Rich People, I Am Here To Help You

Although you might imagine having millions or billions of dollars would make you happy, the ultra-rich are simply never satisfied, according to the Atlantic today:

This instinct to measure and compare doesn’t disappear once people have an obscene amount of money. “The problem is, Am I doing better than I was? is only [moving people in] one direction, which is up,” Norton says. And if a family amasses, say, $50 million but upgrades to a neighborhood where everyone has that much money (or more), they feel a lot less rich than if they had stuck to the peer comparisons they were making tens of millions of dollars ago. Hence the ever-shifting goalposts of wealth and satisfaction.

Michael Norton, a Harvard Business School professor who conducted a study of 2,000 people with more than a million dollars, told the Atlantic that virtually all the millionaires said they would need “two or three times as much” money to be fully happy, regardless of how much money they currently have.

Rich people: Your quest for ever more money is futile. There is no upper limit on the amount of money you can have, and thus you will never reach a point of true happiness. You might have the biggest boat in the world, but you just know some other fucker is gonna build an even bigger one soon.

The only way for you to rid yourself of this constant, tiresome striving is to rid yourself of your money. A good way of doing this would be to pay it in taxes to the government. You might be afraid of socialists, but they actually want to help you by redistributing your wealth to other people who have very little money. They are trying to save your soul and a fortune spent on therapists’ fees.

Or, if you don’t want to give it to the government, you could give it to me. To look after. Until you’ve, uh, reached inner peace, or whatever.