Made this point a hundred times, but distilling again.
Are we rich or poor?
How do we answer this question?
What we tend to do is look at other people. In other words it is relative.
The family at the end of the road has 3 cars we think. We only have 1. We think we are poor.
The family on the other end of town only has a P reg car from the 1990s. Ours is 69. we are richer.
But we can chose anything we like. My colleague at work gets paid more, but does less work. He is richer. His wife is uglier than mine. His dog just died, mine is still alive. And so it goes on.
Wealth is relative.
This game we play gets played out at all scale. United States has an median salary of $54,132 per year while in Nepal it is $8293.92 per year. We like to think then that Americans are richer than Nepali. In fact many Nepali leave Nepal to work in America so they can earn more and feel more wealthy. And Americans are reluctant to live in Nepal because they will feel poorer. In fact this logic expands into more dramatic actions than that. Some people in the US feel that the Nepalese need economic reconstruction so they can produce and earn more because they are poor. Various international groups have been set up to achieve exactly this based upon ideas that some people are poor and some rich.
It all depends upon whether there is such a thing as Absolute Poverty. We started realising that we look at othetr people to find out who is rich and poor, so we established that wealth is Relative. But we seem to have driftred into the idea that some people are "actually" poor--not just relatively--and they need to be helped to become richer. Is this actually true?
Well the most famous analysis of this is in "Man's search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl about what he learned from living in Auschwitz during WW2. That by any measure of poverty was Real Poverty. Threatened with endless hard labour, minimal rations and the increasing threat of starvation and even murder as the war progressed. Yet Mr Frankl observed that even within this appalling world there was relative wealth. People dishing out the soup would take a scoop from the bottom for their friends so they got some actual vegetables and meat in the otherwise watery rations. Not sure if he says this but even death might be seen as the better option compared with endless hard work in freeing conditions with poor and worn footwear and clothing.
In fact there is no such thing as absolute poverty. Wealth and Poverty are always determined by comparing with other people.
This is a really important thing to understand.
It means that the richest person can still feel poor if they compare with someone richer of luckier than them. It means that the poorest person can still feel rich if they compare with someone worse off than them.
This is why gratitude is the key to true wealth. If we note the actual things around us then we will always feel rich. Even the existence of the Sun is a miracle beyond any other wealth. And even greater than that is our life itself. We are already spoiled with riches.
This would be the key way in which Capitalism is a false religion. It is based upon a misunderstanding if life. You can always become richer, and so you are never actually rich.
It is why no matter how much we achieve or how much capital we accumulate we are always at equal risk of feeling poor or rich as they these are not actually anything to do with these things.
Poor and rich is simply what mood we are in and nothing else.
Wow how many lives wasted struggling to be rich and running from poor. But sadly this is the dead end avenue in which the Western world has gotten itself. Somehow we forgot what wealth was, and have been tricked into seeking false wealth and in the process robbing ourselves of true wealth. Everyone in the West is amongst the poorest humans ever known because we have forgotten what wealth is.
And unfortunately struggling--in what is now and endless struggle to double down on our bad investment--we are destroying everything and the Planet is now in critical danger of being destroyed. All we can think of is moving to other planets to try and escape our ignorance. When you don't understand what wealth is you can run to the edge of the universe and still never be rich.
Elon Musk is almost the poorest man in history, and his struggle for wealth shows how impoverished he is. Everything he seeks to gain is actually a compensation for that poverty and not knowing true wealth. His desire to leave the planet and colonise other planets underlines this poverty. If he cannot feel rich on Earth how much harder to feel rich on other planets! All how ironic!
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