I see... so it is only your "desire" stands between you and a $1bln
In a generous mood, I assume that's your idea of humour.
However, in case it's not, perhaps some clarification might help you understand.
People come in many shapes and sizes and as many mental make-ups. In my own case, I have always been attracted to, and even obsessed with beauty and its pursuit. I left school at a time when the immediate choices were further education, two compulsory years in one of the military branches or a job that brought with it a deferment from the miltary. I took the latter option and, consequently, picked up skills that have been of some use to me. Eventually, the call-up thing was ended as a waste of lives and young peoples' opportunities because works was available in post-war reconstruction and keeping people under a military blanket was no longer a useful way of massaging the employment/unemployment figures. (Perhaps more importantly, keeping the dregs of empire together was realised to be little more than a drain on resources, a money-sink without bottom - something that in some ways it still is, long after empire.) That change allowed me to quit industry and become a photographer.
Anyway, my priorities, as I said, were beauty and being near it. Hence photography.
Money. I believe that money,
per se, has limited appeal. It is only if you have never had any, or never known closely people who do have a lot of it, that you think it the most desirable thing in the world. The reality is that everyone needs enough (a variable), and when there is enough to sustain your desired style of living, excess of it has to be found a use. And that isn't as easy as you might think. And with it comes responsibility that can dominate your life and take away the very freedoms that you imagined you were trying to win for yourself in the first place. You realise you've invented another treadmill for yourself.
In the days of the football pools, there were stories about winners who found themselves broke within a few short years. I would not be surprised to learn that the same still happens in the day of the mega lottery wins. If that doesn't tell you all you ever needed to know about money, then nothing will.
But, narrowing it down further to myself, as I know you want me to do, I am not of the very rich because I don't have the desire, the mental abilities nor dedication to the pursuit of money that that requires.
But, I have always had the
freedom to embark upon that quest had it appealed to me. That, my friend, your politcal views - so far - can't steal from me.
Rob C