My wife and I were taking one of our usual photographic walks in the town of Hvar yesterday evening, after the rain.

The tourist season is starting, so it’s more crowded than we’d like, but there were some quite nice sunset scenes and we came back with quite a nice catch on the memory cards.

As a curiosity, Rimac brought quite a show of Nevera cars.

This, combined with the fact that quite a lot of superyachts were parked there, made me think – I’m probably surrounded by the greatest density of people with order of magnitude more money than me, and it’s incredible how little they can actually show for it. In the real world, if you encounter a God who’s an order of magnitude more powerful than you, they are actually scary powerful – they can snap a finger and cancel some event out of existence by modifying its origin in time, or they can assemble a particle cloud back into the destroyed object, or they can create/modify universes. Here, they can buy a bigger boat or a faster car you can’t actually legally drive faster.

I mean, it’s nice, but I can’t but feel it as damning with faint praise. Once you solve all your actual problems that are caused by the lack of money, there’s precious little you can actually do with money. Buy a faster car with more expensive upholstery. Buy a bigger boat. Buy a bigger house. Buy more houses in many different places. Hire people to maintain it all. Have a space programme, or a charity fund, or something to give you the impression that it makes sense and is worth while. But basically, you do the same things you always did, just with no financial constraints. You still drive a car, only better. If you liked boats, you can get a better one. If you were into computers, you can get the best one. If you were into photography, you can buy the best cameras and lenses. You can get the house you actually like, instead of the one you could afford. But you still have all the human limitations, constraints and issues. There’s very little one of those billionaires can do, that a middle class person can’t. I mean, actually do, not just take a ride on a boat or have ten houses that require staff and staff managers. It’s like HiFi – you get to 90% of what’s possible with a few thousand euros. After that, ten times the money will give you the next 9%. After that, you can pay infinite amounts of money for utterly insignificant or even fictitious progress; essentially, you get to delude yourself for a hundred thousand dollars.

Money is absolutely crucial up to a point, and the difference between what your life is as a broke student or a homeless person, and someone in the middle class, can feel like magic. You can just pull out the wallet and solve things that would seem insurmountable to the other person. You can cash out a piece of real estate. You can go to a car salon and buy a new fancy car, cash. If you need a medical intervention, you can just deal with it because money is no object. However, after this miraculous ascent in functionality you can purchase, you get a weird situation where people can have exponentially more money than you, and they have to literally invent bullshit that does barely anything more, but costs insane money, just so that they could show that they can actually get something for that difference in wealth.

But that’s not how things work “up there”, in the real world. There, wealth/power is real, and it’s measured in soul-stuff. There, orders of magnitude do much more than buy stuff that’s invented so that you could pretend to be able to do more. The power differential is real, the way a power differential between a fire cracker, a 1 ton bomb and a thermonuclear device is real. Here, if you’re more powerful you can smoke an expensive cigar on your superyacht while you wait for the delivery of your new Rimac Nevera to complement your fleet of Bugattis. Among the Gods, if you’re more powerful you can correct the timeline, selectively freeze time, spend twenty years doing something and then go back twenty years in time to use the results instantly, you can create a universe to test a hypothesis, and you are actually spiritually capable of functioning on the same level with the fellow Gods. Here, it’s a silly game of pretence, where you act as if your power actually matters. There, it actually matters.

And the thing is, the effort it takes to earn a billion dollars, if we disregard luck which is actually hugely important, is actually comparable to the effort one would have to make in order to attain actual spiritual advancement that would produce actual, non-bullshit power differential in the real world, and this world so successfully hides those results, that barely anyone bothers with it.