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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Can you really be happy living alone in a castle knowing people out there can't afford to pay rent?
Get over yourself man, just let people be happy. It's okay to have nice things, you don't have to feel guilty about it unless you did something wrong to get it.
Well some would argue that accumulating this much wealth is the wrongdoing in this story.
With her wealth she easily belongs to the top 0.1 % wealthiest people in the us. I think this amount of wealth surpassed the "It's okay to have nice things" phase and quickly got to the "You should take some responsibility with your inexplicable wealth!"
She can afford to live in a castle, and she wants to live in a castle. There's no need to say she has to feel guilty because other people can't live in a castle. Unless you're the unluckiest person alive, there's always going to be people who aren't as fortunate than you. In her case it's easy to point a finger because it's a castle, but honestly where's the cutoff? Should she feel guilty if she had instead chosen to live in a less expensive but still large and nice house? What about if she lived in a modest one? She still has a house and those other people still don't. Should she feel guilty because she can afford fine dining while many people can't afford to eat? What if she chose to eat only fast food? There's still other people that can't afford to eat regardless of the quality of food she chooses.
I'm not going to pretend I know anything about how she uses her money outside of what's presented in this meme. She absolutely has the kind of wealth where it would be morally responsible of her to use some of it to help others less fortunate. Maybe she does that already, maybe not. I don't know.
If she doesn't then yeah, maybe there would be a reason for her to feel guilty; but even then I wouldn't say she for sure should. But for the sake of argument let's say she does regularly contribute to charities. Should she still feel guilty about living in a castle? She's already contributing, but she could contribute more if she didn't live in a castle. But that begs the question, how much should she have to contribute? If she still has enough money left over to live in luxury should she feel guilty? I'd argue not.
As an aside, yes, she has contributed frequently to charities. She just doesn't particularly flaunt her contributions.
Hey thanks for engaging in this discussion!
I think you have a point asking "Where to draw the line?" Obviously I don't have a simple answer to this question because it would just be an arbitrary line to draw. Also this matter can't be discussed with Enyas wealth in mind alone but with wealth in general.
I think to answer this question it would be necessary to know who (as in "the richest 0.x % ) would have to abandon how much of their wealth to reach a certain goal for the poorest x % and as long as we can agree that the benefit outweighs the cost (maybe even in a significant manner to "allow" a certain amount of inequality) it is save to draw the line there.
I'm speculating now, but maybe we would come to the conclusion that it would only take a little amount of wealth of the richest few people to lift the poorest of the poorest out of severe hunger. I think we could agree that this would be very reasonable because the benefit would greatly outweigh the cost. Maybe even providing basic housing to all people who need it would cost only a neglectable number of people some of their huge wealth. This could also be a possible line then.
So as you see I'd try to draw a line using some utilitarianistic criteria.
You don't get to live in a 100 million dollars castle while others struggle to pay rent just by doing good things. The music industry is just as rigged as hollywood. Thanks to majors and all these salesmen who make millions there's plenty of real and skilled musicians who don't get half of the recognition they deserve. It's these greedy souls that should get over themself and just let people be happy: once you are a millionare you don't really have to keep squeezing money out of the industry with your albums just so that you can buy a whole fucking castle for yourself...
I think the problem here is: When you realize that what you're doing has value to others you won't suddenly start doing it for free even if you can easily afford doing so. There may be exceptions from this like doing charity concerts as a musician, doing pro bono cases as a lawyer or helping your friend renovate their flat as a house painter and decorator. But in general I am pretty sure you won't go from taking money to doing your craft for free.
You are literally typing this in a platform developed for free
You do know that the two main devs are working full time on Lemmy and are getting paid to do so by the NLnet foundation?
The software developers equivalent of my argument above would be a developers who's getting paid for their dayjob but still does some work for an open source project in their free time.
It's not about never doing anything for free but about stopping getting paid at all.