Cathedrals to the Divine, Crossbows to Defend, Jeeps to Drive
5AM Thoughts
It’s almost 5 o’clock in the morning if you’re US East Coast time (which most of you are) but I had to get these random musings out.
The other day in My Multi-Millionaire Friend Who Feels Nothing, I wrote about how the functional utility of surplus wealth is now the lowest in human history. The key point was that beyond a certain level, more money doesn’t materially improve your day-to-day life. Yet the auto-pilot pursuit of it, especially among those we deify as “visionary entrepreneurs” or “great technologists,” persists as a relic of older human heuristics. As does the deification itself. Average people — especially the physically or mentally weaker, or simply those less capable of defending themselves or imagining and executing their futures (i.e. low-agency humans) — once required a leader to protect or direct them.
That instinct remains today, only reprogrammed. Instead of knights and kings guarding physical lives, we now look to billionaires, executives, and “successful people” to defend our economic lives. Then from that crop, the ambitious rise to take on the mantle of leadership, and the cycle repeats. It’s probably a net positive — the alternative is hellish anarchy — but when the cycle spins too fast, participants lose the plot and fling out of orbit.
The Cathedral and the Cosmos
For most of history, for some, gathering wealth meant building security. For others, it meant assembling the resources to chase some kind of grand vision. Often that vision was quite literal… like building upward to the sky (e.g. the Cologne Cathedral) or expanding the limits of technology in a subconscious attempt to get closer to God — or whatever name we’ve given to the innate human desire to understand why we’re here and to “meet our maker.” I believe this is what Elon really wants, by the way, whether he knows it himself or not. Everything he’s building is just as much about transcending our biological constraints to avoid extinction as it is to become gods or at least as close to gods as possible so that we might understand what God is and how and why we exist in the first place. Because what comes after we colonize the galaxy and no longer rely on just one planet or star for our survival?
The heat death of the universe.
There will always be more “problems” to solve. But that leads to the deeper question… why solve them? At what point do we stop? Is it really our human curiosity — or is it our inability to accept impermanence? Our greatest most detrimental weakness? We must meet our maker and spare no expense. But why? Why can’t we simply enjoy the movie without needing to meet the director?
The ladder never ends. The gameshow is rigged to keep us climbing because stopping means admitting we will die. And we are too weak to accept this.
Castles and Crossbows
In any event, in more practical modern terms, the pursuit of wealth has generally evolved into something a little more civic… the desire to be seen as magnanimous or successful, playing one’s part in a broader commercial or social experiment, defending one’s family by building generational wealth… so that future descendants might be shielded from chaos and uncertainty.
Today, the cheering of the ultra-wealthy by huge swaths of the public (often attacks on them are more reflective of envy than any true dissatisfaction, I believe) is a sort of anthropological echo of that same instinct. People look to founders, CEOs, and business leaders to safeguard their paychecks, often with the help of the revolving door of government. The impulse is ancient.
Just as we once sought safety in castles and armies, we now seek it in bank accounts and corporate benefits especially in a world where most of Western society is far removed from the threat of physical conflict. And in a world where both national states and quasi-state corporations control nearly all levers of force and influence — a “monopoly of violence” — private castles protect you far less anyway. Even if you built one, who would defend it? With what army? Will you throw gold bars from your turrets when people are scaling the facade?
The modern defense is therefore mobility — health, adaptability, resourcefulness, and ability to connect emotionally and rhetorically with other people. The ability to lead, persuade, and build quickly. These are like the new crossbows. None of them require extreme wealth. Money is a literal abstraction — even more so in a world where it cannot be converted into physical structures and physical battalions to physically protect you and your family. It can vanish with a glitch, a decree, a new tax law… vanish by fiat just as easily as it’s created by fiat.
Off-roading
Another analogy is the Jeep. It’s your vehicle through life — your health, your energy, your means of getting around. There’s only so much gas you can put in the tank before it overflows and falls onto the ground becoming completely useless. Then strap on too many extra gas canisters and you lose room for food, gear, tools, and other people to ride along with.
People say, “I need more money — it’s just my lifestyle or my HCOL community.” But that’s like choosing to take the mountain pass, burning fuel on the way up and burning brake pads on the way down, instead of cruising the coastal road where you might actually enjoy the view. You tell yourself the mountain made you stronger or feel more “successful” — but did it? How so? Stronger in order to do what, exactly?
News flash… the Jeep is a rental car. Memento mori.
Nobody was watching you drive up and down the mountain from down below.
The people who care about you just wanted you around — maybe to splash in the waves with you along the coastline instead of sitting in the backseat, watching you navigate a rocky incline to nowhere.