When Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, decided to give away most of his fortune to charity through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he said, "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing". Buffett added that he did not want to be involved in any financial decisions related to the charity.
Giving most of one's fortune to charity is certainly not an easy decision to take. It requires a lot of courage to make such a moral resolution. Many rich people are not willing to give up even the smallest percentage of their wealth.
Self-made millionaires and billionaires in the West usually make their wealth the hard way. In addition to high taxes, the rule of law prevails and the media always aim to expose corruption. It is different, however, in the Arab world. It is almost impossible to track the source of many rich people's wealth. While some have worked hard, others got rich through inheritance, grants and other easy channels. In all cases, very few would share the secrets of their affluence with others. Would-be wealthy people cannot find many role models to emulate.
Two questions perplex me: What are we sacrificing to get wealthy; and why would some choose to live simple and spontaneous lives in spite of their riches?
Downside
Wealth comes with side-effects. For example, some people indulge in the materialistic life to such a degree that it becomes a sort of prison. Rich people experience a fierce internal conflict between materialism — which requires a lot of time, effort and concentration — and personal and familial obligations — which also require a lot of time and effort. Family life, however, like other moral and emotional things in our lives, can't be bought.
Another serious side-effect that indirectly affects a number of wealthy people is that they acquire some unpleasant traits, such as selfishness and injustice. In most cases, because of the accelerated pace of life around them, they do not realise that these characteristics have become part of their personalities. Therefore, many of them resort to charitable works as a back door to more peaceful and less complicated lives.
In the midst of a ruthless, materialistic life, many people lose their souls — whether by choice or not. The journey of life is swift, but we are too busy to pause at the major milestones. We pay a dear price, however, when the journey ceases and we reach our final destination.
Some people spend the bulk of their lives striving to achieve certain goals at the expense of other things. In their pursuit of success and riches, they take both legitimate and illegitimate avenues. When they have attained their goals, they find themselves in a vicious circle that they spend the rest of their lives trying to escape.
All lives come to an end. Not knowing the exact time of that end has always been a concern for human beings. This concern becomes more acute with time, especially when one is deeply involved in a purely materialistic life. Alarm bells go off when the journey nears its end. Suddenly, you wake up to find that the wealth you have been working hard to accumulate is made of nothing but paper — or, as the late poet Nizar Qabbani once put it, "At the close of your life, you will find that you have been pursuing only a trace of smoke."
Jamal Al Shehhi is an Emirati writer.
