In the realm of wise investors and business moguls, Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, is a source of valuable advice. His interests span wide, but they all converge on a singular focus: the pursuit of wealth, happiness and the avoidance of making dumb mistakes. During the 2023 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual meeting, Buffett expressed his desire to be born in the present day, considering it a superior world compared to any before. He acknowledged that modern comm
“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
-Naval Ravikant
I think that’s pretty spot on. We imagine that we can’t be happy because we don’t have certain things while in reality we already have many of the things we used to think would make us happy. As buddhists say; “life is unsatisfactory”. It’s almost impossible to be satisfied with what you got because of hedonic adaptation. You’ll just start wanting the next thing.
I truly belive the key to true life satisfaction is to realize how lucky we are to even be able to complain about billionaires online. Millions of people would consider their prayers answered if they could switch places with us.
Millions of people would consider their prayers answered if they could switch places with us.
Sure and millions would be immediately suffering if they switched places with us, including people you’d least expect. The truth of the matter is most people are not ambitious. They don’t want much, they desire even less. Every single person aged 20-50 that I know just wants their rent to be less than half their income, access to healthcare, and enough money left over to do something in their free time. Yeah, it’s great we aren’t spend our mornings tending to the fields and flocks and don’t have to worry about pickling and canning every single food item we get our hands on. It’d be nicer if that didn’t cost me more than half of my waking hours and 90% of my physical and emotional energy. I’d be willing to give up so much ‘modernity’ for just more free time, and it really sucks the guy that has never suffered in his life is telling me I need to give up both so his heirs can never know suffering.
It’s possible to both recognize how fortunate we are to be in the position we’re in and criticize an asshole billionaire who seemingly understands that the world is getting shittier over time but refuses to do anything about it despite having the power and resource necessary to do anything about it. I refuse to forgive his dragon sickness just because I have internet access in 2023, and it’s fucking ridiculous for you to suggest anything of the sort.
It’s possible to agree with a point someone is making while not liking the person saying it. Personally I find discussion about the topic itself more interesting than talking about billionaires.
You’re not wrong, but the context here makes this statement entirely different. The billionaire expects to continue to be a billionaire, but it is we who need to expect less and be happy for it. We wouldn’t need to accept less in the first place if he weren’t so greedily hoarding the fruits of exploited labor. But that’s not negotiable for him. The idea itself is absurd to him on the same level as unicorns propelling their way across the sky by way of rocket-farting fairy dust.
All the more reason for him to stop hoarding the fruits of exploited labor that he won’t live to enjoy anyway. He has the power to change the world such that we don’t need to expect less and have a tougher world. Rather than actually doing anything about what he’s predicting, he’s just telling the future of humanity to deal with it. He’s a selfish prick and I hope his death is painful with proportion to the pain his existence upon us is, has been, and will be for generations to come.
Heres an idea. We unalive him. Takes his money. Redistribute the wealth. profit.
After 500M net worth, security becomes a personal matter and protection of the law is lost. Murder of billionaire becomes legal and their assets are the bounty. They can sink their money into a personal army OR roll all excess over 500M into voluntary taxes!
Consent manufacturing machine go BRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Well he’s not wrong. Even if we seized power and instated a utopia tomorrow, climate degradation has gotten to the pount where things are unavoidability going to get worse for everyone.
I disagree. The billionaires are stealing a staggering, difficult-to-even-imagine amount of wealth from the world. Greener options often aren’t much more expensive at all, but you aren’t provided with much of a choice (example: electricity producers). In a utopia we could consume much less total and the median person wouldn’t be any worse off.
We don’t need militaries. We don’t need big oil. We don’t need eternal growth with automatic daily pay cuts. They do.
We do need militaries just because these rich, corrupt, sociopath fucks are masters of manipulating people into wanting to hate and kill other people.
If the whole world was at peace with no militaries, some soulless shit would come and convince thousands of people to rape, pillage, and kill…
We need a military. We don’t need militaries. I don’t see any lines when I look at Earth from space. We need a single military controlled by something like the UN, but nobody gets veto powers, and the military is mainly for their corps.of engineers, unless xenos show up and wanna fuck around and find out.
We also need a solar thruster to solve the dark forest problem, and start star lifting the sun so it will last longer.
We’re past a tipping point, which means things are definitely going to get worse no matter what we do.
Of course the amount they get worse could be affected by stopping all fossil fuel burning now, but it’s going to get worse no matter what.
I agree that things will get worse on average (mean). Basically what I’m trying to say is that we could distribute the “worse” unevenly, aimed squarely at people like Munger.
If I had a billion id I could spout whatever fucking nonsense thusbis probably just as easily
Whats next, coconut palace? Let us eat cake?
