the lights are on, but you're not home

-------------- [continuing:  "For the Love of Money" -- written by Sam Polk, Jan. 18, 2014 NYTimes] --------------- There were plenty of injustices out there -- rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis.  Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them.  During the market crash in 2008, I'd made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies.

As the world crumbled, I profited.





I'd seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most -- people who didn't have a million dollars in the bank -- I'd made money off it.  I don't like who you've become, my girlfriend had said years earlier.  She was right then, and she was still right.  Only now, I didn't like who I'd become either.


Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention.


Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone.


Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country.  Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class.





Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation -- including an $8.5 million bonus -- as the McDonald's C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages.


Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.


Despite my realization, it was incredibly difficult to leave.  I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses.


More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I'd feel like an idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important.


What made it harder was that people thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving.  In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I demanded $8 million instead of $3.6 million.  My bosses said they'd raise my bonus if I agreed to stay several more years.  Instead, I walked away. ...


In the three years since I left, I've married, spoken in jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, taught a writing class to girls in the foster system, and started a nonprofit called Groceryships....I am much happier.  I feel as if I'm making a real contribution.


And as time passes, the distortion lessens.  I see Wall Street's mantra -- "We're smarter and work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money" -- for what it is:  the rationalization of addicts.





From a distance I can see what I couldn't see then -- that Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.




I was lucky.  My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction.  The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self to walk away.


{from the Sam Polk article, "For The Love of Money"}


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