When You Are Rich

Published on Nov 10, 2024 (updated Oct 27, 2026), filed under politics, misc. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

When you are rich—

• —you are grateful.
• —you are generous.
• —you share your wealth.
• —you use your wealth to benefit everyone.
• —you take more responsibility, the more you own (“own”).
• —you don’t exploit people you’re responsible for and you don’t exploit people you’re not responsible for.
• —you don’t use your wealth against someone who isn’t as wealthy.
• —you happily pay your taxes.
• —you support taxes on wealth.
• —you lead by example.
• —you support the poor, the sick, the needy, the uneducated, the unfortunate, everyone whom you can help.
• —you invest in the public good, in education, in health, in infrastructure, in food security, in sustainability, with no vain or selfish expectation.
• —you work to make sure there’s better income and wealth distribution (and less income and wealth inequality).
• —you look for more ways to take responsibility and raise everyone’s quality of life.

In a world in which there are rich people (which implies the existence of poor people), that is a rich person: rich on the outside, rich on the inside.

Without riches on the inside, we need no one only with riches on the outside. They’re a liability for us all.

Update (October 27, 2026)

And then someone like Elon Musk comes along—the richest man in the world—to drive the decision of cutting the USAID program, which by now (2026) seems to have already cost hundreds of thousands of lives (The Irish Times, Harvard School of Public Health)—with Wikipedia even suggesting up to 14 million preventable deaths for the years to come.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, dxsrc). You’ll like my work if you value pragmatic, proactive problem-solvers. Let’s connect.