Wealth, greed, and time

Earlier this month, I was taking care of some investments. I was checking when to best exercise my stock options in order to get the best rates on my taxes. I went deep into a hole of figuring out optimal timeframes to buy in various scenarios and started calculating various payout rates until my mind suddenly braked to a complete halt in a state of mild hysteria. What on earth was I doing?

All of the numbers I was staring at were entirely theoretical. All of the options, grants, and stocks I was playing with were all arbitrarily assigned to me simply due to happenstance and coincidence having to do with me deciding to join a company at a specific time. All the tax rates and taxable income were determined by some famous accountants years ago and were magically passed into law. Some random blog post written by someone I’ve never met was telling me that it’s important to maximize my capital gains tax because the rate is far lower than that of the ordinary income tax.

Why? Why on Earth should I possibly worry about saving an extra few bucks here and there, and why should I care so deeply about the rate I get taxed at? Is the money I’m making not enough? There are a hundred other things I could be worrying about that has an immediate impact on not only my life, but on the lives of others around me. How does me trying to guess the difference between fair market value of my company’s preferred stock and its strike price help solve the most crucial issues of our generation?

It’s times like these that I’m reminded of this comic. I think about it a lot. There are so many millionaires and billionaires around the world right now shuffling money into offshore accounts, creating shell corporations to hoard profits, and generating massive amounts of wealth in tax havens. They don’t know what to do with their money except to simply acquire more of it. The more money you make, the more protective you become of it. Or, in simpler terms, #moremoneymoreproblems.

It actually blows my mind to think about the fact that all these ultra-rich folks spend so much time worrying about how to minimize their taxable income rate. Where is the limit to when they’re satisfied with what they’ve got? Income inequality is one of the biggest issues facing our generation, and here we have the wealthiest people in the world with access to the highest tier of financial consultants and tax accountants working around the clock to ensure that their pile of money just keeps growing bigger and bigger in size without really doing much else. It’s insane.

And so much of the “money” currently sitting in online accounts is simply made up. Investments, valuations, and stocks only hold value because large groups of shareholders buy into the hype. It doesn’t even matter what the thing you’re valuing is. If enough people believe it, it suddenly has value. Heck, go back far enough and you’ll find that currency only exists as a thing because long ago, humans collectively agreed that gold is a valuable resource. It didn’t matter if you personally thought gold was worthless. Chances are that your neighbor or the local merchant or the traveling salesmen did, so you hoarded it anyway to sell it to them and soon enough, the whole world agreed that it was worth something.

That’s the part that really gets me. So much of our current financial situation is simply…made up by humans. There are very real, visible problems we could be solving like tackling climate change, reverting ocean acidification, undoing coral bleaching, saving topsoil from degenerating further, reducing plastic waste, preserving the biodiversity of the planet, making healthcare and education more accessible, providing better mental health treatment options, or redistributing wealth in a more sensible manner. But no, let’s just stare at these made up numbers about highly profitable companies trading worthless “options” at made up strike prices and watch charts periodically rise and fall instead.

The core of it all just comes down to human greed. Once we’ve got something, we just want more of it. Land, water, metals, oil, meat, money, you name it. If humanity had the capacity to simply be satisfied with what it had after a certain point, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But then again, if we were content after a certain point, I’m not sure if, evolutionarily speaking, we would’ve gained the ability to be a little more curious and invent new ways of acquiring more of the same thing.

Investors want to see profits increasing quarter-over-quarter. It’s not enough that profits doubled last quarter. They need to quadruple in the next one and double yet again in the one after. Again, where is the limit? All you’re going to do with these kinds of expectations is push everything to the breaking point. Our appetites are far too voracious and unsustainable for a tiny planet which most definitely has very finite resources. No other species has had over eight billion of its members create such drastic change to the ecosystems it inhabits in all the millions of years Earth has been around.

It’s very easy to sit back in a little corner of the world and claim that you’ve got one job at a tiny company doing one specific thing. You’ve got enough to worry about between work and family, so you’re going to focus on ensuring that you’re making the right decisions when it comes to long-term financial planning and call it a night. You’ll sleep well and repeat the cycle the next day. But all over the world, millions of people are doing the same thing. And they’re all linked together with this tight chain-link fence that simply can’t be broken because the bonds are invisible. No single human can see how it’s all connected, so we pretend like it doesn’t exist. We go about our daily lives with little concern for anything but our own well-being and self-betterment. We don’t have time to deal with the broader problems of society and the world. We’ll just use what we want, eat and drink what we want, and fend for ourselves with whatever it takes. Everything else simply isn’t our problem, and this mentality is exaggerated to a terrifying degree at the 0.001% of the wealth bracket, where it has by far the most detrimental and devastating impact to the planet asa whole.

Despite our ignorance and insatiable greed, there is one thing that you can’t buy more of or exploit the hell out of, no matter how rich you are. It’s time, and time is the greatest equalizer of them all. Rich or poor, famous or irrelevant, young or old, we’ve all got an expiration date. We don’t like to think about it and try our best to make the most out of life before it ends, but one day it will. I like to sometimes imagine that it hits the uber-rich like a truckload of realization, that they’ve been able to acquire everything else they’ve wanted, so why not acquire more time? And then they realize they can’t and accept their fate, like the rest of us.

Someone once explained this to me in a way which has stuck with me. The rich don’t have that drastic of a lifestyle change from us. What they get to do with the money they have is delude themselves into “buying time back” by hiring people to take care of the busywork of their lives: laundry, cooking, cleaning, shopping, planning, and organizing. By not doing all this, they’re freeing time up for themselves. The rest of us have just gotten used to chores like doing the dishes, buying groceries, and making calendar appointments as a fact of life. But if you’ve got money, you can “buy this time back” by having others do it for you and pretend like you’ve got some sort of control to delay your inevitable demise.

No matter how hard you try or how much money you throw at the problem, you’re not truly buying back any amount of time. It’s all a static amount, and it will keep gnawing at you like a festering wound that never stops bleeding. Your insufferable greed will do you no good on the surefire march to the grave. Your only choice is to accept it and move on, for now at least. And this is why time is the greatest equalizer of the extremely lopsided society we find ourselves in today. As we we enter into a new decade, I’m not sure what technological revolutions or industrial leap-scale marvels are waiting for us. I don’t know where I’ll be in 2029 and what I’ll be doing. I don’t know how much I’ll be making or where I’ll be living. All I know is that I’ll have ten less years, and that is literally the only statement that universally applies to everyone on the planet at this moment in time. It’s weirdly comforting, and I’ll gladly take it, because it’s been a hell of a decade and any amount of certainty in any fact is a welcome respite from the chaos of it all.