I was once invited to a baseball game with three other
people, our host, the husband of my cousin who had inherited a substantial
amount of money. One member of our
group, a senior employee at Goldman Sachs
who assisted my cousin with her investments spent the better part of two crucial
innings shopping for private jets on his iPhone.
Somehow, that annoyed me.
And not just because he was ignoring the ballgame he had purportedly
come to see. Although that insult to the
game is part of it. It’s like bringing a
book to the opera.
A bank book.
The preceding anecdote reveals two conflicting truisms about
me. One is that I have serious unresolved
issues concerning the super-wealthy. And
two, I sincerely like my cousin and her husband, and they are conceivably
wealthier than the Goldman Sachs
employee.
So go figure. (A
Thought: It could have something to
do with grace and style – the way people handle their blessed predicament. Or I could simply be a conundrous stockpile
of contradictions. I prefer the former
explanation. It makes me appear marginally
better.)
Full Disclosure:
I have always liked money. In my
youth, my by-far comic book hero was “Uncle Scrooge.” (Scrooge McDuck had a swimming pool full of
money, which he would ecstatically dive into, radiating a beatific countenance
as he parabolized gracefully above it.
I did not think about him landing in a swimming pool full of
metallic coinage, my imagination carrying me only as far as his ability to fill
the swimming pool up. (In later years,
the entire fantasy was obliterated by inflation, which required people to invest their assets, rather than diving
gleefully into them.
I knew I liked money.
When, at the age of twenty-one, I received an inheritance check from my
late father’s estate, before depositing it in the bank, I first composed a celebratory
song about the amount:
“Eighteen thousand
seven hundred five dollars
A-a-a-and forty cents…”
That was the entire lyric of the song, delivered in a
multiplicity of melodic intonations.
I liked to count money.
I liked to look at money. (Okay,
the next one is bad.) If it was freshly
minted, I liked to smell money. (I told
you.) My attachment to money extended
far beyond what that money could purchase.
There was a psychological element to financial solvency.
It made me feel taller.
All my life, I have been scrupulously careful with my money
without being noticeably stingy. I was
never educated in these matters. It
appeared to be a natural proclivity.
Early in my career, if, through my various freelance writing
activities, I had an annual income of six thousand dollars, at the end of the
year, I would, without struggle or premeditation, have two thousand dollars left. If I made eleven thousand, I retained
six. Even after buying a new car. (Yes, cars were cheaper back then. My first Mazda
cost $3400.)
Money, however – as it should
have been if I were sincerely single-minded about it – was never my preeminent
priority. (Though I never told anyone,
including myself) I wanted to be in show business, where, admittedly, if you
made it, you could acquire a lot of money, but there was no guarantee whatsoever
that you would make it. And if you
didn’t, you’d have nothing. And yet I
went for it anyway.
Show business aside, however, in my view, the most
straight-line route to enormous personal enrichment, if that was truly your
objective, is not via the “bank shot” of producing a desirable product or providing
some unique talent or service thereby receiving some multi-digitous
remuneration, the “straight-line” route to money is to go directly into
“money.” Like the Goldman Sachs employee, pricing private airplanes at the ballgame.
Even more than banks, which bank robber Willie Sutton
explained he robbed because “that’s where the money is”, the real money is, and always has been, in
finance.
Which I do not ever recall being interested in. It turns out I liked something more than I liked money, and I made that my priority rather than the
accumulation of uncountable riches.
I wonder what happened.
It could have something to do do with the disputable logic
of the thing. I used to wonder why
people kept working after amassing more money than they could possibly spend in
a hundred lifetimes, analogizing this illogicality with people who continued
chopping firewood long after they had chopped enough for a hundred lifetimes of
fires.
Was it not considerably more reasonable to simply stop chopping
when they had unequivocally chopped enough?
Later, however, after spending time with a handful of
inordinately wealthy people, I realized that they kept working, not for the
money, but because they were enthralled with – bordering on addicted to – “the
game” they were involved in that made
them that money. (Belying the oft-heard
assertion that if taxes were raised on the super-wealthy they would immediately
stop working.)
To these fortunate billionaires, money was in no way their
primary concern. (As it inevitably is to
people who do not have enough of it.)
They enthusiastically did what they did, their jaw-dropping remunerations
being a fortuitous by-product. They may occasionally
revel in their riches – peeking at their standing on the Fortune Five Hundred – but that’s merely a competitive
afterthought. (Pitcher Orel Hershiser
once remarked that “Money {as in comparative salaries} is simply our way of
keeping score.”)
Returning to the firewood analogy, the explanation for their
accumulating more than they can possibly ever use is:
They take a visceral pleasure in the actual chopping.
None of this satisfactorily explains my intense annoyance
with the Lear Jet “comparison
shopper” sitting two seats down from me at the ballgame. Did I want to be him? Not if it required doing what he did, and meant
being unable to take pleasure in a Dodger
game on a warm California night. (When queried on the subject, my daughter Anna
opined, “I’d like to be me with their money.”)
What it generally boils down to for me is my (arguably irrational)
irritation with an unearned sense of entitlement. Which if you will allow me, and I have not totally
turned you off by my sourish perspective on a core American undertaking – the
maximization of personal income –
I shall continue exploring the next time.
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