Everyone dreams of being rich. It’s no sin to want to have all your needs fulfilled, and some extra on top of that to blow at the Grande Vegas online casino. Of course, if you were to listen to just about every movie and pop-culture entertainment since the 80s, rich men seem to be the root cause of all evil in the world. RoboCop, Aliens, Total Recall, etcetera etcetera, the list goes on.

Even more modern films and shows continue to push this idea that people with money are the bad guys. Tony Stark in Iron Man (before his character arc), the villain from Iron Man, the villain from Ant-Man, the upper-middle class in Joker, and just about every Cyberpunk story ever. Funnily enough, one of the only movies I can immediately recall where the plot twist was that the corporate business suit guy wasn’t the villain was The Incredibles 2.

Why is that?

I think that the answer is multi-fold.

First, everyone loves underdog stories. We all want to see the little guy win against the odds. The rebellion against the empire. The little underfunded baseball team versus the ivy league team. The poor against the rich.

Second is the misunderstanding of what rich people actually do all day. A lot of people assume that they sit around on their leisure yachts, throwing dollar bills at the slave children making their products in China, while sipping wine and eating caviar. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s not right either.

There’s this assumption that you can only get rich by being immoral, and therefore they deserve to have their wealth taken from them, but the reality is that most of the upper-middle class to rich businessmen have never committed a crime, and have done nothing wrong against you or the lower class. Most people don’t realize that the majority of CEOs and high-income earners are maniacs who work 12 to 16 hours a day, and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they didn’t.

The third reason is perhaps the hardest to admit, which is jealously. We see people who have more than ourselves, and think “why does he get all that, while I only have this? Am I not just as deserving?” But the answer oftentimes is no. I work hard, but I didn’t found Tesla, or Amazon, or Google. I didn’t put my neck on the line for an idea no one else believed in, or took advantage of an opportunity in the market no one else had spotted.

All of these misconceptions are compounded by a very modern anti-West fad that’s been growing like a cancer in our culture. It has seeped into everything. Movies, news, art, social media / big tech, etc. If celebrities don’t grandstand about how evil the country they live in is, they’ll find themselves without work extremely quickly- with very few exceptions, like Chris Pratt, who’s too popular (read: brings in too much money) to get canceled.

The Solution

So how should we really respond to this? The first thing is to learn and understand. The wealth gap is a non-issue for the most part. I don’t care that Elon Musk’s net worth is 250 Million times larger than my own. Despite what people assume, life is not a zero-sum game.

It may seem like it, because of the way that wealth is distributed in society, but it’s not. If you work hard and make smart decisions, you are successful. Yeah, maybe you won’t be Elon Musk successful, but you’ll still be successful.

One of the first major decisions that you have to make is deciding whether or not college or university is worth it. We’re collectively learning more and more that goings tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a piece of paper that qualifies you for a subject that most likely will have nothing to do with your job is not worth it.

Companies are realizing this too, and the pay difference between those with a degree and those without are almost negligible (depending on the field, of course).

Regardless of what you decide, you need to choose a specialty. Specialization pays more than anything else today. It’s a simple supply and demand problem. If you possess skills or experience that others don’t, you’re harder to replace.

This doesn’t mean you have to jump into a supremely niche field like endothermic radiology, or something. Electricians and plumbers with good reputations are invaluable, and absolutely make bank in certain areas. They also have good job security, because robots aren’t going to be installing toilets and fixing the pipes under your sink for a long time yet.

That’s a vital part of choosing a modern career too: Will it soon be automated away? Fast food workers are, unfortunately, discovering that partially due to the “fight for 15” movement, chains like McDonalds are steadily investing in more and more automated facilities that reduce the amount of workers they need in the first place. Low demand, high supply. McDonalds pays a couple of workers a bit more, and the rest earn nada.

Truck drivers face a similar fate in the future too, depending on how advanced automated vehicles get in the near future. Thanks to advancements in machine learning, certain tech jobs and even artistic jobs are going to be made obsolete soon too.

With software like Dall-E producing incredible artwork from a simple text prompt, concept artists may soon be out of a job.

Unless they specialize. (There’s a fascinating YouTube video by a channel named Jazza where he compares Dall-E versus artists on Fiver. The AI beat out the artists, except the ones that specialized in whatever art style they focused on.).

But back to the world of corporations, we should all probably educate ourselves on exactly how corporations even work in the first place. The lack of any kind of basic finance classes is one of the ultimate failures of the education system. What’s the difference between a stock, a share, a bond, or an option? No idea, but you bet your bottom I know about the effects of French Revolution… on France.

Take for instance management. Why does management always seem to suck? The answer is both kind of obvious and frustrating at the same time. It’s because if they didn’t suck, they would get promoted. And they’ll get promoted again and again until they reach a position they do suck in, where they’ll stagnate.

This is called the Peter Principle, and phenomenons like these are prevalent in just about every aspect of business. So the bits of the corporate world that most of us know and hate are also consequences of the bits we appreciate (meritocracy, promotion, pay raises). It’s a tricky problem to solve, since it depends so much on the human equation.

It all goes to show that there is so much more happening all around us than we often give credit. In our attempt to simplify the world, we lose sight of the truth in favor of narratives that we would prefer to be true. I don’t say this to shill for any particular corporation. There are plenty of businesses and business owners I refuse to buy products from, if I can avoid it.

However, every time I see someone on Reddit or YouTube or FaceBook make a generic “Herr durr capitalism bad Herpa Durr eat the rich”, it really grinds my gears- because often the ones making these statements have no idea what they are actually talking about, and live some of the most cushy lives ever possible in all of human civilization.

That doesn’t mean there can’t be improvements, but it’s no excuse to hate an entire class of people because their lives happen to be even better than yours.