Wealth as a symbol of Power

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Living in modern society is indeed very complex and among the daily difficulties we do find in life is our business/works or careers, where we spend like 8-10 hours a day working stressfully not to mention the upcoming following problem, just so that we can get enough money to eat, to pay our electrical bills, expenditures, and tiny budget for entertainment.

We literally waste like 1/3 of our daily life or 1/2 of our waking hours working just so that we can survive, some of us even forget about how life is not all about work, there are other aspect of life we forget along the way. Things like enjoying simplicity in life, e.g a cup of tea in the evening, the joy of reading books, watering plants or gardening, or even socialize with people.

Almost feel like we exchange our potential essence of life just to get basic needs to survive like foods and stuff, not everyone be like this, some people also find a way to live with minimum amount of work yet manage to gain more than enough money to live.. some even gain too much compared to the others and yes.. these stark difference between lifestyle among people can sometimes give birth to jealousy and perhaps sparks the desire to achieve the same "easy" way of living knowing how hard life can be.

The contrast difference of lifestyle as mentioned above and the hardship of getting enough money to sustain daily live both contribute to the creation of symbol towards material wealth in a world of materialism where everything from your effort and goods around you can be capitalized or translated into money or assets.

This materialistic world make life seem like a game of value with wealth as the currency, people no longer care about traditional value as everything else can be translated into money, in a sense money has become the currency of any fundamental value and with money individual can achieve their dreamy utopian life in expense of hard-work.

Not only that wealth is power because it has the capacity to manipulate and achieve things you want but also the realization that accumulating wealth is not an easy matter shown by the rising glamourization of the so-called Hustle culture.

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Wealth is power, yes.. it is what it seems like to be having a abundance of wealth, you don't have to worry about having to live from paycheck to paycheck and the risk of not being able to pay the living costs, you can instead just go to a mall and grab anything you want and just pay like it's nothing, or..you can sit on fancy restaurant and being treated like a boss and not having to worry because you know you have the purchasing power for the price you will need to pay and nothing bad will happen to you like it's nothing really...

Along the way, it does strike me that wealth is the currency for power perception, and there are reasonable potential reason why it is the way it is besides the stated reason above.

I once asked what is in within our societal system allowing the creation of such "powerful" perception attributed to wealth? Our society does work not in a equality-friendly way, in many economic system there are tendencies toward Pareto Distribution of wealth among people which may be the consequences of many factors and these inequality phenomena i believe can be traced back to its primordial signature from Individual perspective society is a huge part of civilization system where ever since we were born we seem to be already in this assembly line of life stages leading all the way to death. We grow up being introduced to the real world surroundings, and then at some point we started to go to school learning how to socialize further and then maybe go to college after several years and after graduation we work and then what? get married, having kids, retire and die.. *depressing way of looking at life right? ouch..* but in between this cycle of life our well-being in the future hugely determined by our early stages of life including our family background

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So we see in many case, some of us were born in economically poor family, some were lucky to be born in generational wealthy family this differences of family economic ability lead to many changes in the children's life

e.g poor education, hygiene & health thus affecting the child's career/business opportunity, income potential, social networking potential, problem solving ability which further impacting a lot capability to create or contribute to business, resulting in inequality of opportunity... those are necessary factors for success but people may get their "start" at different state.

This is a problem for those who are unfortunately facing such disadvantage

one reason is..

because our society seem to work like a giant web of network, the propagation rate of information transfer initiate the societal dynamics/evolution, e.g if people know that there a change in within the costumer trend where people start to shopping via online then it is likely that many business owner will shift their business to follow the trend by selling online finally the overall society social interaction will also follow up shifting to digital interaction as well. If people know that there would be a hyper-inflation next year people may anticipate by buying common public goods, and people may start allocating their investment in certain assets like gold, so we can see the change of costumer behavior caused by the flow of information.

This domino effect of information flow could accelerate the dynamics and change in economic and social landscape, and theoretically speaking,

• First, people who are in the middle of huge chains of social networking may get access to those information far quicker than those who don't, and may get first-hand beneficial of the information

• Secondly. People who quickly get the information and resources to make a transformation within their own interests have more greater likelihood to survive and maintain their own sustainability and overall well-being.

• Therefore people who has access toward this huge social network chain considered as resourceful and hence perceived to have power and better likelihood to maintain stability.

The reason why these phenomena can occur is because of how the societal system has been set up top-down, the very nature of competitive system where private enterprise and entrepreneurs compete is inevitably leading to small percentage of market winner who take the most to themselves and the universality of overall basic income of labor means the labor don't have the same income growth potential as much as the private business owner does, and this contributes to inequality.

The bigger the gap between the rich and the middle class people the more contrast the economic power between them, and we all know what money can do, at certain level of wealth, the rich can have bigger bargaining power and can do more things that people at certain economic level can only do e.g buying expensive prestige car at young age may not something that many people can do, except if you come from rich family or became entrepreneur at relatively young age or else..but the income and preserved wealth has become sort of privilege.

Especially we find ourselves in the era of accelerated transfer of information, things like what we often find in social media where some people showing-off their luxury assets may play a role in further expose the contrast of prestige or the privilege of having such wealth, as a result many young teens may want to replicate the lifestyle of the upper class leading to formation of cultural view among people that these prestige "style" to be perceived as socially more cool, superior.

while prestige itself by definition is..

The degree of respect, regard, and admiration afforded an individual by his or her peers or the whole community. Prestige derives from various sources, including success, achievement, rank, reputation, authority, illustriousness, or position within a social structure

Definition reference : dictionary.apa.org

Thus in summary, this very wealth aspect may be seen as the source of power because of

• The hardship of living create realization how economic ability is power in a world of materialism.

• The generational/familial economic factor and condition helps contribute to the inequality of opportunity.

• The inequality of opportunity plays a role to the economic inequality

• The contrast effect of economic power due to the economic inequality phenomena

• The era of accelerated transfer of information may further may have adding sense of prestige, superiority towards to the upper class lifestyle associated with wealth.

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