I once did a stint working for a very rich man. He was a pretty good guy. I liked him anyway. His family was fine too. One room in their 20 room house was 2,000 sq/ft. And there was a very nice 4200 sq/ft "guest house" in the back yard, which fronted the street behind them, and which also had a separate, enclosed tennis/basketball court. They tore it all down for reasons I never learned. Maybe to improve the view. The thing is the guest house and sports court and one acre lot would have sold, in that neighborhood for at least $3,000,000. Probably more like four mill. Twenty years ago. It'd probably bring closer to ten mill now.
But I learned something of interest from my time there: The very rich don’t see things like the rest of us do. They view the World through a different set of eyes. Rich eyes.
The rich are very aware of their privileges and power. They can get more done with a brief phone call than you or I could with a lifetime of effort.
And they know it.
Some, though not all, are seduced by it.
At the same time the rich lead surprisingly circumscribed lives. More than we down here do. And the richer they are, the more circumscribed their lives become.
They MUST look, say, act and do things a certain way. A class specific way. Kinda' like how the British upper classes must speak posh and use the proper spoon for a given dish. And God help them if their serving staff gets the dessert spoons reversed with the soup spoons.
Now, I think of the rich as being like birds trapped in golden cages. Bored... frustrated... stuck in their prison of plentitude. The challenges that drove them to excel surmounted. The directed energy of their younger days and the thrill that came from scoring big giving way to long years of ennui. Wandering sleeplessly around their mansions in the wee hours and wondering why they're not happy.
So, imho people like Gates, Soros, Bezos, Musk, the Rothschilds, etc. are more to be pitied than envied - so deep is their inner discontent.
Looking at riches through the Christian lens I now see them as a dangerous gift. A kind of curse actually. As the old saying has it, "Be careful what you wish for... you might get it."
Someone else said, “The easier your life, the harder your judgment.”
And the harder our life the easier our judgment.
So dear friends, we should make time to spare a prayer or two for the rich. They need them no less than the rest of us. As human beings they too are suffering. And a lot more than we'd probably suspect.
Citizenfitz
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