The driving force behind wealth inequality no one will ever tell you about
Posted: Tue May 21, 2024 1:19 pm
Trading cryptocurrency and stocks, technology, winning the lottery, starting a new business, pretty much everything profitable, and yes - even becoming a cult figure on social media are all based around the same principal -- You only succeed if you invest both an epic amount of time and money. We now live in a world where extremely wealthy individuals start charities just for the tax write-offs, and to pay salaries to their friends, more than the ideal that they want to actually change the world for the better... For independent humans, creating success seems to be more and more difficult as technology changes constantly. Every year as new platforms emerge and falter, the requirements, success tips, and rules change often leading many of us confused and flustered in terms of carving out our niche and path to comfortable growth...
This is not meant to be a pessimistic rant, it's a practical one.
The driving force behind growing wealth inequality no one will ever tell you about historically is that most wealthy people throughout the history of this world often started out being wealthy. The few often faced very little risk in their paths to success, and even though they may generate wild stories about how they were "self made" and hard working, they often had the ability to bounce back from failure because they had fame, finances, and popularity throughout their lives as a safety net for their success. Independent humans struggle and suffer to become financially independent and successful (now more than ever) in silence and often fail and fade away quietly in futility in this increasingly software-driven world simply because (more often than not) they were not born into wealth.
In the modern algorithmically and analytically driven world, popularity and reach can literally be bought, yet such a high value is placed upon those numbers in terms of value, money becomes the key to being successful. It's rather crazy to say that "You have to spend money to make money" in the same breath as saying that "Equality, fairness, and opportunity exist fairly" for everyone to be economically and upwardly mobile.
Sure, there are lots of people that appear to be naturally successful through natural means in life -- People that commit crimes and then sometimes get away with it but more often they get caught and face jail time. Some individuals create the illusion that they are popular and then profit from doing so, but face challenges in upholding the image. Some individuals are born with highly favorable looks and personality or even luck and intelligence, but those characteristics don't reinforce equality as well, and looks can be fleeting, even some win the actual lottery out of nowhere, and manage to turn it into even more roses (We all wish we could manage that of course). I'm not referring to those prior categories of acquired wealth though, I'm referring to people that started out with far more funding than the common human from day 1 -- People that sponsor stadiums, buy private helicopters and jets, own pet tigers, those that live in houses costing over 17 million dollars, and even people that turn once useful social apps into a wasteland of bot-driven political content and ads to promote their space tour service for aging celebrities... Yeah, That "far-over-the-top-for one-human-being" kind of wealth.
I personally learned over many years and setbacks to live like a fisherman in finding my own personal success. I wasn't born rich, but did have the advantages of school and the best life my family could afford... I also spent many nights understanding how devastating emotionally and financially failure is too. By working like a fisherman on my ideas and goals, not investing fully into any one category, just casting my reel in different spots and seeing if a business idea "bites" like a fish takes bait on a hook, I learned a lot about exactly how much wealth I'd need in life, and how much was enough. If success bites for me after launching a new business idea, I fish in that area more, hoping that I will continue find enough success, and if there are no more bites, I move to a different area, and possibly a whole different lake or stream. That's the way I learned how to lower the risk and instance of failure. Look at me now! still on the path to working for the rest of my life! As usual...
So far, I've mostly found my best success in embracing all the things I don't enjoy (like paperwork and making social media posts) doing in order to fund the things I do enjoy (like making music and chillin' on the beach). From my experience, most people (those not born into wealth & priviledge) don't earn great money unless they dive into doing things they don't enjoy...
I think it's important to be practical about it all, I had to learn that the hard way from even losing everything I had a points in life too.
If you can imagine the classic story of The Tortoise and The Hare and picture both of them cued at the starting line, with the tortoise taking a baseball bat to all four of the rabbit's legs and breaking them rather violently just prior to the start -- it's not to hard to imagine who would win the race... Our current online success economy operates on the same principals in many ways. Our history is well documented as a planet, so I won't place emphasis on how that affects our current reality now, but there have been countless incidents of devastating genocide, scams, slavery, indentured work, civil oppressions, revolutions, theft, wars and conflicts (etc.) that have led us to a point where some players in this game of life took great advantage and found massive wealth out of the misfortune of others at past pain points.
Without simply glossing over the fact that many negatively derived wealth gains have gone unchecked over years prior, here we are now... If you can trace relationships and blood lines, Many of the wealthiest people in the world right now are wealth benefactors (Nepo Babies, or whatever you want to call it) from eras past, and many of them completely dominate, control, and influence the most prominent and profitable media platforms, companies, and marketing groups we know. Citing how celebrity and wealth culture dominates our world right now, it's not easy for many to reconcile that somehow many benefactors from that illustrious past continually manage to stay in wealth, public influence, and power (even when their ideas regularly remain unprofitable and often fail) because their wealth is vast and massive, and constantly growing over time on interest alone.
We live in a world based on nepotism and inheritance of wealth now more than ever... When Steve Jobs (One of the founders of Apple) passed away, he left an enormous amount of wealth to heirs that created many undisclosed and unidentified billionaires... heck, the man had a yacht built for $120 million dollars... You can't really manage to do that unless you have a sizeable vault of quarters hidden in your secret bunker of your 4th vacation house (so I've heard). These people tend to be the blueprint of unobtainable success that people will often speak about as if it can be achieved, just like people talk about our potential to win the lottery, which I don't know about you, but hasn't happened for me yet at all. These undisclosed/secretive benefactors of wealth from generations prior are coincidentally a lot of the very same people running social media platforms, putting out albums as musicians, acting in television and movie roles, working as CEOs at telecom companies, and even starting restaurant franchises that we support. Now that social media has firmly embedded i's culture into our society, the quest for popularity among the wealthy is a highly coveted award as well -- Social media being initially developed to create opportunity for normal people connecting with new and current friends somehow devolved into becoming a celebrity influencer and flaunting symbols of wealth to admirers (or followers) in many ways. The popularity aspect of social media of course has attracted major brands and celebrities by nature, which often completely overshadows and drowns out participation in it by "normal" individuals now... Some would even say that social media no longer cares about anything below celebrity culture, and in many ways I concur with that assessment.
When you look at declining business opportunity and upward financial mobility in the world, you've kind of got to ask the unanswered question why it seems like we're increasingly competing for jobs, opportunities, and business with people who are already born wealthy? the scary answer leads back to the conclusion that may well be that the very same categories of wealthy people end up not sharing the wealth that allows this ecosystem to work, and pretty much letting nepotism capture both employer and employee roles at the top more often than they'd like to admit. Celebrity CEOs often get paid more than their entire payroll in some of the most profitable companies out there right now, and it's devastating to consider as most employees struggle just to find very expensive health care plans that barely cover basic issues one and their family might encounter health-wise without still going bankrupt. The first question that comes to mind for me is why people who obtain so much wealth still feel the need to capture more and more? Why do we have billionaires running for presidency, or CEOs that have earned millions (more than enough to retire) leading companies for decades? Is there truly an elite class of people that are meant to lead things based on their blood lines? Or, in underlying reality, is it just behind-the-scenes collusion, schemes, selfishness, and nepotism holding certain people at the core of societal wealth by design?
There are countless videos of wealthy and successful people online (especially on social media) encouraging us to "Follow our Dreams"... But no one will ever tell you that "Following Your Dreams" and being able to obtain them (more often than not) is directly linked to starting out with (or your ability to obtain) proper funding. There are indeed stories of individuals rising up out of poverty and normalcy organically to become wealthy, but in a sea of over 8 billion people worldwide, even 1 million people based on that success story would be unimpressive in a world where the majority struggles and suffers -- The real truth is that our ability to be financially successful from scratch is shrinking, no matter how solid our ideas and dreams are. In many ways, there is a huge problem now in pursuing our dreams, heck, most people are struggling to just survive, and that's a very dangerous place for all of us to be from a civil revolution-wise perspective.
Just getting a college education now, one can easily generate more debt than the median mortgage for buying a house before making the first penny from their career. As we invest in our dreams (most of us in small chunks at a time) the barriers to marketing our work and making a name for ourselves have become more and more reliant on technology, which is controlled and moderated by far more wealthy interests than us... Many of us as individuals now are forced to compete with major brands and companies for attention, and those companies and brands have a lot more money and resources than we do -- By nature, our ability to compete is pretty much a David and Goliath scenario. There also seems to be a huge economy of scams and schemes that take advantage of our ability to dream big on this already skewed business playing field as well.
As another example -- if you are born a millionaire, and decide to buy 1 million lottery tickets (with different combinations of numbers on them of course) , your odds of winning are astronomically higher than people who can only afford to buy one $10 ticket... It's no surprise (citing that) how most people in this world are finding it increasingly hard to just function in this complicated business world now, as there is an increasing pool of people that generate more and more money simply by leveraging inconsequential parts of their obscene collections of money on investments while not spending any of it in economies driven by independent commoners like us. Class-ism also plays greatly into image, and a lot of opportunity is based on maintaining the right image. It has become more and more difficult for independent business to thrive without deep budgets for staff and marketing alone, much less the costs of creating and maintaining products and services... Just for context, if you can buy Twitter for $44 billion dollars, yet still remain among the wealthiest people in the world (at 206.2 billion in net worth) you might be exactly the type of personality that comes to mind when people mention wealth inequality and/or being born into wealth and opportunity.
When I speak to people about social realities like this in public settings, I challenge people to consider cultural and social perspectives other than the ones they were raised within, and to have them talk about ways they can help others outside of their normal cultural circles, and majority of the time, many rarely think outside of their cultural box. It's baffling how many people walk around thinking that their individually cultivated perspective is fair to impose on the rest of the world. Wealth inequality is also driven by a lack of limited perspectives, or at least by misunderstanding perspectives of others. I think we each can find individual success, while coexisting better if we work hard to keep our perspectives more fluid, not in terms of our own personal convictions, but in terms of understanding others, in solving problems, and in building bridges for effective communication.
I think many troublesome economic and social problems, especially wealth inequality, racism, religion, and cultural wars are often driven, promoted, and amplified by wealthy individuals seeking purpose, status, more money, popularity, and validity in many cases, while also being driven by total blindness and willful ignorance to the other perspectives held by other human beings that are affected by their words, economic weight, and actions. Technology, and the globalist control and influence it can represent in real life can rapidly amplify negative forms of elitism, personal bias, and inequality, and it's long overdue for regulation to reign in the financial and celebrity bias that is regularly showing regularly on platforms that make billions of dollars.
In discussing the future, wealth inequality continues to be the number one threat to the world's societal stability, and a hard-driving force behind architecting social instability. If we don't begin to change the ways that we feed this social instability, and change the way we're complacent (and even admiring of it) it will only grow worse, as it is guaranteed to only create more undisclosed beneficiaries that create even more terribly fake "success tip" videos and social apps that work to fool you into thinking they help you to succeed.
Moe @RUFFANDTUFF
Our Sound Is Unlike Anything Else. We Strive To Be Original.
We Work With and Publish Unique Artists That Go Against the Grain.
FOLLOW US ON:
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PNp925Bg8dCTiIzxY4NVc
https://open.spotify.com/artist/213dCOTf6hXx3Lqc5wE6U5
META THREADS @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TWITTER @RUFFANDTUFF
IG @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TIKTOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
YOUTUBE @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
FACEBOOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
BUSINESS: RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS@GMAIL.COM
This is not meant to be a pessimistic rant, it's a practical one.
The driving force behind growing wealth inequality no one will ever tell you about historically is that most wealthy people throughout the history of this world often started out being wealthy. The few often faced very little risk in their paths to success, and even though they may generate wild stories about how they were "self made" and hard working, they often had the ability to bounce back from failure because they had fame, finances, and popularity throughout their lives as a safety net for their success. Independent humans struggle and suffer to become financially independent and successful (now more than ever) in silence and often fail and fade away quietly in futility in this increasingly software-driven world simply because (more often than not) they were not born into wealth.
In the modern algorithmically and analytically driven world, popularity and reach can literally be bought, yet such a high value is placed upon those numbers in terms of value, money becomes the key to being successful. It's rather crazy to say that "You have to spend money to make money" in the same breath as saying that "Equality, fairness, and opportunity exist fairly" for everyone to be economically and upwardly mobile.
Sure, there are lots of people that appear to be naturally successful through natural means in life -- People that commit crimes and then sometimes get away with it but more often they get caught and face jail time. Some individuals create the illusion that they are popular and then profit from doing so, but face challenges in upholding the image. Some individuals are born with highly favorable looks and personality or even luck and intelligence, but those characteristics don't reinforce equality as well, and looks can be fleeting, even some win the actual lottery out of nowhere, and manage to turn it into even more roses (We all wish we could manage that of course). I'm not referring to those prior categories of acquired wealth though, I'm referring to people that started out with far more funding than the common human from day 1 -- People that sponsor stadiums, buy private helicopters and jets, own pet tigers, those that live in houses costing over 17 million dollars, and even people that turn once useful social apps into a wasteland of bot-driven political content and ads to promote their space tour service for aging celebrities... Yeah, That "far-over-the-top-for one-human-being" kind of wealth.
I personally learned over many years and setbacks to live like a fisherman in finding my own personal success. I wasn't born rich, but did have the advantages of school and the best life my family could afford... I also spent many nights understanding how devastating emotionally and financially failure is too. By working like a fisherman on my ideas and goals, not investing fully into any one category, just casting my reel in different spots and seeing if a business idea "bites" like a fish takes bait on a hook, I learned a lot about exactly how much wealth I'd need in life, and how much was enough. If success bites for me after launching a new business idea, I fish in that area more, hoping that I will continue find enough success, and if there are no more bites, I move to a different area, and possibly a whole different lake or stream. That's the way I learned how to lower the risk and instance of failure. Look at me now! still on the path to working for the rest of my life! As usual...
So far, I've mostly found my best success in embracing all the things I don't enjoy (like paperwork and making social media posts) doing in order to fund the things I do enjoy (like making music and chillin' on the beach). From my experience, most people (those not born into wealth & priviledge) don't earn great money unless they dive into doing things they don't enjoy...
I think it's important to be practical about it all, I had to learn that the hard way from even losing everything I had a points in life too.
If you can imagine the classic story of The Tortoise and The Hare and picture both of them cued at the starting line, with the tortoise taking a baseball bat to all four of the rabbit's legs and breaking them rather violently just prior to the start -- it's not to hard to imagine who would win the race... Our current online success economy operates on the same principals in many ways. Our history is well documented as a planet, so I won't place emphasis on how that affects our current reality now, but there have been countless incidents of devastating genocide, scams, slavery, indentured work, civil oppressions, revolutions, theft, wars and conflicts (etc.) that have led us to a point where some players in this game of life took great advantage and found massive wealth out of the misfortune of others at past pain points.
Without simply glossing over the fact that many negatively derived wealth gains have gone unchecked over years prior, here we are now... If you can trace relationships and blood lines, Many of the wealthiest people in the world right now are wealth benefactors (Nepo Babies, or whatever you want to call it) from eras past, and many of them completely dominate, control, and influence the most prominent and profitable media platforms, companies, and marketing groups we know. Citing how celebrity and wealth culture dominates our world right now, it's not easy for many to reconcile that somehow many benefactors from that illustrious past continually manage to stay in wealth, public influence, and power (even when their ideas regularly remain unprofitable and often fail) because their wealth is vast and massive, and constantly growing over time on interest alone.
We live in a world based on nepotism and inheritance of wealth now more than ever... When Steve Jobs (One of the founders of Apple) passed away, he left an enormous amount of wealth to heirs that created many undisclosed and unidentified billionaires... heck, the man had a yacht built for $120 million dollars... You can't really manage to do that unless you have a sizeable vault of quarters hidden in your secret bunker of your 4th vacation house (so I've heard). These people tend to be the blueprint of unobtainable success that people will often speak about as if it can be achieved, just like people talk about our potential to win the lottery, which I don't know about you, but hasn't happened for me yet at all. These undisclosed/secretive benefactors of wealth from generations prior are coincidentally a lot of the very same people running social media platforms, putting out albums as musicians, acting in television and movie roles, working as CEOs at telecom companies, and even starting restaurant franchises that we support. Now that social media has firmly embedded i's culture into our society, the quest for popularity among the wealthy is a highly coveted award as well -- Social media being initially developed to create opportunity for normal people connecting with new and current friends somehow devolved into becoming a celebrity influencer and flaunting symbols of wealth to admirers (or followers) in many ways. The popularity aspect of social media of course has attracted major brands and celebrities by nature, which often completely overshadows and drowns out participation in it by "normal" individuals now... Some would even say that social media no longer cares about anything below celebrity culture, and in many ways I concur with that assessment.
When you look at declining business opportunity and upward financial mobility in the world, you've kind of got to ask the unanswered question why it seems like we're increasingly competing for jobs, opportunities, and business with people who are already born wealthy? the scary answer leads back to the conclusion that may well be that the very same categories of wealthy people end up not sharing the wealth that allows this ecosystem to work, and pretty much letting nepotism capture both employer and employee roles at the top more often than they'd like to admit. Celebrity CEOs often get paid more than their entire payroll in some of the most profitable companies out there right now, and it's devastating to consider as most employees struggle just to find very expensive health care plans that barely cover basic issues one and their family might encounter health-wise without still going bankrupt. The first question that comes to mind for me is why people who obtain so much wealth still feel the need to capture more and more? Why do we have billionaires running for presidency, or CEOs that have earned millions (more than enough to retire) leading companies for decades? Is there truly an elite class of people that are meant to lead things based on their blood lines? Or, in underlying reality, is it just behind-the-scenes collusion, schemes, selfishness, and nepotism holding certain people at the core of societal wealth by design?
There are countless videos of wealthy and successful people online (especially on social media) encouraging us to "Follow our Dreams"... But no one will ever tell you that "Following Your Dreams" and being able to obtain them (more often than not) is directly linked to starting out with (or your ability to obtain) proper funding. There are indeed stories of individuals rising up out of poverty and normalcy organically to become wealthy, but in a sea of over 8 billion people worldwide, even 1 million people based on that success story would be unimpressive in a world where the majority struggles and suffers -- The real truth is that our ability to be financially successful from scratch is shrinking, no matter how solid our ideas and dreams are. In many ways, there is a huge problem now in pursuing our dreams, heck, most people are struggling to just survive, and that's a very dangerous place for all of us to be from a civil revolution-wise perspective.
Just getting a college education now, one can easily generate more debt than the median mortgage for buying a house before making the first penny from their career. As we invest in our dreams (most of us in small chunks at a time) the barriers to marketing our work and making a name for ourselves have become more and more reliant on technology, which is controlled and moderated by far more wealthy interests than us... Many of us as individuals now are forced to compete with major brands and companies for attention, and those companies and brands have a lot more money and resources than we do -- By nature, our ability to compete is pretty much a David and Goliath scenario. There also seems to be a huge economy of scams and schemes that take advantage of our ability to dream big on this already skewed business playing field as well.
As another example -- if you are born a millionaire, and decide to buy 1 million lottery tickets (with different combinations of numbers on them of course) , your odds of winning are astronomically higher than people who can only afford to buy one $10 ticket... It's no surprise (citing that) how most people in this world are finding it increasingly hard to just function in this complicated business world now, as there is an increasing pool of people that generate more and more money simply by leveraging inconsequential parts of their obscene collections of money on investments while not spending any of it in economies driven by independent commoners like us. Class-ism also plays greatly into image, and a lot of opportunity is based on maintaining the right image. It has become more and more difficult for independent business to thrive without deep budgets for staff and marketing alone, much less the costs of creating and maintaining products and services... Just for context, if you can buy Twitter for $44 billion dollars, yet still remain among the wealthiest people in the world (at 206.2 billion in net worth) you might be exactly the type of personality that comes to mind when people mention wealth inequality and/or being born into wealth and opportunity.
When I speak to people about social realities like this in public settings, I challenge people to consider cultural and social perspectives other than the ones they were raised within, and to have them talk about ways they can help others outside of their normal cultural circles, and majority of the time, many rarely think outside of their cultural box. It's baffling how many people walk around thinking that their individually cultivated perspective is fair to impose on the rest of the world. Wealth inequality is also driven by a lack of limited perspectives, or at least by misunderstanding perspectives of others. I think we each can find individual success, while coexisting better if we work hard to keep our perspectives more fluid, not in terms of our own personal convictions, but in terms of understanding others, in solving problems, and in building bridges for effective communication.
I think many troublesome economic and social problems, especially wealth inequality, racism, religion, and cultural wars are often driven, promoted, and amplified by wealthy individuals seeking purpose, status, more money, popularity, and validity in many cases, while also being driven by total blindness and willful ignorance to the other perspectives held by other human beings that are affected by their words, economic weight, and actions. Technology, and the globalist control and influence it can represent in real life can rapidly amplify negative forms of elitism, personal bias, and inequality, and it's long overdue for regulation to reign in the financial and celebrity bias that is regularly showing regularly on platforms that make billions of dollars.
In discussing the future, wealth inequality continues to be the number one threat to the world's societal stability, and a hard-driving force behind architecting social instability. If we don't begin to change the ways that we feed this social instability, and change the way we're complacent (and even admiring of it) it will only grow worse, as it is guaranteed to only create more undisclosed beneficiaries that create even more terribly fake "success tip" videos and social apps that work to fool you into thinking they help you to succeed.
Moe @RUFFANDTUFF
Our Sound Is Unlike Anything Else. We Strive To Be Original.
We Work With and Publish Unique Artists That Go Against the Grain.
FOLLOW US ON:
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PNp925Bg8dCTiIzxY4NVc
https://open.spotify.com/artist/213dCOTf6hXx3Lqc5wE6U5
META THREADS @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TWITTER @RUFFANDTUFF
IG @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TIKTOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
YOUTUBE @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
FACEBOOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
BUSINESS: RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS@GMAIL.COM