Are you ~not interested~ in money?

I remember reading a story about diddy, diddy was dissatisfied, why, well it was because that despite all of diddy's wealth, on some mornings he would wake up and there would be crust on his lips, you know, the kind that sometimes forms, and no matter how much money he had he couldn't make that problem go away

has he not heard of creme de la mer?

diddy is like the gatsby of (...)

is that a .. coachella?

Alright, alright, enough with the coochella jokes.

Though perhaps we have established that although not everyone in interested in money, sex is a much more universal motivating factor, and sex jokes have a near universal interest. Sigh.

that's because money's no joke

Also, I took "I'm not that interested in money" to mean "money is not my primary motivation" and "money is not in itself inherently interesting" - lots of people seemed to interpret that statement in quite different ways.

this is how I took it to mean so I voted (a), but also because the majority of totally loaded people I know are fairly miserable/unhappy and it's abundantly clear to me that past a certain point money doesn't just NOT buy happiness, it actively contributes to your unhappiness.

i know some rather happy loaded people. maybe money is some multiplication function for happiness? or just irrelevant altogether?

Money is a magnification factor for damn near everything, both good and bad.

I continue to hold to the theory that once you get lifted out of poverty to the point where basic needs and creature comforts are no longer a concern (not having enough money to get these things met is a sure-fire cause of unhappiness) then there is a pretty much a disconnect between more money and happiness.

Happiness and unhappiness seem to be spread in the same proportions in the middle class and the super-rich. Which leads me to think it is something other than money itself which causes happiness.

Feeling like a broken record at this point, though.

^^ I agree entirely with Ms. Boom on this point.

Money does multiply power, but power doesn't make a person happy, only powerful. Power allows one to materially propagate one's values and ideas into the world, which covers both the power to do good and the power to spread misery and disfunction. The money is just the vehicle for these, not the determiner.

I think you're right, MB, but I don't think very many people in this day and age of income stagnation, under-employment, etc, can imagine being anywhere near the point where more money would begin to result in diminishing returns. It's a fantasy for most of us to even contemplate.

would still love a boat, though

Yes, Laurel, I do get that. That the huge disparities in income inequality and years of recession and austerity measures have pushed huge numbers of people under that line of "basic needs and creature comforts not getting met."

It's just (yeah, call me LOL hippie for this) I feel this kind of sadness at the idea, that people seem to respond by fantasising "I want unimaginable amounts of money/to join the super-rich" rather than fantasising about the hippie-socialist-paradise where money matters... less. I'm not going to tell other people what their fantasies should be, but it just seems to me "why do you want to jump in with that thing that is causing the exact problem you are suffering under?" but I'm hardly the first person to have noticed that one. The fantasies of the desperate, annoying over-privileged idealists since 1848.

But this is the argument that I've been having with my brother since I was 15 and he was 17.

I just get annoyed when people essentially accuse me of *lying* for having different priorities or ideals.

in the article about the spanx billionaire, she said that crazy wealth lets you be who you really are. so if you are really a happy person shackled by non-crazy-wealth, it's totally conceivable that crazy wealth can let you truly express your true happiness. maybe the real reason happiness drops off after a certain income level is that most people are truly in their heart of hearts just upper-middle-class.

No, that's bullshit. I'm sure that crazy wealth can let you express who you truly are. But if *who you truly are* is a mean, paranoid, grudge-holding asshole, then even crazy wealth isn't going to make you happy. Most people need circumstances and constraints to hold back ~who they truly are~ in order to be properly functioning members of a community or family or group of people.

Yes, that's cynical and not entirely serious, but still.

i'm just eating a box of prunes here and i'm thinking if i had a billion dollars my true nature would have me eating a burrito instead, SOCIETY BE DAMNED

(i ended up buying a meatball sandwich as befits my non-billionaire status)
i was thinking that the fast food analog of the thread question is if the small medium and supersize drinks were all the same price, which one do you get?

i'm only interested in money to pay my rent and student loans and feed myself.

I'd love to be rich, because I'd have a shit-ton of fun travelling with my friends and starting my own small record label and having an art gallery and stuff.

But since my predilection toward money is "I'd use it to have a ball," I'll never rich. Unless I hit the lottery.

I can see potential money traps, though - right now when I see real estate porn I think the $6mn places in NYC are generally pretty amazing, but once I hit the lotto would I suddenly need a $20mn place and would that feel inadequate compared to my neighbors in $40mn places?

^^^ reading my mind
xpost

well the trick is to buy your apartment and all the apartments around it, so you can't be jealous of your neighbors

Owning a minor league baseball team would be fun.

brewster's millions made it seem like a drag. typical hollywood un-romanticization?

voted 'i don't care about social stats'

Paraphrasing Citizen Kane because I can't be arsed to google the correct quote:

"Yes, sir. This newspaper is losing two million dollars a year. At that rate I'll be flat broke... in 130 years!"

This was when Charles Foster Kane was still young, foolish and bubbling over with exuberance. Later, of course, he gets his comeuppance.

After reading a Lucy Mangan op-ed piece which had me gnashing my teeth with frustration at its heteronormativity and also its assumption that all adult women are in ~relationships~ (let alone relationships with men) I suddenly had to wonder if this question was gendered.

Because perhaps "I wouldn't want that much money" takes on a different meaning if uttered by a man or a woman, on account of how women and men are socialised to *think* about money.

And I have read depressing studies about how, when the same job is advertised at a pay grade of £25k it will get twice as many female applicants at one advertised at £50k - whether because women lack the confidence to apply for presumably more senior roles with more responsibility, or because we fear that well paid a role will consume more time that we have, or if it's because women are socialised not to think of ourselves as worth too much, and fear that we'll be slapped down as ~unmarriagable ballbusters~ if we earn more money than our male counterparts, etc. etc etc.

I suddenly realised that it was just weird that I asked this question, given my bents and my interests, and never wondered if there was a gendered aspect to it.

imo the whole thing becomes a lot more nuanced in ways that the question doesn't really address when you have a spouse and kids and can literally watch on a day to day basis how being someone who is ~not interested~ in money can be pretty shitty for the people that you love and that not caring about money is its own kind of selfishness

this was how i interpreted "caveats" and it is horribly otm

but hey, money is still shit to me

A poll of how much people earn relative to their partners might be interesting. Same as, less than, more than, partner doesn't work but I do, I don't work but partner does, etc. So many permutations to consider though -cohabiting, mortgages, etc etc.

prolly mostly less than as we are all wasting all our days on ilx rather than doing actual work.

yeah but i'm still getting paid tbf

until they sack my gedrunken ass

There you go again with the "assuming everyone has partners" thing when "living alone" is the fastest rising group in most Western countries. (read that in several new sources recently - that Erik K-something's research.)

Not that living alone is automatically indicative of being un-partnered, but it's becoming increasingly true that partnered is no longer the default state for western adults.

i'da said that i'm in an income bracket where more money/spending power *should* still be v important to me, but i just moved to a city where my real income will be probably stretched a lot more than was the case, so i guess i'm not as bad as i feared.

I thought the partners-earning-differential would be an easy-ish way to look at whether attitudes to money are gendered. I wasn't assuming they'd live together - hence the cohabiting permutation - and I only suggested partners because it gives a direct comparator (which would usually be) across genders.

People's partners are a self selected group, and therefore not likely to be random, or even indicative of any general pattern.

This is so often the problem with talking about gender, that people generalise from "my partner does X..." to "all women do X..." and it's a dangerous trap to fall into.

True, true, and ILX is a self-selecting group as well (arguably even more so).

I tend to specialise, in that "from "my partner does X..." as opposed to "most women do X..." "

Which is also wrong, but.

i hate money i want more of it so i can forget there is such a thing

― coal, Thursday, April 19, 2012 7:40 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ this

also you'd need two polls one for men and one for women if the question is about whether you are more/less interested than your partner in order to get info on whether it is gendered ?

I tend to think "not caring about money" is often the result of being raised comfortably unaware of money. I say this as someone who grew up kind of comfortably unaware of money -- not trust-fund rich or anything, but comfortable and with parents whose attitude was that everything was always fine. When I was in my early 20s and watched my parents start to have real financial problems as my dad lost his once super stable job, my attitude about money shifted pretty quickly.

I tend to think "not caring about money" is often the result of being raised comfortably unaware of money

Agreed.

hating money's death grip is not the same as lofty disdain tho

yes because one is caring and another is not caring

partly i hate its death grip on my dad's sense of the world i think, if ever anybody was an Oscar Wilde definition cynic then it's the guy who tried to fill me with his world-view

Like when it hit me that "Oh wait, you can't afford to fix the kitchen cabinets that are falling apart right now? Oh wait, you have to make choices between trips to visit us and trips to visit your mother?" etc. it finally hit me what money is really about. I mean I was living in run-down apartments and wearing thrift-store clothes and not doing anything extravagant, and in my mind that was "not caring about money." But I still had this vague sense of security, probably with an assumption that my parents could help me if I really needed something.

If you call your dad he can stop it all...

I see how those brought up in a financially comfortable environment could not care about money in many ways. But there also seems to be a subset of the lower middle class youth who are flippant about it. Maybe because there is the realization that they may never be in a position where they have a lot of money. Best to say that you don't care about it. Otherwise it could just be depressing.

"not being interested in" != "not caring"

There is some serious semantic wiggling going on in this thread to change the question being asked.