Replacing Billionaires
A better way of solving an unsolvable problem
The Window Across the City
Imagine standing at a bus stop in the rain after a ten-hour shift. Your shoes are wet, and your rent has gone up again. Across the road, a screen the size of a building shows a billionaire stepping from a private jet, smiling as though the universe has personally arranged the sunny weather for him.
Resentment in that moment is not a moral failure. It is the mind registering an obscene difference in freedom. The billionaire, you reckon, can choose where to live, when to rest, what risks to take and which inconveniences simply not to experience. You may be choosing between heating and food, or between replacing a broken tooth and paying the electricity bill.
It would be insulting, I would think, to insist that you are merely suffering in different ways. The billionaire may be lonely, mistrustful or exhausted by status, but they still possess choices you may not have. They could give away enough to transform lives and remain unimaginably wealthy. You cannot conjure security out of a compassionate attitude.
The question, then, is not whether the resentment is understandable. Of course it is. The question is what to do when the injustice is real, those benefiting from it are unlikely to surrender their advantage, and your one life is passing while you wait for the world to become fair.
Here is some good advice: do not wait for the powerful to become compassionate, or for you to reach the summit of sufficiency, before you begin to live.
The Bargain That Keeps Moving
Modern life offers a bargain so familiar that we rarely notice how strange it is. Work harder now. Endure a little longer. Accumulate enough money, status and control, and eventually you will reach the place where life feels safe, settled and free.
Up to a point, this is sensible advice. The trouble is that ‘enough’ has wheels.
As income rises, the standard of adequacy often rises with it. A room becomes a flat, a flat becomes a house, and the house needs a better postcode. The better postcode introduces neighbours who own things you had not previously realised were missing from your poor soul. The pursuit expands faster than the satisfaction it promised.
None of this means money is unimportant. Poverty can be brutal. Hunger, debt, unsafe housing, humiliation and the inability to protect the people you love are not spiritual exercises. A person needs material stability, practical agency and relief from relentless fear.
Material sufficiency and endless accumulation, however, are different projects. The first gives life room to breathe. The second can become a permanent postponement of life, with no natural horizon and no point at which the system announces: this is enough.
Most people will never become exceptionally wealthy. Hard work matters, but so do inheritance, health, timing, social access and luck, none of which comes from a vending machine. Yet many still organise their lives around the values of extreme wealth: comparison, self-protection, competitive status and the hope that one day they will no longer need anyone.
The tragedy is not simply that they may fail to become rich. It is that the attempt may crowd out the more attainable work of love, belonging, meaning and deeply felt contentment.
Suppose you live until you are eighty (lucky you!). That is a long time to spend preparing to begin and doesn’t give you much time to be.
The Wealth We Misnamed
I’m not one for feel-good quotes that fizzle out after thirty seconds. So this is not a slogan:
The richest life is not the one that owns the most. It is the one that participates most fully in what makes existence worth having.
We have mistaken the means for the destination. Money can buy space, comfort, treatment, education, travel and time. These are real goods. But we want them because we expect them to open into something deeper: less fear, more peace, freedom, love, dignity, significance, belonging and the sense that our life is not being wasted.
Many of those deeper goods are relational. They do not sit in a vault; they arise between people.
A poor family can laugh around a table where the plates are chipped and do not match. Brothers can carry one another through grief. Friends can share tools, meals, childcare, contacts, courage and a ridiculous private joke that survives for forty years. None of this makes deprivation acceptable. It reveals only that monetary poverty and human poverty are not identical.
The old individualism tells us that freedom means becoming independent enough not to need anyone. It is a horrible thought, not least because it is impossible. No one becomes human alone.
Freedom is not escape from dependence. It is participation in relationships that make dependence safe, mutual and life-giving.
People enduring hardship can therefore still experience genuine happiness. Not because hunger is secretly charming, or because suffering reliably builds character, but because love, identity, usefulness, humour, loyalty and belonging can survive when money is scarce.
The scandal is not that happiness can survive poverty. It is that prosperous societies know much of what human beings need and still train them to place wealth ahead of the conditions that make happiness possible.
What We Build Between Us
Picture a street where five households barely speak. Not that unusual for today. Each family buys its own tools for jobs done twice a year, struggles separately with childcare, searches for work alone, cooks alone, worries alone and meets each emergency as a private disaster.
Now let trust begin to form on the same street. Not instantly. Trust is a very delicate thing. Let it slowly make its way into the community.
One person knows how to repair bicycles. Another understands benefit applications. Someone else can tutor mathematics, lend a van, cook for an ill neighbour or introduce a young person to an employer. Nothing magical has appeared. The people and resources are roughly the same. What has changed is the structure through which value can flow.
No person is an isolated unit generating a life from nothing. Each of us is shaped by histories, institutions, bodies, memories, accidents, relationships and choices. We receive influence, alter it and pass it on.
A community makes that truth practical. Acts of reliability accumulate. People remember who arrived, who listened, who kept confidences and who helped without turning assistance into a claim of ownership. Those memories reduce fear. With less fear, there is more room for thought, experimentation and agency. Agency produces contribution, which can strengthen the community that made it possible.
Support does more than soften hardship. It can improve the odds of material advancement. Shared knowledge prevents costly mistakes; shared care releases time; shared tools reduce expense; trusted introductions create opportunities. Emotional support can keep a temporary failure from becoming a permanent collapse.
Mutual support does not merely divide hardship. It multiplies capability.
This is not sentimental village life painted in warm evening light. Communities can be controlling, judgemental and claustrophobic. In Flowmonic terms, they must be organised around the attributes of unconditional love: honesty without humiliation, compassion without possession, patience without passivity, forgiveness without denial, sacrifice without hidden debt, and acceptance without abandoning necessary boundaries.
The aim is integration, not conformity. People remain distinct, but the channels between them stay open.
A World That Does Not Need Permission
Once such communities exist, the relationship with extreme wealth changes. To replace billionaires, in the sense that matters here, is not to install different people at the summit. It is to replace the billionaire as our distorted image of the complete life.
The community no longer says: you possess the complete life; please give back enough that we may imitate it. It’s only fair. Do it!
It can say instead: we have created a form of wealth your system cannot guarantee.
Here, in what we’ve created, affection is less likely to be bought. Friendship does not depend on access, and status need not be constantly defended. A person can be known without turning every interaction into a negotiation over position. Worth comes from participation, reliability, insight and care rather than control over resources.
We cannot know whether any particular billionaire is happy. Some may be. Maybe most of them are. Good for them. It’s not that we would want to wish unhappiness on anyone. That would be nasty. But wealth cannot guarantee authentic love, trust, usefulness or belonging. When money changes the behaviour of everyone entering the room, it may even become harder to know who would remain if the money disappeared. I recently watched the 2015-2020 TV Series Schitt’s Creek that eloquently made the point that it might not.
Nor do we need to shame the billionaire into generosity. Shame often produces defence, performance or withdrawal, and wealth should not be granted moral authority in the first place. The billionaire may enter the community, but as one human being among others. Money cannot purchase belonging, leadership, forgiveness or admiration.
A new civilisation can begin without first winning control of the old one. Small communities can build practical solidarity, meaningful work, shared learning, local enterprise, care networks and forms of celebration that make life feel inhabited again. They can connect with other communities without hardening into rigid institutions.
This is not a withdrawal from politics or justice. People can still organise, vote, protest, negotiate and demand material reform. But they need not make their entire capacity to live dependent on the success of those struggles. They can resist injustice without allowing it to define the full horizon of what it means to be human.
The old world says: become powerful enough not to be threatened.
The new world says: become connected enough to face threats together.
Enough to Begin
Perhaps happiness is not the final goal. Pleasure passes, and contentment can become complacency. A life worth living also needs meaning, purpose, growth, contribution, direction, love and enough security for the mind to unfold rather than merely endure.
But happiness matters. What sort of philosophy asks people to sacrifice the felt quality of their lives to a future that never arrives? What kind of civilisation reaches the deathbed rich in objects and poor in moments that felt unmistakably alive?
We should not ask the struggling person to admire the billionaire, excuse hoarded wealth or pretend injustice is an illusion. We should ask something harder: see the injustice clearly, resist it where resistance can work, and refuse to grant it ownership of everything valuable.
Begin with what is present. You might have to look at reality a little differently to notice what that is.
One trustworthy relationship. One shared meal. One skill offered without humiliation. One frightened person discovering that a setback will not leave them alone.
Then build consciously from there. Recognising the value of community is not enough. Community must become a project.
You may never own the penthouse across the city. But you can help create a world in which no one has to stand beneath it believing that the people inside possess the secret of being human.
Do not defeat the billionaire at the billionaire’s game. Build a life whose deepest wealth that game cannot produce.
Perhaps, one day, the person looking through the glass will not be you looking in.
It will be them looking out.