Acting as Badly as Billionaires

After the end of the supposed decade of greed of the 1980s, Cy Curnin of the band The Fixx sang the following lines:

How much is enough when your soul is empty?
How much is enough in the land of plenty?
When you have all you want and you still feel nothing
How much is enough, is enough?

How much is enough?
Buy, buy, buy
Buy, buy, buy

We're drowning in possessions

If Cy had only known then how things would evolve over the next 35 years, as income inequality proved ever-widening, he and his bandmates might have waited to release the song.

Those with obscene amounts of money are wielding unprecedented power in the United States, and it’s easy to be disheartened by the lack of compassion and the massive consumption of the uber-wealthy today. I think actor Jesse Eisenberg said it best when he appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher in January of 2025 and had this to say about tech billionaires and politics:

”If you’re so rich and powerful, why are you not just spending your days doing good things for the world?”

Good question. And while it’s tempting to hop on that bandwagon and lambast Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and the like, it might also be time to look in the mirror and question our own motives in life, because from where I’m standing, there’s a lot of “amass as much wealth as you can, retire and live out your days in a gated community somewhere” mentality.

It’s true for some relatives of mine. It’s true for many friends of mine. And if I’m being honest, it’s true for me and my family. I spend a lot of time watching financial videos by Rob Berger on YouTube, reading articles on Investopedia and Motley Fool, updating spreadsheets and forecasting when my wife can retire. It’s not like this is foolish behavior – financial literacy and planning are important – but what exactly is the goal here? When the world appears to be headed for irreversible disaster, am I just hoping to ride off into the sunset and escape from reality?

The antidote for this type of mentality – whether you’re a billionaire or otherwise – is to get involved. Find a cause or causes that you feel strongly about, and start contributing, not just financially, but with your time. I was teaching English for a few years, and since that petered out a year ago I’ve made a few modest attempts to find something new to contribute to, but so far those have gone nowhere. One of the sad truths in life is that non-profits aren’t always well-organized and often lead to wasted time and dead ends. But when that happens, it isn’t time to give up on volunteering; it’s time to find a different non-profit.

Volunteering boosts one’s outlook on life, creates social connections with like-minded people, leads you out of the bubble you’ve been living in, and makes a difference in the lives of people or the lives of plants and animals. Those differences might be small, but that’s okay. If you’ve ever been in need of a little help, you know how important small acts of kindness can be.

So don’t follow the blueprint of billionaires. Don’t look at life as a way to accumulate wealth and ride out the rest of your lives in a bubble. Get involved.

A Christmas Carol and Embracing the Good We Do

Imagine attending a performance of the Dickens play, A Christmas Carol, except that this time it contained new information. Yes, Ebenezer Scrooge still finds his redemption toward the end of the play, but in a brief narrated postlude we learn that his kind and loving employee, Bob Cratchit, made a serious moral blunder just before dying at a young age. What moral blunder, you ask? Something short or child abuse, rape or murder, let’s say, but a detestable thing nonetheless, a very regrettable act. Which character – Scrooge or Cratchit – would we view in a better light? The one who brought misery to others for most of his existence except for a flash of philanthropy towards the finish line, or the one who lived a noble and loving life except for a flash of regrettable conduct toward his finish line?

Finish lines matter to us. When it comes to sports, it might be all that matters. I’ve often thought it’s a shame that as a fan you can experience jubilation for 8 ½ innings of baseball or 55 minutes of football, only to sour if the opposition scores six runs in the bottom of the ninth or two touchdowns in the final minutes of the fourth quarter, as if the previous joy you experienced never happened. It’s the ending that matters; the team that performed well for 90 percent of the game is a failure, and the team that performed poorly for 90 percent of the game is a success.

But what about human life? Is the finish line the be-all and end-all?

About twenty years ago I composed the following couplet:

Are we measured at the grave?
Or by the weight of equal days?

I had been contemplating the ability for humans to redeem themselves, to make up for past transgressions and finish life morally strong, perhaps with the hope that posterity will judge them for how they’ve completed the race rather than how they ran it. By contrast, if each of our days is weighed the same, then a poorly-lived life can never be overcome. If this is the case, then the legacy of a character like Ebenezer Scrooge would be far different than the one portrayed in the Dickens classic. Sure, we might applaud the miser’s late-life efforts, but we’d still condemn him for everything that preceded it.

I like to think that when it comes to the art of being human, we can view things less black and white than we do a sports game, granting ourselves and others a bit of latitude and allowing us to have it both ways.

Are we measured at the grave?

Yes. How horrible it would be to live life without believing in redemption, the ability to correct our errors, steer back on course, make up for past transgressions and strive to finish life with more wisdom and better conduct than preceded it. Without this, all of us at times would be unable to face another day.

Or are we measured by the weight of equal days?

Yes. How horrible it would be if we couldn’t take stock of the good we’ve done even after making a terribly regrettable act and happening to discover that our time has run out, that we’ll be unable to finish life the way we’d hoped.

As we begin the new year, let’s try to have it both ways: embrace all the good you’ve done and strive to do more good, and embrace all the good others have done, regardless of where they end up. After all, some never have a chance to redeem themselves. If Ebenezer Scrooge had died at the first site of Jacob Marley’s ghost, he never would have had a chance to rectify all the wrongs he’d committed.

Life can be tough. Let’s try to grant ourselves and others all the generosity we can muster.