“Acquisition and hoarding are human instincts that go back to our earliest forebears,” said the skeleton. “The ones who survived acquired and hoarded as a hedge against the terror of want. Relative abundance meant survival in dark, cold days when other humanoids were willing to kill you to take the haunch you were about to eat.
“Longing for luxury was tied in to that, the physically bolstered illusion of being rich enough not have to worry about your security. Those who were best at acquiring and holding on to things became rich and lived the easiest lives.
“Life, which is frequently a tightrope walk under the best of circumstances, is eternally fearful in poverty, like the insecurity of the cave in a world of hungry predators. The constant press of needs you can’t meet goads you to a hopeless, gnawing desperation. Hoarding isn’t an option when you’re poor. Picture the terror of night time in any favela, ghetto, inner city, rural area. The least principled will never hesitate to bash your skull for that $300 that might be in your pillow case. No point saving a cookie when it will only be stolen from you as soon as you let your guard down.
“Your sister told you about that experiment where they demonstrated that the ability to delay gratification was the biggest single predictor of future success. They’d give young kids a marshmallow and tell them that if they waited five minutes, and didn’t eat the marshmallow, they’d get two marshmallows. The experimenters then left the room and watched from behind a one- way mirror as many of the kids ate their marshmallow.
“When the scientists went back into the room, a lot of the marshmallows were gone. The kids who’d had the restraint to not eat the marshmallow all got another. Some kids now had no marshmallows, others had two. They gave each kid without a marshmallow another one and repeated the process.
“After the second five minutes the kids who’d been able to save the marshmallows the first time each had four. A couple of the kids, having seen it done in the first round, managed not to eat their marshmallow in the second round and they each now had two. The rest of the kids had eaten two marshmallows, had none, and were done.
“They tracked these groups of kids through school, the best gratification delayers versus the kids who needed instant gratification. As one might expect, across the board the kids who’d had the discipline to not eat the marshmallow, for the sake of future gain, avoided self-destructive behaviors, did better in school, went on to get college degrees and better, higher paying jobs.
“So some of this is hard-wired, Elie, a part of survival. Those better able to strategize, and roll smartly with contingencies, always have a better chance to survive and thrive than those who are at the mercy of their immediate needs. That’s one of the true horrors of poverty, how it bends the will toward instant gratification. The children of the poor are rarely taught how strategically important it is to delay gratification sometimes. Their parents and grandparents have no idea how it’s done, have no wisdom in this regard to impart to their offspring.
“After a childhood like mine, and my brother and I were hungry a lot, believe me, being in the Army was like being at a great buffet for every meal. I couldn’t believe how much food there was. There’d be signs over the counter that said ‘Take All You Want but Eat All You Take.’ So I did. I must have gained thirty pounds in the army, and none of it was fat. It went on from there, eating whatever I wanted was a sign of my freedom from poverty, from want, from hunger.
“I had mom buy steaks for dinner every night, we usually had steak, if you’ll recall. I didn’t care for chicken that much, so when you guys ate chicken, or lamb chops, or fish sticks, mom would broil me a steak. Eating steak was a sign of my success, it was, literally, the taste of success. A chargrilled steak from my barbecue under the cherry tree in my own grassy backyard there on a quiet, tree-lined street in suburban Queens? Man, oh man!
“As a kid in Peekskill, I never allowed myself to dream of such wealth. I used to resent you and your sister as spoiled little middle class fucks complaining about nothing while I was busting my ass working two jobs to give you, compared to what I was given, a castle to grow up in, and a steak dinner every night. Do you know how many times I had steak before I went into the Army?
“Which made it all the more traumatic when I shoved that raw chopped meat into Paul’s mouth. That was our equivalent of steak, and we’d have it almost never — chopped meat served in a patty. You can be sure Paul’s drool was wiped off that meat and it was cooked. I didn’t get to eat any of it that night.
“But anyway, Elie, the point I was making is that everyone knows if you’re working for money, if you’re getting a check at the end of the job, whatever else you may be doing, you’re not wasting your time, you’re being productive. Everybody understands working for pay. It’s a necessity and, besides, there’s morality attached to making an honest living.
“Let’s leave aside for now soul-fulfilling work people truly love to do, or work that saves people’s lives, or does something equally important, most people don’t get that. I’m talking regular, stinking work. But, whatever the work, while you’re doing it for money you have nothing to worry about except for the job you’re doing. It all makes sense, focuses the mind away from the self to the demands of the paying work. It’s the most reasonable possible way to spend your time.
“I know that’s part of why this is bugging you so much now, how long and hard it is trying to write this book with no assurance that, however good it might turn out to be, you’ll ever see a dollar for these hundreds and hundreds of hours of work. You want to get paid already. I get that. But here’s something else to think about, and it ties into our longtime historical and political conversation– two areas where we have virtually no essential disagreement.
“We are given opportunities sometimes, even ones that may be impossible to see at the time, and they either make it or break it for us, depending on how they shake out. You recall when your mother and I forbade you to go see Fail Safe with Michael Siegel when you were about eight? It was a controversial adult movie that ended with the nuclear destruction of the world, in gritty black and white.
“You were a kid who had nightmares about the natives from Tarzan movies and were terrified of dying in a flood like all the people Noah didn’t allow on the ark. You’d just vomited from seeing those Nazi clips of the death camps. I think your mother and I made a reasonable call on not letting you see a movie that was going to give you nightmares.
“But, of course, our opinions didn’t mean anything to you, you always knew best, and Michael Siegel had the money, I guess, since your allowance wasn’t enough to afford a ticket to the Utopia, and you said ‘screw you,’ and left the house to go across the street to Michael’s. Then you two walked down to the Turnpike and went to the movies.
“I guess it was a double feature, and you lost track of the time, and by the time you got home for dinner, dinner was long over. Your mother and I were furious. Your mother was actually in a rage. We punished you harshly. Do you remember the punishment?
Yeah, it was the best thing you and mom ever did for me: no TV for a year.
“Well, you turned the lemons into a lemon pie, then. At the time the year-long TV ban really was the equivalent of a torture, as far as we could see. With no TV you spent more time in your room, more time throwing a ball off the side of the house, more time outside, more time reading and drawing. I guess it taught you that TV is mostly bullshit. Very addictive and sometimes compelling bullshit, but mostly bullshit really.
“You soon discovered that nothing happened to you if you missed Gilligan’s Island, or Mannix, or My Mother the Car, or Ronald Reagan as a maudlin Grover Cleveland Alexander on the Million Dollar Movie, or whatever precious must-see, advertising-laden gem was being broadcast at any given time.”
It was like a year off the grid. It taught me a lot, now that you mention it. One thing it instilled in me was the conviction that I have the inner resources, and love of things like drawing and writing, to engage myself almost all of the time. A side note: I never had a bad dream about the nuclear destruction of the world after Fail Safe.
“Good for you, then. Here’s the point I’m trying to make. Most of us have to work, it’s a simple fact of life. In addition to the need to earn a livelihood, a lot of people are terrified of not feeling ‘productive’, which is how they feel if they’re not making money. They don’t feel right, even if they can otherwise afford it, indulging their imaginations instead of buckling down and taking care of real paying business.
“Some work well into their retirement years to avoid their dread of all that leisure time, idle hands and all that. I was like that to a large extent. My brother put on a suit every morning years after he retired, sat in an office chair in front of his computer reading the paper. Some people win the lottery and still go to work every day. They need it, and it’s seen as virtuous to work, even if you have millions of dollars in the bank. Others, usually mocked as lacking ambition and character, are content to live their life without making a living, if they can manage to.
“You fall into the latter camp, and you stay busy, I’ll say that for you. It could have still gone well for you. You could have inherited a half a million dollars when your mother and I died, if things had gone differently on Wall Street in 2008. Of course, you could also have inherited a million, or, like some of your friends, three million or twenty million. Your unhappy friend Friedman probably got two or three million when his mother, your friend Sophie, died at 98 a couple of years back, not that it made him any happier.
“On the other hand, Florence Siegel, artist, intellectual and Leftist, one of your big role models, didn’t leave her daughters anything– Mike had never made much money, he worked for his father-in-law then taught people how to play Bach– they didn’t care about money. They had a reverse mortgage at the end, but continued to live into their late nineties, so they outlived their money. Poor people never leave any kind of inheritance, they’re lucky to have a burial fund when they die.
“Most middle class people in our ruthless capitalist system are driven, not unreasonably, by fear of a desperate future. Many are obsessed with, or at least very disciplined about, making, saving, investing and maximizing the interest earned by their money. For a variety of reasons.
“The point is, if you feel like you have things to do every day, you’re willing to live modestly, aren’t envious of what others have, and you have life-sustaining values beyond making money and acquiring the things money buys, even a fairly modest inheritance can make you feel rich. You may not be secure from a horrific wipe-out on the crooked roulette wheel that is modern financialized capitalism, but then, neither are your friends who have ten times more.
“I’m not setting this up as the old Philosophy 101 trick hypothetical– which would you rather be a pig satisfied or Socrates dissatisfied? If you choose the pig, in that moment of satisfaction, as the question suggests, you lose. How about if we take away all the things a pig loves? With Socrates, he has his amazing mind to keep him occupied, even transfixed, even if he was locked alone in an empty room. The pig, with fewer inner resources, is screwed without the things that make him happy. It’s catnip for twenty year olds looking for wisdom. It’s not my point here, though.
“There is, I think you’d agree, a talent for happiness, like there are talents for all sorts of thing. The source is mysterious, some have claimed recently that there’s a genetic component, what you refer to as ‘the fucking happiness gene’. Talent is always a mystery. A talent for conversation, for example, which comes largely from being a good listener with a wealth of empathetic, sometimes humorous, ways to respond — where does the ability to listen well and empathize come from?
“The talent for happiness, I suppose, can be cultivated, like other skills, or it may be mostly innate, or instilled– or not– early in life. You see some people have it to a larger degree than others, the ability to be excited about life, engaged with the people and things they love. With a talent for happiness, a small gift can make a deep impression. Without that talent, even the largest gift will never do much but increase the emptiness, most likely.
“As the last part of this thought experiment, and to illustrate the limitations on wealth as a solution to any fundamental human problem, outside of hunger, shelter and medical care, let’s imagine that when you turned twenty-five your mother and I had released a ten million dollar trust fund to you.
“We would also have appointed a smart financial advisor to work with you on managing the portfolio. You’d visit this guy periodically and get whatever you needed for your living expenses. Think of how you would have lived. Not that much differently from the way you live now, most likely. You might have a nicer guitar, a couple of fine calligraphy pens, a nicer winter coat, a couple more pairs of good shoes, but I’m certain you wouldn’t suddenly crave a life of luxury. I’m also sure you would be generous with charitable contributions.
“You would’ve hired a couple of experts to get funding for your non-profit and seen your student-run workshop alive in the world as a sustainable program. You might have started writing a far inferior version of a book like this thirty years ago, if you hadn’t been scrambling to pay the rent, repay student loans and so forth.
“Now imagine you’d grown up with a grandfather who made many millions of dollars in a bare knuckled way. Your father had taken his modest fifty million dollar inheritance and, with a single minded focus on increasing his wealth, parlayed it into a billion dollars. You were born the son of a billionaire and grew up in an elite world with other very rich kids. Would you have any reason to understand any of the things you know now, the understandings you value the most? You would understand only one thing for sure: you had done very wisely not to have been born to some poor fuck and you were very wisely living accordingly.”
“You can take that to Goldman Sachs, Elie,” said the skeleton, collapsing back into his dirt bed.
