I don’t know, but I wonder the same. I’m in the US and work for a guy that has tens of millions of dollars. He still spends all day in the office 6 days a week. To be fair, I don’t think he does it for the money, exactly, but I can’t understand why he keeps working at all.

Bollywood actors are hypocritical and never use their platform for good. Stopped watching them in theatres long time ago.

It’s harder to think about “enough” in places like India (or even the US) where there is so much inequality.

But I would define “enough” as comfortable. Not worried about bills, buying whatever groceries you want, a good living situation and enough cushion that an emergency won’t make you homeless.

The addiction to more, more, more is a disorder like hoarding is.

I have wondered the same thing many a time. I don’t think it’s naive to wonder honestly. I find it genuinely confusing, not from a moral judgy standpoint but more of an effort to reward standpoint.

If you or I sold tobacco in exchange for a quantity we’ll call a “shit-tonne” for the purposes of discussion. It would change our lives considerably. As you said, you personally would do it, and I think odds are pretty good I would too. But if that 1 shit-tonne of cash doesn’t significantly change the recipient’s life or capabilities or long term security, I don’t understand why they’d bother with it. I think my confusion diverges from yours in so far as I don’t think the point of getting rich for the vast majority of people has to do with acquiring the luxury of a moral compass. It might be for some, but I’d say for most it’s at best a side benefit and for many irrelevant. However I do think that most of us without the requisite shit-tonnes of cash like to imagine the purpose for acquiring it is to avoid having to expend the effort required to acquire anymore thereafter. In this framework, which seems so obvious and relatable to me, you’d think you couldn’t hook wealthy actors in to shilling tobacco because basically, they just couldn’t be bothered, I mean why bother? You might keep acting if you find it fun but surely there’d be funner gigs than ads?

This is a more cynical way to look at it, but no less inaccurate than your theory of acquiring wealth to buy the ability to be moral. In the case of wealthy actors however, I think they’re maybe not the best example, the richest ones are very rich but their material desires are sometimes able to scale with their wealth. Nicholas Cage was a good example as he managed to get himself in to ridiculous debt ostensibly from insane spending on ridiculous things. Presumably he liked having those things and was able with some effort to actually spend enough outpace his unbelievably high earnings. In that context you might well take lucrative acting gigs for scummy companies to help you out of debt or to help you buy one more private island.

There’s a whole other tier of offensive and obscene personal wealth where you see people like billionaire CEOs. These people trash my model of the ‘purpose’ of acquiring wealth and by the actions we see them do, yours as well. These guys probably couldn’t spend all their money on material objects if they actively tried. Their motives are very obscure to me. I definitely judge these guys but I leave them just a little bit of slack in so far as it seems generally observable that acquiring this much wealth seems to make you want to keep acquiring more wealth. I may not know why, but it almost seems like some kind of a fundamental law or drive so it could almost have some exculpatory power, though not much and in any case would only lend credence to the idea that society as a whole ought to avoid the accumulation of quite so much personao wealth since if my observation is at all accurate it would tend to mean, that much like we hold it to be true that all drivers will be impaired after a certain amount of alcohol so too does wealth tend to corrupt the decision making and motivations of people who have too much of it.

I’ve read about the topic a little bit and there’s some concepts that make some sense. People do crave purpose, so if you make enough money to sit on your ass and avoid having to make money people have a tendency to create objectives for themselves to work towards and if they don’t it can lead to unhappiness. In the case of some of those who achieved such wealth they had such objectives on the way up too, so it’s how they’ve always lived their life (theoretically, if they supposedly got their through hard work and merit, big if). This does explain it I guess, but as an explanation it feels vague and weak. I’ve heard ideas around a kind of competitive peer pressure effect too, these guys want to be richer than each other. This is unsatisfying because it’s just so dumb but makes a lot of sense, especially because it kind of scales with wealth as well. Often as people at all walks of life take stock of their position they will assess how well they’re doing in comparison to where they were before and also in comparison to someone else around them so by those metrics you’re always going to want to be doing just that little bit better than a few years ago and your always going to want to be exceeding or approaching the person you’ve most recently set as a desirable standard. All of these ideas seem to explain the behaviour we see but to me all feel too wishy washy to really make sense but I guess that’s because it’s going to be lots of these drives acting in concert along with something that one probably just has to experience and which basically none of us ever will as it comes with becoming richer than god.

Personally I can’t but think that if instead of becoming rich, I suddenly got bequeathed all of Elon Musk’s wealth unexpectedly from his timely death then I’d very likely have far less ambitious and contentious goals than he. Not necessarily because I hold myself to a higher standard but because, I mean, why take over the world like a megalomaniac when it’s so much easier and more fun to do lots of drugs and go traveling and play with all the best toys? If I really crave purpose I can make a movie or something, I wouldn’t even have to be good at it, I could buy everything related to it being made and distributed. If I was talentless and it stunk and flopped, it wouldn’t be my problem and I could afford to spend my time getting good at it as a hobby even if each flop cost hundreds of millions. But maybe one the zeros started trailing on my account balance I’d suddenly start wanting to own everything and influence politics and just generally being a bit of a prick, it seems to happen to people.

Money is power. Power corrupts.

Frankly, I think 5 million USD should be enough for anyone pretty much anywhere in the world to live the rest of their lives comfortably. Taking 1 million out to spend immediately and leaving the rest in a savings account, even at 2% interest per year, you’re getting 6666 per month, or 80k per year.

For me, personally, living in Brazil, 600k dollars would probably keep me afloat for the rest of my life with my current expenses and comfort. That’s roughly twice my current salary for the next 25 years.

So, when is it fucking enough!? When will these people have enough money?

For many, it’s never enough, because they see it as a competition, one about showing off “wealth” in the most cringe way possible (just look at all the assholes that love to show off their expensive car collection) and also where they interpret rules like in the Munchkin card game: it’s ok to cheat, so long as you don’t get caught.

Epicureanism teaches that you will never have enough money, enough fame, enough influence, so chasing after those will never make you happy. Instead, you should focus on fulfilling your needs and fixing problems in your life, getting enough to eat, enough sleep, surrounding yourself with friends and enjoying the small things in life. When you’re unburdened by needs, you reach long-lasting happiness.

So to me, that means earning enough to fulfill your needs is enough, especially if you don’t have to worry about losing your job any time soon

About 20% more than what anybody currently has at any point in time

Greedy people are more likely to end up wealthy. Greedy people are also more likely to end up doing ethically dubious things.

Of course, any wealth at all is unethical if you’re being honest with yourself. There’s a famous passage in the Bible.

Jesus was out teaching his disciples or healing people- whatever he did. And a rich man comes up to him and asks

“Jesus, I want to follow you and go to heaven. Please tell me what I should do”

What did Jesus say? Jesus told him to a) sell all of his shit b) give that money to charity c) physically follow me around

What did rich guy do? Have an epiphany about morality and living the good life?

No, he cried. He cried because he didn’t actually want to let go of the good things he had for morality.

All of us in first world nations are guilty of this to some extent. The way our world is shaped you essentially have to be unethical to survive. There are levels to it, of course. But I think your perspective is too black and white and needs a little nuance. Seem like a teenager.

I don’t think any amount of money is enough. This is what happens when we live in a society that relies on material wealth as a source of validation instead of a means to fulfill our basic needs.

Its human nature to always want more regardless of how much you have. U could have enough money that you wpuld be incapable of spending it all and yet still want more. There is no such thing as enough there never will be.

When I am immune to the thoughts of questioning my finances

I find celeb ads pretty disgusting. Watched ads for gambling apps? They almost always feature a celeb. All I can say is, we have to know that celebs will do whatever for more money. They don’t care about their audience. The onus is on us to not get influenced by them.

Stop watching youtube, especially CoffeeZilla. Stop reading so much reddit, although you make the right choice to move over lemmy, do not over use Lemmy.

Spend more effort on training, studying and working for better job, better future.

What matter now for you, is not how fuck up the higher up. It is how you are comparing to those at your level. You can make more money than your peer if you better than them.

I know someone who earns 10s of thousands of euros a month. His girlfriend, who has lived with him for many years, had to sell her bicycle to be able to afford something she really needed. He hasn’t ever given me the impression that he’s happy. Some people just are that way and our society enables their behavior.

Personally I think “enough money” it’s more a mindset than about physical money, you can have a lot of money and still didn’t have “enough money” or you can not have any money and at the same time have “enough money”.