the_riches
the_riches is a text document stored in the ULRO terminal.
Contents
The Riches
From Selected Archive Documents (R-T):
Getting rich was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I see that now, at the end, when the insight is useless.
Not being poor was great. No longer having to worry all the time. Being able to afford the best doctors. Being able to go on holidays, being able to take care of my mother.
But being rich? It just isolated me. It changed every interaction with every other person, because suddenly I had the ability to change their life, to fix all their problems, and they knew it. And I knew it. A simple choice on my part could take away so much of their pain. Every interaction became infected by this inequality between us, and it made me bitter. Made me feel every relationship, even with family, was transactional. I was desperately looking for some genuinely human experience, but I seemed excluded from that now, and it made me resent everyone.
What I didn't see, what I only see now as I'm dying, is that I could have used that money for good. All of it. I don't mean giving it to some NGO run by other rich people. I mean really using it. I loved movies - how many indie movies could I have financed? How many books could I have gotten published? And how much could I have just built - not another villa for myself, but things that would benefit civilization in general? Hell, I could have just given it away. Made all those lives better. Taken away that pain.
And if at the end of the day I was only left with enough money to be upper middle-class... so what? At least I would have been the person I wanted to be.
Comments
| Athena: Resource wealth as such has no value. It only matters in terms of the ability to act. But what made this ancient human so unable to act? It can't have been a personal failing, as most people of similar wealth acted the same way. |
| Cornelius: Perhaps the answer lies in scarcity, or a system built on it, naturally optimizing towards resource accumulation. Historical circumstances, not individual sin. |
| Miranda: But I have read about rich ancients who did act differently. They were rare, but they did exist. So it is possible for people to defy the will of history. |