Money and Wealth

In this story, I am going to be portraying some high level ideas about my thoughts on money and wealth in general.

To start off, let us ponder upon a certain kind of cycle which is extremely counter-intuitive to me that inherently goes on around us. A person tries to get ‘quality’ education which ultimately enables him to start earning at least sufficient amount of money so that he can have a certain decent ‘quality’ of life (where the quality depends on that person). Now after that point where a person’s education enables him to start earning some money, the amount of education that the person continues to get varies enormously on the profession of the person and the specific interests or his philosophy towards life in general. But the key takeaway here is that education should make a person smarter with each passing day, which also implies that it should also make him wiser. But in a certain section of our society where the rate at which people make money increases more than linearly or the average scale, people does n’t really end up making wise decisions with the money they earn. In other words, since the person concerned already earned a good amount of money which is basically a byproduct of his education, he should be able to take wiser decisions than lets say somebody who earned an order of magnitude lesser amount of money which should in turn be directly proportional to the order of magnitude of education that the person received. Instead what ends up happening is that an average rich guy tend to make more unwise or in certain cases more stupid decisions than the average middle class guy. So here is this paradox that the very fundamental role of education which ultimately enables a common man to earn some money and be wise in order for him to be self-sufficient ceases to serve at least one of its original purposes, ie, more money ultimately makes a person more stupid instead of making him more intelligent.

Now, what this boils down to is that the money accumulated by certain people does not depend on his education any more. This basically means that once a person accumulates a certain minimum threshold of money and has a mechanism to keep that chunk of money to that same level without incurring proportional amount of work to keep that money, the system gets fuzzy. So there must be a certain inherent flaw about my axiomatic inference stated above; which means that one of my assumptions stated above is not realistic. Or the source of money that these people are making has a large distance with any form of education.

This brings me to my next thought. A fairly general claim can be made that people practicing politics make the most amount of money. And people practicing religion comes slightly behind them. In short, politics and religion are the two most financially rewarding professions to mankind. This statement can be made fairly generically without going into the details about the particulars of either the religion or the political party with respect to a certain geographical location.

I would like to conclude by posing the following question: What would you do with all a particularly large amount of money if it was readily available to you today? By large, I mean really large; you can think of it as the amount of money that would be the equivalent of you retiring today and also enable you to continue leading the same standard of life or even better. I think this is a very basic question that probably many of us don’t have a good answer to and here I do not intend to be sanctimonious in any sense of the term. If we indeed have a reasonable answer to this question, then we already know the ultimate vision of our life, which I think should be a great progress in itself!