You’re right, we all wish that the rich are miserable. But perhaps it’s more that they lose the hunger for life that us lesser mortals experience? I’ve been thinking about what ‘being comfortable’ means. Because a lot of human restlessness, even anger occurs because we look at others and what they have, even though we possess and have experienced so much. Growth is painful, awkward and change is hard. So being comfortable is a real ambition but maybe it’s not about money, rather it’s about self-development?
The trick is to live long enough to learn from our mistakes and redeem ourselves by finding a more satisfying path; one of less burnout and more enjoyment based on giving instead of just receiving and expecting...
The lucky ones are those who either catch themselves early on, or live long enough to do it later.
Some are not so lucky and die before they can live!
Life crises make us wiser and open our eyes, if they do not break us. But again, longevity is key. Time heals as they say, but the trick is not running out of time!
Those who truly love art (and not being rich) just major in art & end up teaching? Or simply being happy to visit museums. The colors in Cézanne’s oranges in D’Orsay blew me away—so rich…
This is a story of two guys I know. I will refer to them as Matt and Pete. You might know men who are, broadly speaking, rather like them.
Matt is more a friend of a friend. I like him but we never had that moment where we bonded over a shared interest or world view; we were always on the periphery of each other's social circles. Throughout his early twenties Matt smoked cannabis – the heavy potent stuff. There were a few months when his diet consisted entirely of weed, sausages and onions, and the kind of cheap canned beer that is favoured by homeless alcoholics. When Matt drank to excess, he would often become violent and belligerent. When he was like that you couldn't reason with him or even communicate with him. He once threw the entire contents of his bedroom at me and a friend: First came the TV, then the PlayStation and the books and the compact discs and finally the dirty laundry – the balled up white socks. One night there was a knock at my front door. It was after midnight so I ignored it. The knocking became a pounding. I looked out of the bay window. Two of my friends were standing on the front doorstep looking like a pair of total scumbags. When I went outside to berate them, they told me that Matt was so drunk he had been taking wild at swings at them whenever they attempted to move him. It was a freezing cold winter night. I drove them back to where they had abandoned him, lying on the frosty pavement. As soon as we attempted to pick him up he began fighting us with his eyes barely open. We eventually manhandled him into the backseat of the car. He continued to fight us for the duration of the drive back to his house. I was kicked in the side of the head, which I did not appreciate. When we arrived at his front door, I left him for my friends to deal with. Apparently he fought them all the way upstairs to bed.
Currently Matt has a good job in London. He is married to a devout Christian woman. He has children. These days he is a much calmer man. He's very clever and well read; he always was. The last time we met I was idly reminiscing about the more misspent moments of our youth. He passed some oblique comment about me remembering a lot and I realised that I was making him uncomfortable. He's moved on with his life.
What I should have said to him is that he's the person who he is now because of the person who he used to be. You can't have the latter without the former. Matt has seen a lot of himself. He's been out on there on the limits. He's gone places within himself that he doesn't want to revisit. A man who can do that and then graduate to being a functional member of society is a man with enough self knowledge to know where to draw lines. You can trust him to an extent, and you can rely on him when life gets unpredictable because he has some experience with unpredictability.
I haven't seen Sad Pete (as we called him) in decades. He was a callow, hollow-eyed young man who looked permanently startled. He had once met Princess Diana; I forget the exact circumstances. I remember Matt asking him: “Did you shag her?” At the time I doubt Pete had known the touch of woman.
People like Pete exist within a very narrow realm of experience and they seldom step beyond that comfort zone. They might think of themselves as honest, decent people. When their integrity is tested or life goes off script, they don't know what to do and they are quick to throw others under the bus. Social capillary action tends to draw this kind of person into middle management where their mediocrity, their cowardice and their prosaic dishonesty can become a problem. We have a man of this type currently leading the United Kingdom.
Adversity shapes us, particularly when we are young. Whether it's a part of our life or something we actively seek out, it is an essential component in becoming a well-rounded human being.
A couple of days ago Joe Rogan interviewed Elon Musk on his podcast. You can find it on YouTube and elsewhere. Musk is, I believe, currently the second-richest man in the world – a billionaire many times over. His three hour conversation with Rogan begins with him being verbally berated by Grok – his pet AI. The pair cover a lot of ground, from Musk's ongoing attempt to stop the US from bankrupting itself, to the marooned astronauts on the International Space Station, to Thomas Crooks – the man who narrowly missed assassinating Donald Trump. He also talks at length about the logistics of applying heat-shielding tiles to spacecraft, which turns out to be more complicated than just slapping on some high strength adhesive and then sealing the joins with caulk. It sounds like the most boring topic in the world, but he makes it interesting because it is of interest to him. He seems happy, investing his money in projects that are largely to the betterment of man and the long-term continuation of our species.
Meanwhile, my monthly disposable income amounts to around £20. Like Musk, I too am happy, though I am not building any spaceships and have no designs on colonising Mars. Find a way to engage with the world around you and, whatever your income, you'll be okay.
I think many of us have encountered someone like Matt. Years ago I shared a house with a pleasant friendly young guy. But after losing his girlfriend and smoking a lot of weed, his behaviour became unpredictable and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. One hot summer night he attempted to climb in through my bedroom window, extra scary as the heat meant I was sleeping naked. I shut the window just in time, but soon after he set fire to my post including a birthday present. Enough, we went to the police station. The cops were sympathetic but said they could do little. When they called round, someone on the floor below let Keith into their room, so the cops left. Eventually he disappeared, possibly back to his parents in Yorkshire, though they had disowned him at one stage. The sad thing was that at heart, he was a really nice person, but circumstances plus his weed habit destroyed him.
White Lotus is great. After It's done I am cancelling HBO. It's fun to watch people creating their own misery in such a luxe location. Well, not fun. But great. Great that those wealthy fools frolic for us in the midst of their individual prisons of greed, fear, desires, ignorance. Why? Because it's familiar. Just blown up to larger than life, and far away. Not just me not liking people with license plates from Connecticut.
Finally watchwd the Ab Fab movie in which Patsy and Edina do suffer greatly. I will send a link to a discussion on a stage in whic 3 contemporary oil painters of some small reknown discuss the nervous making feeling that by picking up a brush they are forgering dollars. It feels true, sounds true to life.
You’re right, we all wish that the rich are miserable. But perhaps it’s more that they lose the hunger for life that us lesser mortals experience? I’ve been thinking about what ‘being comfortable’ means. Because a lot of human restlessness, even anger occurs because we look at others and what they have, even though we possess and have experienced so much. Growth is painful, awkward and change is hard. So being comfortable is a real ambition but maybe it’s not about money, rather it’s about self-development?
The trick is to live long enough to learn from our mistakes and redeem ourselves by finding a more satisfying path; one of less burnout and more enjoyment based on giving instead of just receiving and expecting...
The lucky ones are those who either catch themselves early on, or live long enough to do it later.
Some are not so lucky and die before they can live!
Life crises make us wiser and open our eyes, if they do not break us. But again, longevity is key. Time heals as they say, but the trick is not running out of time!
Those who truly love art (and not being rich) just major in art & end up teaching? Or simply being happy to visit museums. The colors in Cézanne’s oranges in D’Orsay blew me away—so rich…
This is a story of two guys I know. I will refer to them as Matt and Pete. You might know men who are, broadly speaking, rather like them.
Matt is more a friend of a friend. I like him but we never had that moment where we bonded over a shared interest or world view; we were always on the periphery of each other's social circles. Throughout his early twenties Matt smoked cannabis – the heavy potent stuff. There were a few months when his diet consisted entirely of weed, sausages and onions, and the kind of cheap canned beer that is favoured by homeless alcoholics. When Matt drank to excess, he would often become violent and belligerent. When he was like that you couldn't reason with him or even communicate with him. He once threw the entire contents of his bedroom at me and a friend: First came the TV, then the PlayStation and the books and the compact discs and finally the dirty laundry – the balled up white socks. One night there was a knock at my front door. It was after midnight so I ignored it. The knocking became a pounding. I looked out of the bay window. Two of my friends were standing on the front doorstep looking like a pair of total scumbags. When I went outside to berate them, they told me that Matt was so drunk he had been taking wild at swings at them whenever they attempted to move him. It was a freezing cold winter night. I drove them back to where they had abandoned him, lying on the frosty pavement. As soon as we attempted to pick him up he began fighting us with his eyes barely open. We eventually manhandled him into the backseat of the car. He continued to fight us for the duration of the drive back to his house. I was kicked in the side of the head, which I did not appreciate. When we arrived at his front door, I left him for my friends to deal with. Apparently he fought them all the way upstairs to bed.
Currently Matt has a good job in London. He is married to a devout Christian woman. He has children. These days he is a much calmer man. He's very clever and well read; he always was. The last time we met I was idly reminiscing about the more misspent moments of our youth. He passed some oblique comment about me remembering a lot and I realised that I was making him uncomfortable. He's moved on with his life.
What I should have said to him is that he's the person who he is now because of the person who he used to be. You can't have the latter without the former. Matt has seen a lot of himself. He's been out on there on the limits. He's gone places within himself that he doesn't want to revisit. A man who can do that and then graduate to being a functional member of society is a man with enough self knowledge to know where to draw lines. You can trust him to an extent, and you can rely on him when life gets unpredictable because he has some experience with unpredictability.
I haven't seen Sad Pete (as we called him) in decades. He was a callow, hollow-eyed young man who looked permanently startled. He had once met Princess Diana; I forget the exact circumstances. I remember Matt asking him: “Did you shag her?” At the time I doubt Pete had known the touch of woman.
People like Pete exist within a very narrow realm of experience and they seldom step beyond that comfort zone. They might think of themselves as honest, decent people. When their integrity is tested or life goes off script, they don't know what to do and they are quick to throw others under the bus. Social capillary action tends to draw this kind of person into middle management where their mediocrity, their cowardice and their prosaic dishonesty can become a problem. We have a man of this type currently leading the United Kingdom.
Adversity shapes us, particularly when we are young. Whether it's a part of our life or something we actively seek out, it is an essential component in becoming a well-rounded human being.
A couple of days ago Joe Rogan interviewed Elon Musk on his podcast. You can find it on YouTube and elsewhere. Musk is, I believe, currently the second-richest man in the world – a billionaire many times over. His three hour conversation with Rogan begins with him being verbally berated by Grok – his pet AI. The pair cover a lot of ground, from Musk's ongoing attempt to stop the US from bankrupting itself, to the marooned astronauts on the International Space Station, to Thomas Crooks – the man who narrowly missed assassinating Donald Trump. He also talks at length about the logistics of applying heat-shielding tiles to spacecraft, which turns out to be more complicated than just slapping on some high strength adhesive and then sealing the joins with caulk. It sounds like the most boring topic in the world, but he makes it interesting because it is of interest to him. He seems happy, investing his money in projects that are largely to the betterment of man and the long-term continuation of our species.
Meanwhile, my monthly disposable income amounts to around £20. Like Musk, I too am happy, though I am not building any spaceships and have no designs on colonising Mars. Find a way to engage with the world around you and, whatever your income, you'll be okay.
But Musk isn’t ok and is dismantling civic institutions in the US.
I think many of us have encountered someone like Matt. Years ago I shared a house with a pleasant friendly young guy. But after losing his girlfriend and smoking a lot of weed, his behaviour became unpredictable and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. One hot summer night he attempted to climb in through my bedroom window, extra scary as the heat meant I was sleeping naked. I shut the window just in time, but soon after he set fire to my post including a birthday present. Enough, we went to the police station. The cops were sympathetic but said they could do little. When they called round, someone on the floor below let Keith into their room, so the cops left. Eventually he disappeared, possibly back to his parents in Yorkshire, though they had disowned him at one stage. The sad thing was that at heart, he was a really nice person, but circumstances plus his weed habit destroyed him.
White Lotus is great. After It's done I am cancelling HBO. It's fun to watch people creating their own misery in such a luxe location. Well, not fun. But great. Great that those wealthy fools frolic for us in the midst of their individual prisons of greed, fear, desires, ignorance. Why? Because it's familiar. Just blown up to larger than life, and far away. Not just me not liking people with license plates from Connecticut.
Hey, there’s poor folk in Connecticut too :).
I love people from CT, just not when they drive! And I am working on that.
I listened to your interview on Fresh Air. You were brilliant. As always.
Thrilling words of wisdom.
Finally watchwd the Ab Fab movie in which Patsy and Edina do suffer greatly. I will send a link to a discussion on a stage in whic 3 contemporary oil painters of some small reknown discuss the nervous making feeling that by picking up a brush they are forgering dollars. It feels true, sounds true to life.
Happy holiday to Carlo. Great work with Sophie. Thank you. I'll be watching Riviera.