Danger! Money! It kills!
I read a really, really interesting article on msn.com. It took me 24 hours to write something about it, and of course now the article in question has disappeared into the ether as I never bothered to copy the link. I admit it - my bad. (If you happened to see the article and know where it is, please do let me know.)
The article was forwarded to me by someone who thought that it might be of use, because it was along the lines of “How To Make A Million Dollars”. Actually, it was, but not in the way I would have expected.
There’s countless articles like this one, people talking about how they made their million after the fact, that all you have to do is “work hard” and “have faith” and one day someone will park a dumptruck full of money in your driveway.
If these stories were useful, we’d all be millionaires. Where’s the stories like “I sat on my couch crying because I couldn’t buy Christmas presents for my children” or “I secretly invested my son’s college money in this scheme, thankfully it paid off or he’d be stuck with a high school education” or “My car got repossessed and I wondered what the hell I had done with my life” that are a lot closer to what it’s like to struggle? No one admits to that kind of thing. Everyone just tries to make it look easy, effortless, like the most natural thing in the world. If it’s not easy for you as well, you must be doing something wrong.
Interesting, but that’s not what struck me.
There was a link to yet another article which was about lottery winners. More specifically, lottery winners who wish they had never won the lottery.
This particular piece read like some canned cautionary tale about the Evils Of Being Rich, that these country bumpkins who drank themselves a hundred thousand dollars into debt a year after winning a few million were an example of money’s power to ruin us all.
There were no stories about stock brokers who made a million and lost it all on drugs, coke and loose women. There were no stories of people who had won a million dollars and had never been happier. There were only stories about Ordinary Folk who were living in a trailer on social assistance five years after hitting the jackpot.
I got the impression that this piece was telling people that aren’t rich that they shouldn’t even bother trying, that it just all ends in tears. So just make your $30k a year, pay your taxes and be satisfied. Actually trying to better your life just leads to heartache.
Winning the lottery, I’m sure for some people, would be a bad experience. However, NOT having money smokes the pole as well. It’s more negative messages about money – despite all the messages in society of “buy more, get more”, there’s also this message of MONEY = BAD.
These stories of lottery winners reminded me a lot of classic ghost stories. There are theories (which I agree with to a large extent) that the ghost story and horror movie are in large part cautionary tales for young people. Make out with your boyfriend in a car on a deserted road … and get horribly hacked to death by an escaped lunatic! Get busy in a tent with a boy at camp … and get macheted by Jason Voorhees! They’re always tales of young people doing what they’re not supposed to be doing and suffering some awful violent death as a result. These cautionary stories of people who make money seem to operate the same way. The ghost stories were trying to prevent premarital sex and illegitimate children. What are the cautionary tales of money trying to prevent?
Maybe it’s just comforting to see people suffer when they get what we lack. In other words, maybe humans are just jerks.