What Is Old Money? Defining Capital
It’s been like this since birth—never made any incremental gains, always fixated on the existing stock.
Many people are naively天真, not in terms of personality, but because they’ve never experienced the alienation that capital imposes on a person.
Imagine you have no job and most of your expenses and income come from investments. What would your mindset be? You’d value money extremely heavily, because it’s your lifeline.
Money is capital. Your bank deposits are capital. Let me ask you: what rate of return do your spare funds actually generate? Or are they outright producing negative returns? Don’t tell me it’s because you don’t have enough money—no, it’s because you’re the problem.
With smaller capital, it’s easier to micro-manage; your personal abilities can be leveraged across every asset, every dollar. But as capital scales up, you grow increasingly overwhelmed, and returns trend toward mediocrity.
A person who survives solely by directing capital cannot avoid sliding further into calculating behavior. This process is precisely what we call the alienation of humans by capital.
If you want to become a great general, you’ll inevitably embrace deception and wrestle with inner demons; if you want to master the game of money, you will be alienated. Professional money players, living off opulent comforts and outmaneuvering others, grow more calculating the deeper they sink into the practice.
You say you want to marry into old money, to parasitically feed off the last-heirs of old fortunes—what does this even mean? It means you want to drain the lifeblood of those very same vampires.
The Jia family in Dream of the Red Chamber was a hollow shell; they relied on consuming Daiyu’s inheritance to throw an elaborate birthday banquet for the elders, then reneged afterward and married Baoyu to someone else. If you have nothing better to do, watch the gothic animated film Corpse Bride to really grasp how old money devours inheritances and how victims end up shouldering the blame. (And don’t forget the romantic swindles and Ponzi schemes out there.)
