First Draft

Part 2: Brainstorm (Jake Stendel)

I make more money than you. The utmost vile, narcissitically pretentious, ego driven over inflated demeaning yet obsequious statement that one can say to another. Yet, regardless of conversational social norms or sympathetic conventions, it still rings true. My income > your income. But what does that mean? Is that power over someone? Is it freedom over them? Even though it is an objective truth, is it unempathetic to admit to something like that? // insert quotes from span.

Jordan Belfort: self made millionaire, the wolf of wall street, and most importantly, an unempathetic scumbag. How did a happily married 22 year old turn into a hedonistic heartless hothead helming a life of dissipated debauchery? Money, and the unempathetic values that come with its excess. EXPLAIN WHY. /// Reference Washington Post article regarding the negative correlation between wealth and empathy. My ultimate goal here is to correlate wealth and empathy, wealth and happiness, happiness and empathy, and finally use those to try and solidify and prove how money makes people less empathetic. I had read an article one time describing the correlation between money and happiness. It discovered that the happiest people landed in the 70-120 thousand dollar income, country dependent on income tax and other factors of course. Nonetheless, this bracket proves that money is important, as the freedom it gives people. // Now that I know this correlation, it’s important to analyse where it comes from, to uproot the cause at the seams of its conception. 

Crusty yet mushy, sour yet bitter, was alive, yet makes you feel dead inside: Gefilte Fish. The old country was not home to a wide variety of culinary cuisines. It was home to pogroms, rodents and street names with enunciations that require the muscular ability and endurance of a tongue twisting Guinness world record winner. Despite that, it was still home. After making her narrow, harrowing and heroic escape from the grips of systemized German genocide, my great grandmother had found herself in the land of opportunity: PreIsraeli Palestine. Her long and winding road, filled with beautiful, heart wrenching stories ended with her family making the migration to Montreal. It is on this basis of Gefilte fish and fought for freedoms that I come from. // Quote Winston Churchill line from Peaky Blinders: “From a tent to a boat to a house to a mansion.” This quote fits with this part of the article as he is describing the comeuppance of a family, gradually increasing their wealth and status. I will then relate this to my personal story, and how the unconscious pressures of this lust for status and wealth, not on the basis of any conscious values from any family members, but my own anxiety of not giving my family’s life more worth by proving that their hard work did not go unaccounted for in the next generation.  // Compare judaism and upbringing to need to prove yourself. Cross this with how making more money will make you less empathetic. //

Future thinking cautionary tale about worries regarding an empathyless future.