes school, we can arrange for his next job and our next domicile to be much closer together. But a place that's A) acceptably safe, B)affordable and C) near one's job is a tall order. A gal can dream...

[(Anonymous)]

My car is a 1996 Safire blue Toyota Tacoma. I’ve replaced he engine, the rear differential, the transmission, other parts.... I love my car! Her name is Safire the Bitchin’ Rig and she’s useful on our little homestead as well as reasonably fuel efficient for general travel.

My husband drives a 1995 Honda sedan. Same general repair history. We bought both of them used.

I hate the thought of all that up front carbon footprint for car manufacture, plus I hate spending money on cars when there are so many other ways to invest in the superstructure of our farm.

Annette

[methylethyl]

Nice! It's hard to own a car for that long, and not name it, I think. Ours is Marilyn :) I was recently explaining to my brother how to open the back hatch on the car (he was borrowing it), and now he laughs about it-- you place your hands on the car, address it by name, tell it what a nice car it is, and how good it has always been to us, thank it profusely, and then gently turn the key. Mostly this works. But you can never count on it... at 21 years all the latches and things get cranky. It's been years since the A/C or the radio worked. We've adapted.

[kimberlysteele]

Ha ha my car's name is Carla...

[methylethyl]

Funny! My first car was Lottie, short for Carlotta ;)

[(Anonymous)]

I had a Honda Civic for 22 years, and would still be driving her if it wasn't for rust. Her name was Kuro-Auto-Sama, which was a pun on the name of a cat in the anime "Trigun." I loved that car like one of the cats, still miss her (though I don't miss driving, especially in the winter when all the SUV owners forget they also need to slow down on iced-up roads.

--Sister Crow