A Night on the Town

Last night, Kevin and I attended a fancy party put on by the company for which I work. I work just one day a week at the local Air Force base for a contracting company.

  We rarely dress to the nines.  It was fun!  That suit Kevin is wearing is the same one he wore to our wedding, 15 years ago!  But my dress is different :-).

   We had a lovely time after a rocky start.  We got lost on the way there.

  There is some irony there.  Earlier on Saturday, Kevin was looking at ads and came across a GPS system for...I don't know, not a WHOLE lot of money.  He asked me if we should get one.  And I scoffed.  NO, we don't need no silly GPS system!  I am QUITE capable of looking up maps on the internet.  We don't need another gadget, and we don't need to spend the money.  We never get lost.

   And yes, I did get a map to our party.  I looked it up, found the right spot, printed it out, and brought it with us.  But, I confused Patterson Rd. with Patterson Blvd.  We wanted the latter, and the map took us to the former.  So there we were, driving the streets, without a map at all as we discovered the car we were in had no local map.

  Kevin called his mother (who was watching the children) and she was able to direct us towards the right place.  We found it and weren't even late.  I was thinking it was going to be a short and disappointing evening, but we overcame with Kevin's mother's help and Kevin's flare for direction. 

  So maybe a GPS is a good idea, hmmmm....

  We sat at a table with my boss and his wife and had an interesting discussion.  My boss grew up in New York with a father who was a surgeon and therefore quite well off.  BUT, their family had friends who were seriously rich.  I mean like billionaires. 

  This was interesting to me because Kevin and I had been talking about that giant lottery this week.  I don't know how much it was for, like $500 million or so.  We're good enough statisticians to know we'd never win if we did play, but we also know that we'd probably destroy our lives if we were unfortunate enough to win.  As Kevin says, playing the lottery is the classic lose-lose situation.

 Why would we destroy our lives?  Well, that much money just has to be hard to manage, or at least I think it is for most people.  There are plenty of studies showing most lottery winners really do struggle and most are unhappy.  They lose their motivation to be blessings to those around them, and start spending wildly and using money foolishly.  A surprising number manage to spend it all in a short amount of time.

  One thing that strongly occurs to us is that our kids would probably have a really hard time with life.  Why?  Because they'd have very little motivation to work hard.  Why work hard and be thrifty and all those wise, sensible things when your parents are super wealthy?  And a lazy, entitled, adult is just not a pretty sight.   A lazy, entitled adult is not a blessing and is usually unhappy.

  So I mentioned those thoughts to my boss, and asked him what those very wealthy families did to raise productive adults.  There are wealthy families (like the Kennedys) who produce people who are ambitious, hard workers.  I disagree with the Kennedy's political views, but they are at least motivated to do something with their lives.

  My boss said that question was a hot button topic, because most of the families he knew did NOT do well with passing any kind of work ethic on to the next generation. The children of those families were 3rd or 4th generation wealthy and they were lazy, selfish, and spoiled. 

  That was not a surprise to me and it confirmed my belief that riches are truly a challenge.  Jesus said so, therefore it is true :-). 

  So we can be happy that we're not wealthy. We have plenty of money to meet our needs and some of our wants, and that is a good place to be.