Replies (2)

• @soulcutter@ruby.social 2026-09-24 21:08

  @tante@tldr.nettime.org it reminds me of the divide between nobles and peasants. Except less self-aware

  Open ##4839038

• @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-09-25 06:59

  @tante@tldr.nettime.org Children often behave like this. They do things on the boundary of acceptable behaviour to learn where those boundaries are. It’s almost never a conscious ‘what can I get away with’ thing, it’s just a thing they do to understand what is permitted. The morbidly wealthy regress to this, I suspect, because they either never had boundaries enforced (hereditary wealth) or suddenly have them removed. Most people have boundaries enforced by a bunch of different things. Laws, social constraints, economic constraints, and so on. When you become richer, some of the economic constraints go away. But so do some of the social ones: people around you are less likely to call you out for being rude if they depend on you for income. Eventually, so do the legal ones. I suspect that this also triggers some paradox-of-choice-like anxiety. As constraints are removed, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed by possibilities. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of this is driven by a subconscious desire to find some boundaries and have them enforced so that they can, like the rest of us, reason about the space of possible actions more reliably.

  Open ##4840852