I’ve been going on a lot of long walks lately as I am still too heavy for jogging. It was on one those that I thought up this “tweet” for Bluesky:
To Aristotle, our wealthy would be misers.
In his "Nicomachean Ethics", Aristotle emphasizes the concept of virtue as the mean between extremes. When it comes to wealth and generosity, he sees liberality (generosity) as the virtue. Misers fall into the vice of stinginess, while the opposite vice is prodigality (wastefulness). From his view, a truly virtuous person gives the right amount, to the right people, at the right time, and for the right reasons — thus being a magnanimous man.
This liberality isn’t just about what we call charity. I once heard Ed Cooke say in an interview that I cannot relocate that one of the best ways to be magnanimous was to throw what I believe he described as a “slamming party.”
On another walk, or perhaps it was another lap on the same walk, “magnanimous” became the answer to the question, “what am I supposed to do once I have made myself so employable that I become employed [1]?” So, instead of just being on a treadmill forever, always trying for more employment, I need another goal for my personage, including my wealth. Magnanimous.
Yet another walk, this one for sure at a different location, I imagined a magnanimous act: I should throw a party when I have kept my weight off for a year [2]. I remember the great party I threw at the end of my employment with last place I was long-term. It was the end of the school year, and I bought everyone their first drink, and it was a great time where I could use my social skills of flitting around and knowing different thing about the people there, connecting, entertaining, being treated as the big shot by the wait staff... I walked on, got pumped (in more ways than one) -- so why not throw a party both when I get to the target wait as well? I do not have current co-workers, but I do have a Sunday school class that I am in, and men’s group within that. Oh, it’s so on.
It is worth noting that I do not intend for these parties to “pay off” in any economic sense. I am already plugged in enough with the group that if a “friend of a friend” had an opportunity for me, it would have happened already. Also, the school that I left and threw my first magnanimous party for is the same one where the administrator rat fucked me on an employment history check... though I will note none of the administrators were at that party, in spite of being invited. The point is the party itself, and it is money well-spent whether or not something comes back to you from it.
The most eye opening part of "Wonder Boy," the biography of Tony Hsieh was that during the period he was living in a compound in downtown Las Vegas, and called by the media the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas, he at one point expressed frustration that a music festival he had funded did not turn a profit. This was during the peak of his post-Zappos utopianism, when he was trying to remake not just company culture but actual city blocks according to the principles in his book "Delivering Happiness." And yet, despite all his experiments in serendipity—serendipity being a word he used a lot, sometimes industrially—he couldn’t quite stomach the festival losing money. It was supposed to be part of a kind of social-engineering ecosystem: invest in culture, attract the right kinds of people, spark innovation, happiness follows. Except it also had to "work," meaning it had to scale or feed into some quantifiable network effect.
Sure, he was rich enough for the loss to be irrelevant—and he seemed to genuinely believe in these events as civic good, but could not quite accept that civic goods sometimes just cost money. He tried to write the book on happiness,but his models of happiness and applied social order did not include benefactors giving gifts that would not be monetized, and with great impatience [3].
It’s nice to know I can be a bigger man than that.
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[1] I got myself so buried, that it is has been a long process to get myself out. I knew that I could not do any of this in one swing, so to speak, but would only through the accumulation of small improvements. The rough idea has been to be 10% more employable each month, and I think that is basically have done.
[2] After all, keeping weight off is statically the harder thing to achieve.
[3] After Vegas, Hsieh would retreat to another, more closed compound in Park City, Utah. Here he tried another happiness strategy called 10X, where if you fulfilled his whims, you could bill him 10 times the cost. “Get me a soda,” could be worth $20 or more to you. How this is a strategy for “happiness” for anyone but the wealthy person making the demands was no longer the point. Hsieh also got into ketamine, with the God-complex that can lead to. Eventually, since he could no be bothered to move from spaces so cleaning people could temporary occupy them, he ended up living in filth. Whether there was any degree of foul play, or he was just being stupid with fire safety, his end is also part of the cautionary tale.
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