Being rich and powerful is a bad (modern) life goal

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Money doesn't change people; it only shows who they are.

You either die a hero or live long enough to be the villain.

These quotes have in common the correlation between a person's concentration of power and its derivatives, such as money and fame, and of them becoming or showing to be a bad person.

Since most of us are not the most powerful, wealthy, and famous people, it's tempting to think that this happens with "them" but that it wouldn't happen with us. We tell ourselves, "If I had this much money, I would spend it helping the poor instead of buying these ridiculously expensive items." "If I were the president, I wouldn't be corrupt." "If I were a famous actor, I would never do drugs."

But since we aren't one of the wealthiest people in the world, the president of a country, or a famous Hollywood actor, we can't honestly know how we'd act if we had all of that power.

Or can we?

Choice and self-control

If we define self-control as the ability to choose and act deliberately, to do what we deem good, and not to do what we consider bad, there's a critical requirement embedded in it: choice.

It can be easy to forget this requirement of choice being available when evaluating others' self-control. For example, in a study where researchers measured people with high and low self-control, they found those in the high self-control group were tempted much less often than those in the low self-control group.

Like most of us, the researchers watched the person's behavior when judging self-control without accounting for the choices they had.

It's a simple but crucial concept: the self-control we display when acting depends both on our ability to choose well and the choices available to us.

And you know who has a lot of choices? Powerful people.

Liberty and Freedom

We'll take a slight detour because I need to explain two different choice concepts. I call them Liberty and Freedom.

Note: The words "Liberty" and "Freedom," when used elsewhere, are sometimes used interchangeably, have unclear meanings, or carry a meaning different from the one I describe here.

Liberty is the ability to act or not act in a particular way. The lack of liberty is demonstrated by the absence of the ability to act or not act.

Freedom is the absence of an obligation or prohibition to act in a particular way. The lack of freedom is demonstrated by obligations and prohibitions coercing one's actions, often from an entity monopolizing a disproportionate coercive power.

As defined above, liberty is the concept that pertains to choices available and depends, among other things, on our power to act. If Bob insulted Alice and Alice punched Bob in the face in retaliation, Bob had the liberty to insult Alice, and Alice had the liberty to punch Bob. If Alice had been wearing noise-canceling headphones or Bob had dodged the punch and ran away, they wouldn't have succeeded and, by definition, wouldn't have had the liberty to do it.

As defined above, freedom is a concept of obligation and prohibitions based on disproportionate coercive power. If Bob insulted Alice and Alice thought about punching Bob but knew that if she did, he'd call the police and they'd put her in prison for two years for assault, she doesn't have the freedom to punch Bob. If the law had an exception for the particular type of insult Bob used, or if she was best friends with the police chief and knew he wouldn't arrest her, she'd have the freedom to punch Bob.

In summary: liberty is the ability to act, and freedom is the absence of obligation or prohibition from a coercive force in our action.

Our relative lack of freedom

If I were rich, I'd travel the world. I'd cross the country on a motorcycle. I'd lay on the beach all day.

These are some examples of everyday things we say about how we'd live if we had a life-changing amount of money.

What's interesting is that traveling the world, riding a bike, or lying on the beach are not challenging actions or even ones that require enormous amounts of money or power. It's our obligations and prohibitions that prevent us from pursuing them, commonly our need to work daily to earn an income and care for our families. In other words, a lack of freedom.

An observant person would notice that people who actually are traveling the world, driving across the country, or spending all day at the beach are often not necessarily wealthy and powerful. Virtual nomads, surfers who left the city for the coast, backpacking young adults, minimalists, and traveling vagabonds, have in common that they often don't have incredible amounts of money.

What they do have is a lot of freedom, an absence of the typical obligations and prohibitions most of us have.

Laying on the beach all day every day or just spending time traveling the world turns out to not be a common hobby for the wealthiest people in the world. That behavior sometimes dumbfounds us, the people who don't have that much money, fame, and power today but believe that's how we'd act if we did.

After all, why choose to work a high-pressure job and be entangled in all the drama of a high-profile life instead of just chilling at the beach?

Our relative lack of liberty

The answer is their excess of liberty.

Here's a hyperbolic escalation of liberty to outline its impact on our self-control.

Say I was chilling at the beach when I started to feel a little hungry. It's 10 am, 2 hours until lunchtime.

Scenario 1: I decide to wait it out. I'll go home and prepare lunch in 2 hours.

Scenario 2: Actually, I have a phone with me, so I'll call home and see if we can have lunch at 11 am and wait 1 hour instead.

Scenario 3: Actually, I have a maid preparing the food, so I'll call home and tell them to prepare the food right away.

Scenario 4: Actually, I have a chef preparing the food, so I'll call home and tell them I'm craving shrimp and I'd like to have it right away.

Scenario 5: Actually, I'm just a quick 20 minutes away from the best seafood restaurant in the world. I tell my assistant to get the chopper ready, and I call my close friend, the restaurant owner, to say I'm coming right over. He's delighted I'm visiting and says he'll start to get the jumbo shrimp ready for when I arrive and that he can't wait to hear what I think when I taste it with the new white wine he's pairing it with and that he's looking forward to catching up.

With Scenario 5 available, the one where I eat the best shrimp in the world paired with great wine and conversation in my close friend's restaurant and company, it's much harder to wait out my shrimp craving for 2 hours on the beach and then walk back home to prepare all of the food myself and eat a simple lettuce salad with chickpeas.

Excess power creates excess liberty, which excessively taxes self-control.

Absolute power of a Hollywood actor

While this last scenario of flying on a chopper to get the best shrimp in the world seems hyperbolic and unrealistic to people with normal levels of power, money, and fame like us, it's not that unrealistic to some specific people in the world. Perhaps aside from the part where we start chilling on the beach for 2 hours with nothing else to do.

In "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing," Matthew Perry's memoir, the actor who played Chandler Bing on Friends, talks about dating Julia Roberts and breaking up with her for frivolous reasons, about "sleeping with almost every woman in Southern California," about flying on a private jet to Switzerland from California on a whim to get more drugs from his Swiss doctor given his American doctor's refusal to keep his current dose, calling drug dealers to bring him drugs at rehab virtually anywhere in the US, and otherwise an almost incomprehensible amount of partying, sex and drugs to ordinary people like us.

Due to his acquired wealth and fame, Matthew Perry had almost limitless power, levels of magnitude above what most of us have and well above what we can fathom. At one point in his life, he was the only one of 2 actors in history to have the most-watched TV show and movie simultaneously, alongside Michael J. Fox. He acquired power, wealth, and fame beyond his own and most of our wildest dreams.

He also struggled with addiction and torpedoed romantic relationships with some of the most incredible people in the world throughout this time, despite his desire, will, and constant effort to be sober and build a family.

Some people do have enough power to have virtually limitless choices, which counter-intuitively makes their life extremely, extremely hard.

Addiction

Most of us are addicts. Often we have moderate behavioral addictions, like using our phones with Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter or binging on TV shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO. Sometimes they're strengthened by chemistry, like our eating sugary and fatty foods in doughnuts, chocolate, pastries, and other junk food. Sometimes we're further dependent on chemicals like drinking alcohol in beers, wine, and whiskey, caffeine in coffee and energy drinks, and nicotine in cigarettes.

While we have these moderate addictions, most of us don't have the freedom or liberty to indulge them without boundaries.

We spend the night in bed on Instagram, knowing that we should go to sleep early, but we know we have to show up at work tomorrow or we'll lose our jobs and income. We eventually turn off the phone at 1 am, pop out of bed at 6:50 am after a few snoozes on our alarm clock, and drag our sleep-deprived selves through the day.

Now, how would that change if we had no work to show up to the following day? No bosses? Virtually infinite money? Do we stay on our phones a little longer when we use Instagram on Friday night because we don't have to work the next day? Do we sleep in on Saturday when we don't have to work?

How would that change if we had 400,000 followers on Instagram telling us they loved us? Expecting us to post several times a day?

4,000,000 followers? Liking our every post and story?

40,000,000 followers??

What if everything in our lives was overcharged that way? The best foods were at our fingertips; the most famous and exciting people were messaging us and wanting to date us; the most incredible social media reach, where everyone wanted to listen to what we had to say. What if the best of the best of everything were tempting us at virtually all times, everywhere? No obligations and prohibitions at all to restrain us, laws that apply to others but not us.

How would we fare?

Be careful what you wish for

Like an evil genie that grants us wishes we later regret, we fail to foresee our difficulty in making currently unavailable choices.

We delude ourselves by thinking that if we had infinitely more options than we have today, we'd behave for the most part as we do now, except maybe doing a little more of that good thing, that we'd enjoy our newfound freedom and not work or do chores. Crucially, we believe we'd easily ignore all potentially harmful new choices not currently available, just as we do now.

Achieving that level of self-control is extremely difficult. The history of the most powerful people, such as Hollywood actors, rock stars, CEOs, and world leaders, is littered with catastrophic failures we dismiss as a lack of self-control or weak character. Meanwhile, we fantasize that the same wouldn't happen to us were we in their position, simultaneously desiring to have that same power and assortment of choices at our disposal.

Matthew Perry later calls his coming of fame and wealth a Faustian bargain, comparing it to the story of Faust's coming to overwhelming power granted by Mephistopheles in exchange for his soul.

At one point, Matthew Perry even prayed to be famous while offering literally anything else in return. Here's the section in the book where he talks about his Faustian prayer:

About three weeks before my audition for Friends, I was alone in my apartment on Sunset and Doheny, tenth floor—it was very small, but it had a great view, of course—and I was reading in the newspaper about Charlie Sheen. It said that Sheen was yet again in trouble for something, but I remember thinking, Why does he care—he’s famous?

Out of nowhere, I found myself getting to my knees, closing my eyes tightly, and praying. I had never done this before.

“God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.” Three weeks later, I got cast in Friends.

Perry, Matthew. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (p. 81). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.

Back then, he was oblivious to how hard his life would be after being granted his wish.

Just like the rest of us.