right! like gamestop almost makes sense (til you get into the meme stock psychosis bits) — a bunch of gamers with zero experience with stocks buy GME because they want to save the company (somehow forgetting how consistently godawful gamestop was as a chain of sleazy gaming pawn shops) and end up in over their heads. but the waste of space retail stores you enter once when you first buy a house and/or buy a baby and never again?
“I’ll be the only good billionaire” is such a seductive fantasy for a certain personality type, and it’s impossible by definition — the only way you keep the billions is by being a lying, cheating leech on society. doing the right thing with the money implies giving up the vast majority of it, but somehow that never factors into the power fantasy for these types of folks
I absolutely get the “I’d be a good billionaire” fantasy, it’s something I’ve indulged in every now and then- but for me, it’s really more a personal agency fantasy, just one of many ways I like to imagine having the power to single-handedly make the world better. But… in the end, they ARE fantasies, are just cathartic games for me to play when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed by the world’s bullshit. (And they usually involve giving the money away, hah.) No one should actually have that much individual power. Definitely not me, lol.
It’s the people who defend the exploitative systems that make billionaires possible, for the sake of that fantasy, who really irk me. They’ve genuinely convinced themselves, on some level, that it’s possible to, as you said, keep the billions without being a leech on society. That there’s somehow a chance they could really be that billionaire personally, or even that they’re actually temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
right! like gamestop almost makes sense (til you get into the meme stock psychosis bits) — a bunch of gamers with zero experience with stocks buy GME because they want to save the company (somehow forgetting how consistently godawful gamestop was as a chain of sleazy gaming pawn shops) and end up in over their heads. but the waste of space retail stores you enter once when you first buy a house and/or buy a baby and never again?
“I’ll be the only good billionaire” is such a seductive fantasy for a certain personality type, and it’s impossible by definition — the only way you keep the billions is by being a lying, cheating leech on society. doing the right thing with the money implies giving up the vast majority of it, but somehow that never factors into the power fantasy for these types of folks
I absolutely get the “I’d be a good billionaire” fantasy, it’s something I’ve indulged in every now and then- but for me, it’s really more a personal agency fantasy, just one of many ways I like to imagine having the power to single-handedly make the world better. But… in the end, they ARE fantasies, are just cathartic games for me to play when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed by the world’s bullshit. (And they usually involve giving the money away, hah.) No one should actually have that much individual power. Definitely not me, lol.
It’s the people who defend the exploitative systems that make billionaires possible, for the sake of that fantasy, who really irk me. They’ve genuinely convinced themselves, on some level, that it’s possible to, as you said, keep the billions without being a leech on society. That there’s somehow a chance they could really be that billionaire personally, or even that they’re actually temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
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Reminds me of this game, where you try to spend billions https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos
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