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Lead therapy.
I think it‘s called psychopathy.
The french had a good cure for wealth hoarding I think. Temporary though. We'll need regular immunity shots to make sure it doesn't spread again.
No, affluenza is a bullshit excuse that rich people use to avoid responsibility
I do kind of feel there's a psychological component to it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was comorbid with pedophelia.
It takes a certain type of person to become a billionaire...there needs to be a severe and untreated antisocial personality disorder underneath all of it. If you've got that, add in a bit of opportunity (usually just being born rich) and a bunch of enablers and baby, you got a billionaire.
Once you get to billionaire level, it's just a cyclical disease. The privilege and recognition and power that just comes along with hitting Billionaire status in the first place is enough to continue to feed it more and more.
There is no cure...you can only treat the symptoms by donating all assets and earthly possessions. Then cognitive therapy can begin.
Greed is one of the seven mortal sins for a reason and you don't have to be a religious person to see and experience that
But not if you have $999,999,999
Buzzwords are for idiots.
There are definetely psychological effects of holding a million or more dollars for long periods of time.
I believe that becoming a billionaire is often the result of an OCD condition related to hoarding. If someone was that strongly compelled to hoard an equivalent amount of cats, rusty cars, broken appliances, etc., we would step in and stop it, because it would start to be a danger to the health of the public.
Yet if their OCD Hoarding manifests as financial, we laud them as economic heroes, and governments actually GIVE them more money.
Their hoards should be confiscated, and they should have to take medication to reduce their dangerous compulsions.
There is only so much personal agency a person can possess, before it becomes public insurgency.
If there is an overhaul, I think the focus should be on a revised economic system, where there are fixed incomes based on job type or status, alongside absolute caps on how much wealth can be held. Anything beyond the cap is 100% taxed.
UBI is used to guarantee shelter, utilities, transport, healthcare, and generic items. Money is used for buying fancy stuff, such as sheets with patterns or colors, bigger housing, and so forth. Fixed incomes start at $10,000 a year for citizens, students get a range of income based on grades that range from $10,000 to $20,000, while basic jobs like waiters get $40k a year. Astronauts get $100k, the absolute cap for annual income. Leaders get their position and pay rank voted by the workers of the company.
It is best if everyone had personal freedom, but they shouldn't have absolute freedom over everybody else. I hope the arrangement I outlined gives enough flexibility that most folks would feel fulfilled.
I won't lie, and I'm sure some would have some criticisms, but that sounds like a good enough cure to me.
This is the solution, but to help wean them off their addiction, maybe we could send them all to addiction rehab facilities, just to give them an out so we don't have to get violent. They are addicts and compassion is the best way out of this mess. Fight fire with water
Why? How? What did I even read?
Why would being successful in life be a mental disease?
Hoarding a resource (money) when other people are starving, homeless and dying of preventable diseases.
If we see that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior.
Why aren't you spending all your money and time on helping others then?
The money you earn would find around zilion uses in helping others.
Once my needs are met, I am. And I'm disabled. Why aren't you?
Because I'm selfish.
Contrary to your hero's opinion, this is not a virtue. It is a vice.
moneu does not equate to success.
Money does equate to value provided to the society, which in my opinion equates to success.
Only a moron would think that billionaires earned their money. Sorry to hear that about you.
Mental disorder is very, very tricky to define, as something maladaptive in one context may work in another. One example is how in individualistic cultures, people hearing voices more often experience them as intrusive and malevolant, and we call it schizophrenia, while people on collectivist cultures may experience the voices as friendly and comforting. Is that a disease, then, if it benefits a person? Psychologists tend to go with a working definition based on how adaptive a condition is for the person and their society.
But in what context does it benefit a person to be unable to ever have "enough" of anything, never able to be satiated, compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use? Further, when the condition drives them to use the power attendant to that wealth to actively harm their society in myriad ways, how is that adaptive? It seems that they harbor a deep anxiety about the possibility that their accumulated wealth might be reduced, in a way completely imperceptible to them, and even being consciously aware that this is so, still suffer from a mania that compels them to hurt other people to keep that from happening.
Hardly sounds like what most of us would define as "successful in life."
compulsively adding to an enormous pile of wealth far, far beyond anything that they could ever use
Meh. It's just work, vision and lots of luck that leads to exponential growth. And when you start getting exponential growth to your investment, stopping the process of getting richer and richer would require active work to stop it from happening.
Only in fiction do people become rich by being compulsive about it.
It shouldn't be possible. Full stop.
Billionaires are a scourge on everything good in this world.
There should be a cap on how much wealth a person or corporation* is legally allowed to possess. Once their net worth hits $999,999,999.99, it triggers a plug at the bottom of their bank account to open, forever draining** every penny that attempts to exceed that maximum amount.
*Corporations included because they seem to claim all the rights of personhood
**and TRULY trickling down to people who actually earn & deserve & need it
It doesn't need to trickle down at all. If the money simply ceases to exist, what little we have becomes much more valuable.
Burn it all down.
I'd love to see it someday.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
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