Randomly Generated Topic #2: What Would I Do With A Million Quid?

This topic came up on the random topic generator and it seemed like some good old-fashioned escapism and lord knows I could use some of that right now. Most unfortunately I am confined to moving as little as possible by the horrendous pain of multiple sunburn. The one sunny afternoon I'll be experiencing this holiday and it cripples me for the remainder of my time in St. Ives. At least it gives you and I some more quality time, reader.

So, £1M; a million smackers; 1,000 G's; twenty million bob; one almost-not-worth-it hour with Chris Tarrant. In this society we have built for ourselves, where not only is money king but acquiring and spending money is the activity towards almost all efforts are directed, we must all at some time have fantasised about being rich and everyone's got their own ideas about what they'd do with their money. Perhaps the best use of a fantasy budget I've ever heard is this, from TV's Family Guy:

If that were a possibility, it would be right up there on my list and at $50,000, it's an absolute steal.

What you would do with a lot of hypothetical money (especially a lottery win) is almost modern life's standard psychological test. That's pretty terrible, if you think about it: I'll learn about your character by seeing how much respect and reverance you have for the almighty dollar.

Anyway, to "win" the test, one's automatic reaction is to say, "Well the first thing I'd do is I'd give some to charity," thus hoping to give everyone the impression that you are a kind hearted and generous person who can not be corrupted by money. Essentially, you are lying but everyone knows you are, so it's fine: the next thing on your list is what everyone listens to. In truth, giving to charity is probably on everyone's list, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone for whom charity was really the first consideration or who would give most of their money away to a good cause.

Also, a million pounds sounds a lot but in today's society it isn't as spectacular as once it was. Someone said a few years ago that it now takes a fortune of at least £5M if you want to live the always desireable "millionaire lifestyle" and it's true. A nice house can set you back over a million, a few nice cars (because no millionaire ever just has one) can get rid of up to another million and sustaining just these two extravagances for merely a year could be very pricey. And then there's your kids to consider: you don't want to hand life to them on a silver platter but at the same time, being obscenely rich and not sharing it with your own kids is unthinkable. Assuming that this is money you've won or rapidly earned rather than inherited, you'd have to sort out the rest of your family too and suddenly most of the money's gone again.

Since the question is what would I do with a million pounds and I do not currently have a million pounds, we'll have to continue to assume that the hypothetical money is winnings.

Coming from a poor background, my first action would be to distribute the money around my family so they can pay off mortgages etc. I'm no financial genius but I'm going to assume that this would be extremely expensive and would leave me a couple of hundred grand down at least. After squirrelling another couple of hundred grand away for myself, extravagant gifts for friends and family would follow and the remainder would go to a poverty relief concern.

In the space of one paragraph I've just run through ONE MILLION POUNDS. How ridiculous does that sound? I've just casually tossed away more money than most of us will ever see in our lives. This comes from living in a society where the elite want us to do nothing more than work for their benefit. In return for this we are given a little bit of the powerful stuff that the elite control us with, money, and then they use their media outlets to mindfuck us into spending more money than they gave us on their products and their friends' products so they get it all back again with interest while we work for them, chasing after the dream of the millionaire lifestyle.

All this society teaches us to do is want stuff and then it jacks the price up and we want it even more because it has become a status symbol. The worst of this is that we can't escape. There is no alternative system, because we are all conditioned to unquestioningly believe that communism is evil and socialism is misguided. And above all, we have been made to no longer care for anyone but ourselves so a turn away from the capitalist dream of being the richest person in the world is unthinkable.

Rant Over. Sorry about that.