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Comment by foogazi | Hacker News Reader

Is it a mental illness if a billionaire many times over still wants more money ?

We are all witnessing live via social media how ultra-wealth directly leads to mental illness.

I find it more likely that the cause and effect here are the other way around: people who are sociopaths tend to be more successful at becoming extremely wealthy and powerful.

I think there's some of that, but our current era - probably fueled by social media itself - seems to be producing something else entirely.

The DSM definitions usually require some aspect of being made unhappy by your mental state. He seems pretty thrilled to be himself.

A disorder needs to interfere with regular functioning but does not need to make one unhappy. Someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder doesn't necessarily even recognize that they're causing havoc, much less feel bad about it.

Not if it’s narcissism or sociopathy.

Is that true of something like NPD also?

So why the ketamine?

Bertrand Russell would apparently say "no, that's just being human"

"All human activity is prompted by desire" --but read the rest, it's insightful even (especially) for today

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/le...

Billions of dollars is beyond human comprehension. We handle it better with 1,000 millions. But then the human mind thinks about things on a scale of millions of dollars being a minute amount.... which is not how the general populations thinks about personal expenditures.

https://futurism.com/what-is-a-billion-2

Mo money = mo power. When you have that much money, you’re just competing with others with similar amount of money as you. So the only way you can outdo others is by having more power (which can come to you if you have more money).

It’s the billionaire equivalent of Florida retirement communities where people try to become the HOA presidents to exert more power.

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