What Interests Me This Weeks

I'm known to be materially minimal among friends. The idea of flaunting wealth is offensive to me. I can't exactly say why, maybe there's an inherint understanding for the danger of stoking envy that's more than my ability to express. Or maybe I'm closet communist.

But somehow I've been thinking about the notion of how to be conspiciously rich, strategically. See, rich is not the same as wealthy. There are many definitions of wealth, but they are almost always intangible.

Richness however is much simpler and shallower: it involves the display of stuffs. Why? It's about the winning the status-game.

I don't fault certain professions for resorting to overt signalling of success and credibility. I look down on those who don't need to but still do it. But those who do need to often do it wrong or for the wrong reasons.

There are costs to displaying wealth (making the intangible visible) that often goes unaddressed. You enlarge the surface area of attack, making yourself a target of exploits. When many people seek your favors, not being good at saying no can be fatal.

So if ever one day I have the unlikely need to display material success, how would I do it? I can think of a few ideas and I can hear you say "buy me dinner".

But I have problem getting pass the why. Friends and families who I have known a long time don't need me to impress them. In fact doing so invite problems. My colleagues even less so.

That narrows the target-pool-to-impress to old school acquintances (school reunions) and newly met people in business. I no longer do business development, and school reunions happen once a decade.

If you can name many more circles where you wish to impress people, then I think my imagination is failing me.

This whole thought exercise unintentionally reveal what I value in new people I meet: insights. It's rather rare for display of wealth to insersect with richness of insight.