- Drew Magary writes directly from his guts for Deadspin. I love non-fiction writing that speaks so bluntly about the self:
“Because you see, there are two worlds out there. There’s your world, which is all about you and the people you know and everything else that’s going on in your life. And then there’s the actual world, which doesn’t give two shits about your problems and is ALWAYS GOING ON. Even when you think there’s nothing happening out there in the rest of the world, like on a slow news day, there are trillions of things happening—people being born and people dying and people fucking. It doesn’t stop just because you had a bad day. It doesn’t even know you had a bad day. You are barely a hair on its balls, and that’s a good thing. Because it’s always there for you when you need it. I needed it that night because I needed a distraction from all the fear and worrying. I needed to know that there was someplace else for me to go for a second to get away from myself, to pull myself out of that blackness and be part of something that was still alive, still fucking massive.“
- The Immortal, life support machines keeping each other alive.
- Though I do appreciate Jaime Dimon going on Meet The Press and admitting that he and his company made mistakes, I don’t appreciate that he acted like $2 billion vanishing into thin air is not a big deal. It was never my money, of course. But $2 billion dollars could do a whole lot of good in the world. I’ve heard investors say, “well, the entire investment was estimated around $100 billion, so 2% out of that is not a very big loss”. This is the attitude that people don’t like, this is precisely it. This idea that they play in the sandbox with millions more toys than the rest of us, yet they act like our sandboxes are one in the same. No one can relate to it. No one sees these guys as regular people. But, I suppose this is just the nature of capitalism. No matter how much bigger and better toys you have in your sandbox, I’m supposed to relate to you, cause it’s all for the greater good.
- Relatedly, Does Money Really Motivate People?
“While the behavioural sciences are of limited help on the ethics involved, the claim that multi-million pound pay packages boost performance is a separate and testable assertion. Performance-related pay has become so deeply ingrained that few question it. Most of us assume that offering people bigger financial rewards means people try harder. However a growing body of research in the fields of psychology and economics, and more recently neuroscience, paints a more complex picture of the relationship between money, motivation and performance.”
-Sonny
