In overhearing the talk in today's financial markets, especially in the
new tech financial markets and the eye-popping figures
touted for company valuations during speculation of their IPOs,
I have a tendency to get distracted from
context
in spite of
who I am.
When I'm distracted from
context,
my relationship with the wealth of newly minted billionaires is one of
separation: I'm separated from it, and I'm separated from
them, the newly minted billionaires. Actually billionaires are
passé these days. A billion dollars is
passé these days. A mere pittance really. Paltry.
Chicken feed. Try twenty billion ... and more
...
I have no issue with others' croesan wealth. Really I
don't. Yes I can think of a few things I would do with an extra billion
or two in loose change in the wallet in my back pocket. But the truth
of the matter is in order to have the wealth (or, to put this in its
true perspective, in order to have their wealth), I'd have
to do exactly what they do. It's more than that actually. It's in order
to have the / their wealth, I'd have to be them. And
that's the truth which sobers me up instantly about other people's
wealth. It isn't a statement about what I think of tech billionaires
personally. I admire what they do. I admire the way they do what they
do. But I don't want to do what they do, and I don't want to be them.
When I get that, I don't envy their wealth, I'm not separated from it,
and I'm not separated from them. It's not significant. It's just a
so what?!
There's something else I've come to see lately: whatever experience I
have of others' enormous wealth is my experience. More
pointedly, whatever experience I have of what enormous wealth
is, is my experience. The moment I betray my experience by making
it over there and with them rather than over
here and with me, is when I forfeit all real wealth (the
actual bank account where the dollars reside is less definitive than it
at first may seem).
Similarly, the way successful popular music artists attract my ear is
really all in the experience I
create.
The experience I
create
is a lot less dependent on what they do than it at first
may seem. It's I who
creates
the experience of their music. In this way, successful popular music
artists at best assist me
creating
my own music experience, rather than doing something from which I'm
separated and in which I don't
participate.
By the way, one of the things about being a popular music artist is it
comes at an enormous cost: the loss of privacy. I had an opportunity to
work with the Jackson
family
at their sprawling compound on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino,
California. Great individuals. A truly great family. One evening in the
kitchen after work,
Michael's
father Joseph, his mother Katherine, brother Jermaine and sister Janet
(sans makeup and muscularly beautiful) and I were sitting
around, eating cold cuts, talking. I was sharing that after working
with them I would be going to Paris to work, followed by a vacation. A
wistful Jermaine said "Do you know how much I wish I could go somewhere
and just relax and be unrecognized?".
"Wow! That's something" I thought to myself. "You have
unimaginable
wealth and
fame,
and everyone loves you. But you can't walk down the street to
the grocery store and show your face in public for fear of being
mobbed ...".
Sir Paul McCartney, a billion and a half dollars of net worth fortune
later, has
famously
and endearingly observed one thing he's ongoingly afraid of is waking
up one day finding himself poor. It doesn't matter that it's a billion
and half dollars later. It doesn't matter that it's fifty years later.
It doesn't matter that it's thirty top ten records later. It makes no
difference that his is arguably the most widely recognized and loved
face and
voice
on
the planet.
The same sense of being poor in Liverpool is still there. The quality
of life afforded by wealth is hopelessly and constantly
undermined by termites from the past boring the foundations of Life now
and for the foreseeable future.
There is no thirty billion dollars outside of
my experience of thirty billion dollars. There are no
forty top ten records outside of my experience of forty
top ten records. There are no academy awards outside
of my experience of the academy awards. And I am the
source
of my experience.
