Ten Million Dollars

Written 2025-06-10 · Published 2026-10-16 · Last edited —

I wish to gain 10 Million dollars.

I view money as a tool, but a tool with a very special nature: it's utility scales proportionally to its amount. A hammer is a tool that achieves its goal perfectly, to hit things that are otherwise painful or impossible to hit ; But two hammers doesn't double its utility. two hammers is the conjunction of a hammers that is used, and a hammer that is useless.

However, money scales: 8 dollars might get me a single burger, but 16 gets me a full set. Its utility doubles. I love tools, I love their utility, the pain they bypass. Therefore, I must love money, its utility, the pain it will solve.

Of course, the dependency between the amount of money and its utility might not be completely linear: 10$ gets me a nice meal, 20$ a greater meal , 80$ an even more memorable culinary experience, but 200$ might not be as big of a jump in the utility of money as I felt in the initial 10$ to 20$ transition. Social consensus agrees that money and the utility it brings hits a plateau, like a logarithmic curve.

But I am skeptical, and I think that this critique of money's eventual convergence to a constant amount of utility might be a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of people's love for their inevitable poor lives. I doubt that people will actually choose poverty over wealth, failure over success. But a person who has deemed themselves determined to lose might critique the "hedonistic vice" of success, of wealth.

Therefore, I must gain 10 Millions dollars (of the buying power of 2025), I must amass it to see what its like.