Our Age Of Gluttony

Over the years, I have written many times about wealth distribution. It has long been a topic of interest to me, and through the course of my life, I have been introduced to increasingly impressive levels of wealth.

As a child, the rich guy for me was one Mr. Gwyn Montgomery, who lived a few doors down and was the manager of the Audubon Ford dealership in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His house was somewhat bigger than ours. His cars were somewhat nicer than ours. He probably made 25% more than my father. And, most important to me, his son Steven tended to get nicer gifts for his birthday or at Christmas than I did. Even worse, Steven had a really nice treehouse and I had none. So that was my youthful introduction to the maldistribution of assets.

In middle school, the rich family was the one whose father was the President of Dreyer’s Ice Cream. In high school, it was the Jacuzzi family (which is where the name of the hot tub comes). In college, it was getting to meet Mike Markkula, one of the founders of Apple, and Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer (it’s a long story).

The most proximal interactions I had with money, though, didn’t happen until my kids started going to school. They went only to private schools, and along the way, they were classmates with many centimillionaire and billionaire families. I had my first country bumpkin “garsh, I’ve never seen such a thing!” during one school function where we met at the house of a classmate which had an elevator. There would be much bigger places to come.

I’ve never really been much of a gawker about these things, and I’ve never been struck with envy. Our home is no palace, but most folks would consider it nice, and the simple fact is that, as relatively modest as it is, we don’t even USE most of it.

• The giant whirlpool tub in the master suite? Hasn’t been used in a decade.

• The built-in sauna? Maybe once every couple of months.

• How about the outdoor hot tub? Maybe once back in 2019?

• The living room – – no one’s ever in there. Or the guest suite. Or the playroom. Or just about anywhere else.

In this beautiful place, 90% of the space is largely ignored, and I remind you; this isn’t at all a big place. What we actually need is actually much less than what we have.

I am reminded of this because the kind of wealth I’m surrounded by now has three distinctions.

One, it’s much more massive than before. We’re not talking manager at the Ford. We’re talking trillions of dollars.

Second, it’s much younger than before. My childhood image of the rich was a nearly dead John D. Rockefeller. These days, it’s kids in their twenties.

And the third difference is that it’s much, much closer to home, and in fact has become part of the family.

I’m going to have to be careful here, without citing dollar figures, showing any pictures, or naming any names, but I’ll just say an exceptionally close colleague of my son just purchased one of the most expensive homes in the entire country. You could put our house on his estate, and I’m not sure if anyone would notice. It’s obscenely large, as are the grounds, and many newspaper and magazine articles have already popped up about the purchase.

The buyer is quite young, and it’s just him and the wife. Now, there’s nothing wrong with someone suddenly having a huge amount of cash and buying a home which could probably house a couple of hundred people. After, it’s his money, and he got it fair and square, although I think he probably doesn’t really recognize that the dumb luck of being born at exactly the right time ad to do with it. All the same, I think the entire exercise is kind of insane.

In fact, I think a more appropriate word is gluttonous.

I mentioned earlier what a small portion of our vastly more modest home actually gets used. What about this young man that doesn’t even have a single kid? How long is the thrill of owning a place going to last? What happens when you’ve run out of friends and colleagues to call up, have come over, gawk around at your huge-ass mansion, and then leave? What then?

To me, it’s not that different from someone winning a mega-lottery (IQ delta notwithstanding). They get infected with the horrible disease which rhymes with “trigger ditch“, and they began to blow vast sums on ostentatious, showy, look-at-me assets and, in a way, kind of lose their goddamned minds.

There have been plenty of tales of newly-minted millionaires who find themselves broke, and although I don’t think the fate of this young chap is that grim, I do think that, ten years from now, he’s going to look back and have more than his share of deep regrets.

I find the age we’re living in now of simultaneous opulence and desperation to be truly grotesque. The Everything Bubble has horrifically warped society, and traditional values and principles are getting thrashed. I can even see this in the (idiotic) Burning Man event which pops up ever Labor Day, drawing tens of thousands of freaks, drug weirdos, and sex addicts into the desert to party it up for a few days and pretend they’re engaged in something deeper than the vapid nihilism in which they’re actually engaged, the apex of this being, naturally, the famed Orgy Tent.

All of this is going to come crashing down, and soon. Thousands of years of human history haven’t put us into a permanent state of WHATEVER this is that’s going on around us.

Cycles are still real, reversion to the mean is still a thing, and black-hearted purist that I am, I simply cannot wait to see what happens next.

Burn it all down.