Tag: wealth

The Immortal Inequality (A Short Story)

Photo Credit: Dieter Blom

In time, society figured out how to prevent death, and everyone became immortal. As a matter of fact, we can stop all unwanted forms of aging, with bodies perpetually feeling like they were in their twenties.

Amazing isn’t it? Well yes, but there were some unexpected results in how it became implemented.

First, the rich received treatment before everyone else. For a while, this was an experimental (which means expensive) treatment that only the truly wealthy could afford. As it became more established and the costs decreased, the middle classes started using it, but it was labelled as an optional medical expense by most healthcare agencies and still out of reach of many of the poor of the earth. The wealthier got to reexperience their better bodies, forever, while many poor still aged and some died before they could get this death-defying treatment.

Ok, governments and charities may have solved that one. Legislating coverage and subsidizing it so that everyone in the world can get it. But another problem persisted:

Debt has become eternal. One’s debt will never go away. Not even the slow deterioration of one’s body towards retirement absolves people from their obligation to pay their debts. Those indebted must work and work until they pay back every cent (with interest), forcing them into awful, low-paid jobs.

The wealthy, however, are able to make money at an exponential rate; whereas, the waged poor and middle class only make money through salaries, which follow a much slower, linear model. Thus, in addition to their initial lead being far too great, they continue to expand their wealth leaps and bounds beyond what everyone else can.

Where does this money ultimately come from? Those with less. They are fleeced as the cost of standard expenses rises and rises filling the coffers of the wealthy widening the chasm for the indebted.

Death was once the great equalizer, the cut-off that nerfed everyone how much further ahead or behind they happen to be at in the race, but now, that check no longer exists. The wealthy shoot at lightning speed ahead, and nothing exists to keep that lead in check.

And they use that to control the type of afterlife they would like to have. The poor are increasingly forced to harvest more and more for the rich. The middle class, too, although they have more flexibility to establish their own comforts and hobbies when they are off from working. The rich can choose whether to expand it on luxuries, or for whatever reason, spend their afterlife wasting away at work. And no individual has a real chance of catching up with them.

This is how society chugs along. We continue to build our output forever, locked into this system of inequality. Expending more and more resources and engulfing more and more planets in the universe until one day, maybe, just maybe, we will expend all the resources that keep us going in this hell of immortality, allowing the cleansing fire of death to finally renew us once again.

What Is the Point of Money?

Many spend their lives acquiring money, but what really is money? 

For many scholars, money is the ability to do something – whether that is to eat a sandwich, own a nice necklace, have someone provide a service for you – turned into a quantified unit. By this definition, money has incredible value. It literally is the ability to do or have things, but there are still some limitations to that value. 

First, the capacity to do what? At the end of the day, money is a tool, a way to meet other goals. Capacity makes a very poor goal or purpose in itself. People who pursue money for money’s sake are attaining the ability to do things without a sense of what they want to do in life in the first place. 

Second, as quantified capacity, money becomes less valuable the more you attain it. Everyone has the capacity to do things with their time and energy. Your salary has a certain amount of capacity as well. When you work, you trade the ability to do whatever it is you could do with your time and energy during that time for the capacity latent in your salary. 

Often, this trade may give us even greater capacity, allowing us to do things we otherwise could not do with the time we have. You can use that capacity to meet your needs and pay for the things that you want, and thus help you live a better life. Such a trade may be worth it for you. 

But after you have so much stored, gaining more may no longer add much value to your life and in some cases, may decrease it. Billionaires, for example, have enough to meet an entire life’s worth of needs and wants (and often the needs and wants of dozens or hundreds of more lives after that). 

In such a situation, they do not have enough time left in their life to enjoy the capacity that they would gain from making more money through work. Each day they work, they lose one more day they have spent doing anything else (spending time with family, relaxing on a beach, or whatever makes one happy). Some ultra wealthy still work because they feel their job gives them a sense of meaning in their lives, but from a certain perspective, they are sacrificing their capacity to keep working. 

Billionaires are an extreme example, but this applies to a certain degree to everyone. There is a time to build a base of capacity for ourselves by earning money, but the more one builds up, the less useful any new money we gain becomes. Eventually, that can switch and trying to attain more money after that is actually counterproductive. 

You should evaluate for yourself how much of this thing called money you truly need and when the money you would gain is no longer worth what you would have to do to get it.