The wanting
Syl Ojalla · The Forum Internum
At some point — and nobody seems to know exactly when — having enough stopped being the point. The point became having more. And then, having acquired more, the point became having more than that. And so on, apparently without limit, without terminus, and without anyone involved stopping to ask what, precisely, they were doing and why.
This essay is that question.
The arithmetic of absurdity
Let us begin with a number. One billion pounds. A thousand million. Stacked in fifty-pound notes, it would rise roughly two kilometres into the sky. Invested conservatively, it generates in the region of thirty to forty million pounds per year without the owner doing anything at all. It is, by any reasonable measure, more money than a human being could meaningfully spend in a lifetime, more security than any conceivable emergency could require, and more comfort than any body can physically absorb.
Now consider the person who has one billion pounds and wants two.
What is the want for? Not survival — that was secured somewhere around the first million. Not comfort — that was exhausted long before the first hundred million. Not security — no conceivable threat to personal wellbeing requires a billion-pound buffer, let alone two. The second billion cannot be eaten, worn, or experienced in any way that the first billion did not already make possible. It will not extend the owner’s life, improve their health, deepen their relationships, or provide a single moment of pleasure that the first billion was incapable of providing.
What the second billion provides, in functional terms, is a larger number. That is all. The want for it is not a want for anything money can actually buy. It is a want for the number itself — for the score, the rank, the position on a list. Which raises an obvious question about the nature of the game being played, and whether the people playing it have noticed that it has no end, no winner, and no prize beyond the playing of it.
The objects
The superyacht — that most legible symbol of extreme accumulation — is worth dwelling on, not because it is the worst of it but because it is the most visible. The largest examples stretch beyond 150 metres, carry crews of eighty or more, and feature indoor swimming pools, helipads, beauty salons, and multiples of every amenity that could conceivably be required. The operating costs alone run to tens of millions of pounds per year. They move between the same small collection of ports — Monaco, Cannes, Bodrum, the Maldives — at low speed, burning extraordinary quantities of fuel, occasionally requiring a second, smaller support vessel to carry the helicopter that the primary yacht cannot accommodate.
The support yacht exists to service the yacht. Pause on that for a moment.
The pearlescent paint finish available on certain ultra-luxury cars — a finish that adds hundreds of thousands of pounds to vehicles already priced in the millions — is applied to machines that cannot legally be driven at the speeds they are engineered to achieve, on roads they are frequently too low to navigate without scraping their undercarriage. The car is, in any practical sense, less useful than a second-hand hatchback. It is purchased not for use but for the fact of ownership — for the ability to say, or simply to know, that it exists and is yours.
Private islands. Orbital space tourism. The stated ambition, expressed with apparent sincerity by more than one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, to establish a permanent human presence on Mars — not as a species-level civilisational project but as a personal legacy. The ambition has so outrun any conceivable relationship with ordinary human life that its destination is a barren, freezing, airless rock forty million miles away. This is what the wanting looks like when there is nothing left on Earth left to want.
What the wanting is actually for
There is a psychological literature on this, and it is largely consistent. Beyond a certain income threshold — research by Kahneman and Deaton placed it at around $75,000 in 2010, later revised upward by Killingsworth in 2021 but still nowhere approaching eight figures — additional wealth produces diminishing and eventually negligible improvements in day-to-day wellbeing. The hedonic treadmill ensures that each new acquisition rapidly becomes the new baseline, generating not satisfaction but an adjusted floor from which the next want emerges.
The very wealthy are not, by most measures, happier than the moderately comfortable. They are often less so — more anxious, more competitive, more preoccupied with status and comparative position, more vulnerable to the particular unhappiness of people who have everything and feel it acutely. The wanting is not satisfied by the getting. The wanting is, in fact, intensified by it.
What extreme wealth accumulation actually provides — beyond a threshold that most millionaires crossed long ago — is power. Not comfort. Not pleasure. Not security in any meaningful sense. Power over other people, over institutions, over the conditions of other people’s lives. The second billion is not about the money. It is about what the money represents in terms of leverage, influence, and the capacity to impose one’s preferences on the world at scale.
This is worth saying plainly because it is usually dressed in other language — innovation, disruption, philanthropy, legacy — and the dressing tends to obscure what is underneath. What is underneath is a will to determine outcomes that affect millions of people who were not consulted and did not consent. The yacht with seventeen bathrooms is not the problem. It is the receipt. The problem is what was exchanged to acquire it, and what the acquiring represents in terms of what everyone else goes without.
The social contract nobody signed
The standard defence of extreme wealth accumulation runs as follows: the wealth was earned through effort and ingenuity; taxes are paid; jobs are created and innovation is driven; and what remains is a private matter.
Each part of this argument repays examination.
Wealth at the scale of ten, fifty, or two hundred billion pounds is not earned in any sense the word normally carries. It is extracted — from the labour of workers paid less than the value they produce, from infrastructure built by public investment, from the legal frameworks that protect property and enforce contracts, from the social conditions that make markets possible at all. The accumulation is not the product of individual effort alone. It is the product of the combined effort of hundreds of thousands of employees, decades of publicly funded research, and the consuming behaviour of millions of people. Conflating the conditions of accumulation with personal desert is the central sleight of hand in the mythology of the self-made billionaire.
The tax argument is empirically weak. Effective tax rates for the ultra-wealthy — accounting for the legal structuring of wealth through corporations, trusts, unrealised gains, and offshore arrangements — are routinely lower than those paid by people earning a fraction of the income. This is not accident. It is architecture: a system designed, lobbied for, and maintained by those with the resources to shape the rules of the game they are playing.
The philanthropy defence is the most revealing because it converts a political problem into a personal virtue. The philanthropist decides which problems are worth solving, which institutions are worth funding, and which communities are worth helping. This is not generosity in any ordinary sense. It is the privatisation of collective decision-making — the replacement of democratic processes for allocating shared resources with the personal preferences of whoever accumulated the most. When the wealthiest individuals on Earth exercise greater influence over global health policy, public discourse, electoral politics, and the conditions of work for millions of people than most elected governments, the question of legitimacy is not optional. It is the only question that matters.
The madness question
Is it madness?
In the clinical sense, no. The people engaged in extreme wealth accumulation are, by most observable measures, highly functional. They run complex organisations, navigate intricate political and financial environments, and make decisions of considerable sophistication. The machinery works.
But there is another kind of madness — the kind that Erasmus described in The Praise of Folly in 1511, the kind that Tolstoy was circling in How Much Land Does a Man Need? in 1886 — which is not the madness of the broken mind but the madness of the misdirected life. The madness of a person who has organised every resource, every hour, every relationship around a goal that, on examination, turns out to be empty. Who has won a game that was not worth playing. Who has arrived at the destination and found that the destination was the wanting itself, and that the wanting, satisfied, has nothing to offer.
Pahom, in Tolstoy’s story, is given the opportunity to claim as much land as he can walk around in a single day. He walks further and further, driven by the want for more, and arrives back at the starting point just as the sun sets — and dies from the exertion. The land he is given is exactly six feet. Enough to be buried in.
The story is not subtle. Neither is the phenomenon it describes.
What is perhaps most striking about extreme wealth accumulation is not its greed — greed is commonplace and well understood — but its joylessness. The owner of the six-hundred-million-dollar yacht, moving from port to port with a crew of eighty and no fixed destination, is not, by most accounts, having a particularly good time. The fund manager working hundred-hour weeks to move from the first billion to the second is not doing so out of pleasure. The founder who has automated the leisure out of his own existence in pursuit of the next disruption is not, in any ordinary sense, living well.
They are running. From what, it is difficult to say with certainty. Toward what, it is increasingly clear, they do not know.
What accepted madness looks like
The most interesting word in the question this essay began from is not madness. It is accepted.
Because the accumulation is accepted. It is not merely tolerated — it is celebrated, aspirationally modelled, and institutionally protected. The rich list is not a register of social concern. It is a scoreboard. The superyacht is not an object of political scrutiny. It is a status symbol, covered approvingly in the pages of publications dedicated to its celebration. The individual who wants to reshape civilisation according to their personal vision is not regarded as someone who has lost perspective. They are regarded as a visionary.
A society that normalises the accumulation of two hundred billion dollars by a single individual while one in five of its children grows up in poverty has made a series of choices. Those choices are not natural, not inevitable, and not without alternative. They are political choices, sustained by ideology — the ideology of meritocracy, of earned reward, of the heroic entrepreneur — and they serve identifiable interests.
The same interests, in fact, that are served by the belief that class hierarchy reflects human worth, and that economic position reflects personal desert. The thread connects. The mechanism is the same: a fiction, told with sufficient confidence and repetition, until it disappears into the background and begins to feel like common sense.
The wanting is not natural. It is not admirable. It is not evidence of vision or drive or human excellence. It is evidence of a particular kind of poverty — the poverty of a life in which meaning has been entirely outsourced to accumulation, and in which no amount of accumulation has managed to supply what it promised.
The yacht has seventeen bathrooms. The life examining itself in each of them is still the same life.
References
Erasmus, D. (1511) Moriae Encomium [The Praise of Folly]. Translated by B. Radice (1971). London: Penguin Classics.
Kahneman, D. and Deaton, A. (2010) ‘High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), pp. 16489–16493.
Killingsworth, M.A. (2021) ‘Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4), e2016976118.
Killingsworth, M.A., Kahneman, D. and Mellers, B. (2023) ‘Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2208661120.
Layard, R. (2005) Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Allen Lane.
Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
ProPublica (2021) ‘The secret IRS files: Trove of never-before-seen records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax’, ProPublica, 8 June. Available at: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files (Accessed: March 2026).
Tolstoy, L. (1886) ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ in Master and Man and Other Stories. Translated by P. Carson (2005). London: Penguin Classics.
Veblen, T. (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan.
Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane.