If I had a trillion dollars

Let’s say you had an allowance of $100 million per day.

To put it in context: $100 million buys a mega-mansion in New York, a fully outfitted private jet, or 400 Bentleys — every day. To spend one trillion dollars at that rate, you’d have to keep going for 27 years and four months. A private jet a day for 27 years.

I can’t fathom that much money. I cannot imagine the freedom or the shackles.

And what would I even do with it? I don’t even need one Bentley, let alone the nearly four million a trillion dollars would afford me. There haven’t even been half a million Bentleys produced, ever.

I heard that the wealthiest person in early 19th century America died from an infection that simple antibiotics would cure today. That’s the real wealth we all share — over time, humanity develops public goods that raise quality of life for everyone.

I love that Barenaked Ladies song, If I Had a Million Dollars. I wonder what I’d do with a trillion. I have no damn clue.

I’d hope that enough would be far less than $100 million a day, because it is now. I like my life. And we’re lucky to have enough and live in a time where entertainment is cheap and people with Down Syndrome aren’t condemned to institutionalization.

Still, I hope that I’d live modestly and use the surplus money to find the next antibiotics, the next sanitation, the next discovery we can’t predict — whatever it is that makes a future generation look back and wonder how we ever lived without it. Something that reduces gun violence, or increases survival rates for terminal disease, or makes energy cheaper and cleaner.

The best use of the money would be throwing it at something I could never predict, and probably never see the fruits of in my lifetime. Which is basically burning it — spending on something with no guaranteed return. I wouldn’t try to “invest” it in anything, because that implies a certain return and is not nearly ambitious enough.

I’d have to waste it, on something that might advance humanity or might be a total flop. All this assuming I could find those people that are creative enough to be worth wasting huge amounts of money on. Which is a weird problem to have.

I just don’t really understand mega wealth, I suppose. Do people that wealthy feel good about it? We aren’t mega wealthy. And yet, I think about money all the time as it is and it’s awful — I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a trillion dollars warping every relationship, every room I walk into. I’ve seen that prism destroy happy families, for far less than a trillion. And yet, that would still be a helluva lot better than having to choose between groceries and medicine.

There’s no winning when money is the thing you’re thinking about. Too little and you worry about it. Too much and it still consumes your thoughts. The songs that capture this paradox best aren’t the ones about getting rich — they’re C.R.E.A.M. and Mo Money Mo Problems. The trap is the same at both ends.

The real key for me has been wanting less. Keeping expenses low enough that what we have feels like enough. And thinking about love and life instead of ruminating about work and money.

Which is how yesterday went. I still had to work most of Saturday — which sucks. But despite that we made it to the dog park and the soccer field. We watched the World Cup and listened to good music while doing chores. I took our three oldest grocery shopping and we stopped for smoothies on the way home, just because it was sunny and refreshing. We ended the night watching A Goofy Movie on the couch because it was Father’s Day.

I want to be able to afford days like that.

Is abundance enough? How much is enough?

Friends,

I’m really excited for both podcast episodes this week. I hope you enjoy them.

In the first, I was remembering a play I was part of in high school. Woody Allen’s God. One of the satirical elements of the play is the Greek chorus in the play calling for Deus ex machina - “God in the machine” - by name to save everyone.

Will the abundance that innovation creates save us all? That’s a question I asked myself directly when writing Character by Choice.

Do we need to care about goodness and character? Would we be okay if we had a world full of abundance? Perhaps obviously, I didn’t think abundance was enough because I kept writing the book.

Link to S2E4 | Abundance.

I’m equally excited about this week’s audio reflection. Years ago, one of my best friends - Jeff - and I were talking about money. He had heard a book or podcast about money in the Bible and shared a question he was gnawing on. How much is enough? Not even theoretically, but what would the actually dollar amount be?

It’s a question that’s stayed with me for years and the main subject of this week’s guided audio reflection.

Link to S2E4.1 | How much is enough?

I hope you have a good week. If you’re in the US - don’t forget to make a plan to vote or complete your absentee ballot.

With love from Detroit,
Neil