The Money Compromise
Jordan Belfort: one of the world’s most coveted assholes, and one of the most revered money makers of the 20th century. There was a time before the money and the fame where he, much like most of us, was a kid, passionate about making something for himself, passionate about making money. Belfort was in his mid 20s, living off of a salary comparable to the burnt onions at the bottom of your soup pot, when he knew that he wanted more. He hopped off one of the grimey New York City buses to Wall Street, determined to create something as big as the stock companies trading around him. As soon as the high pitch bings of the quotrons hit his ears he was hooked. To many Wall Street is a place of greed and excess, but to Belfort, it was his primary school playground. Instantly consumed by this passion for money making, Belfort quickly began his own stock company, one that “pushed stocks onto their unsuspecting clients, which helped inflate the stocks’ prices”. He made millions off of his fraudulent schemes and ruined countless financial lives in the process, eventually earning him the title, and subsequent feature film ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’. Finally, the once innocent stock boy sucame and thrived on the life of voluptuous greed, earning him a 22 month prison sentence. He turned into a man made of asbestos wallets, living by the philosophy that ‘more is never enough’.
It seems that time and time again, the richer you are, the less you care. A research piece that attempted to anatomically dissect the relation between money and empathy determined that “status and monetary incentives appear to be more salient than empathy in guiding behaviors in a social dilemma task” (Osman, LV & Proulx). The ultimate discovery of that paper determines that the ego and abstract power derived from money disable cooperation. However, is that necessarily such a bad thing? While the obvious, and cliché answer would be to say that money isn’t the key to happiness, it isn’t so clear cut.
In a money based world, our species has surpassed its need for empathy, and truth be told, rightfully so. From an objective standpoint, you need money to survive, you don’t need empathy. In fact, in a study surrounding wealth and happiness, it was determined that “higher social class was associated with greater self-oriented feelings of contentment and pride, and with greater amusement” (Piff, Moskowitz). If you can feel happiness and make money, why is there a need for empathy? There seems to be no reason why you shouldn’t just hustle at something that makes you money, don’t think twice about whoever you make that money off of, and bathe in the lavender smell of knowing ‘you made it’ in the world we live in. But much like Jordan Belfort’s case, you might question how long your apathy will hold itself together. I know that quite often I will put the dollar sign before I put the passion. Where does this come from? And how can we 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. My great grandmother had 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 12 brothers and sisters, and a near exponentially increased number of cousins, nieces and nephews. While many families this sprawled out, and copious in size tend to fall on the poorer side of the spectrum, hers did not. They owned a variety of beer factories, giving them enough money to comfortably bathe in the finest of Poland’s riches. My mom told me that she was the only 4 foot 9 polish grandmother who can drink a beer. My great grandmother came from a family that had it all, and had all of it to give her. But they were Jewish. And the 1930s were not kind to Jews. While some may call it fate, luck or a lame apology from their creator, it was love that in turn saved her life. In the early 1930s, my great safta found her Romeo. It wasn’t an easy ride off into the sunset, because much like the play, the Capulet’s were unfond of Juliet’s boyfriend. This led to their great escape; a harrowing bolt to the land of Israel. She went from riches to rags, upgrading from a 5 star suite to a tent and a Torah in the desert. Now while love saved her life, it was not as empathetic to her family’s. While she never saw her family again, I got to: peaceful, in a pile of ash, at the centre of Majdanek.
My great grandmother’s long and winding road, filled with her 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. Me, as well as most people have the innate purpose of carrying out our ancestors tradition, in their honour. And the easiest way of letting these people know that what they fought for has value, is in showing them that you can make something beautiful out of the struggles that they overcame. On the one hand this is a beautiful sentiment, a progression of their work into yours. On the other hand, it can be the root of unconscious pressures for the lust of status and wealth. Not on the basis of any conscious values from any family members, but our own anxiety of not giving our family’s life more worth by proving that their hard work did not go unaccounted for in the next generation. To me, and likely to many others, keeping that anxiety in check by constantly making as much money as you can, empathy be damned, is a necessity. The problem with this thinking is that there is no feasible limit to how much money is enough to feel that fulfillment. Much like Jordan Belfort, more seems to never be enough.
Do you know that weird tingly giddy feeling you sometimes get? When the mitochondria powered elevators in your gut don’t remember which way is up, and just start butterflying about. It’s the feeling when you know that someone has nothing to give you, but still manages to give you something. Now that’s beauty. To some it’s the final dimes of a paycheck being spent on your favourite bag of chips. To Karen Weese, an author for the Washington Post, it’s her friend who tipped 5$ at a Denny’s even though she “worked as a caregiver and was raising two kids on less than $19,000 a year.” How can someone who is in an inescapable hustle for a minimum living still be generous? Weese dictates that it’s empathy by proximity. Humans have the innate ability to feel for themselves, and the more they see themselves in others, the more empathetic to those they become. The issue arises as we climb closer to the ‘One Percenters’ of the tax bracket. While a poorer person looks around and sees crowded markets, overflowing with similar people, a rich person may look around to see vast, empty and lonely savannahs. That’s why “John Paulson gave $400 million last year to Harvard University, his alma mater, and not to, say, Habitat for Humanity.” It seems as if the thicker the wallet, the thicker its asbestos walls become.
How can we change this? A large problem that I have noticed with the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality is that people become passionate about making money more than they are passionate about doing something interesting that makes money. When someone values the incentive of cash as their primary objective, they rarely prove to be successful at anything else. Take Jordan Belfort as an example: his need to make money was his prime objective, and landed him coping with drug withdrawal from a prison cell. Unempathetic monetary ambition is never associated with long-term, sustainable success.
Weese recalls her story of her friend making almost no money, but who still cares about someone else in the same boat as her. Anthony Davis, the Director of Communications for Solomon Schechter Academy notes that “you have to be able to practice what you preach. So, if you have a massive ego and you’re working very hard to justify that, as long as there is no sense of disrespect”, eventually you will find empathy. Contrarily, he too knows that “if you have an ego and you’re selfish, it’s never going to work out. Or karma will be a bitch.”
It seems that the more passionate you are, the more compassionate you act. But as pretty as it sounds, you can’t live solely by doing what you love. You need money. That’s the money compromise. When you love something you learn to compromise with it. Same as a relationship. You have to change your outlook from money being the goal of the work, to money simply being a symptom of it. You have to take what you’re passionate about and turn it into something that can pay rent. That may mean compromise, but what it really means is dedication. It means that the want to be Quentin Tarantino finds purpose creating commercial videos; that the want to be travel novelist starts out by hustling for freelance jobs. What it does not mean is loss of passion, or loss of love. It’s not about being a cold-hearted capitalist soaked in the guilt of a need to prove yourself to your ancestors by attaching a dollar figure to your face, nor is it about wanting to please everyone you work with. The same way you pay for a product you want, people will pay for a product they want.
How can you be the product they want? It’s about making everything you do better than the previous thing you did. By setting the bar higher, inspiring self-confidence in doing something you bonafidely care about, and being passionate about what you do, you will make money, AND be empathetic.
Davis says that being empathetic about your passion is as simple as “knowing that what you do is good, but knowing that it can be better, and knowing that you can make it better”. Don’t take it from just him, take it from Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey. In his 2014 Best Actor acceptance speech, he tells his audience that he is his own hero. Not him today, but him in a perpetually increasing twenty years from today. He acknowledges that “I’m never gonna be my hero […] that’s just fine with me, that keeps me with someone to keep on chasing”. In this almost reverse twisted Belfort-esque style, McConaughey turns the “more is never enough” philosophy into something beautiful: a system where the person who can make money becomes more valuable than the money that person makes. Chasing your future self by following the vocation of your passion, you may not make the most money the fastest, but you will make the best money the longest.
End Line: Something something “and to that I say alright alright alright.” (Matthew McConaughey)
Works Cited:
Oscars. “Matthew McConaughey winning best actor” YouTube, 11 March 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD2cVhC-63I
Piff, Paul K., and Jake P. Moskowitz. “Wealth, Poverty, and Happiness: Social Class Is Differentially Associated with Positive Emotions.” Emotion, vol. 18, no. 6, Sept. 2018, pp. 902–905. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/emo0000387.supp (Supplemental).
Osman, Magda, et al. “Can Empathy Promote Cooperation When Status and Money Matter?” Basic & Applied Social Psychology, vol. 40, no. 4, July 2018, pp. 201–218. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/01973533.2018.1463225.
Davis, Anthony. Phone Interview. 29, March 2020.
“Jordan Belfort.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 16 Apr. 2019, http://www.biography.com/business-figure/jordan-belfort.Weese, Karen. “How Can You Tell If Someone Is Kind? Ask How Rich They Are.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 21 Oct. 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/21/how-can-you-tell-if-someone-is-kind-ask-how-rich-they-are/.
Jake Stendel Non Fiction Writing 