THE FEED
The Nervous Breakdown is Accepting DonationsLOS ANGELES 12 February 2010 |
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The guy in the picture is named Karl Rabeder. He’s an Austrian millionaire, and he’s in the process of giving away his entire fortune. All of it. To charity.
He’s keeping nothing for himself. Or his wife.
“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive—it prevents happiness to come.”
After unloading his entire fortune, he and his wife will be moving into “a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.”
Mr. Rabeder? Are you a fan of peripheral American online literary magazines?
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Fuck, man. Rich people get everything. Even the best access to karma.
“Nothing” to a rich person, though, in my experience, is usually not the same as “nothing” to a poor person.
Call me cynical, but unless he is trying to starve he and his wife to death, my guess is that he will keep something.
I don’t know. He sounds pretty determined.
Even if he is, I am still annoyed.
What must be his goal in doing something like that to himself and his loved one? Why would someone so consciously undermining all the basic rules of survival, like, “have money to buy food.” Yeah, money complicates things, but so does starving to death.
What’s he going to do? Eat twigs and berries?
In anticipation of the inevitable question, “Is there any way he could NOT annoy you?” I offer the following:
Yes. He could keep $15K a year for himself and his wife and move into a crappy apartment in downtown Chicago with a bedroom window within spitting distance of the El.
THEN I would believe he was a martyr.
Rabeder may have been reading Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and was inspired when Japhy came into the picture speaking of the Chinese scholar Han Shan who left the city for the mountains, leaving all material possessions behind.
It could be genuine. Only Karl Rabeder knows. Either way, after he has given millions to The Nervous Breakdown I just want him to know I have zero qualms accepting his money to pay off my student loans.
Japhy was kind of a tool. Ray kinda knows it, too. Why didn’t Rabeder pick up on that?
That said, I wouldn’t throw a check back in the man’s face, either. Might shout “sucker!” over my shoulder as I ran away, though.
Dear Mr. Rabeder,
I accept Visa and PayPal.
I saw this story the other day and found it amusing. “I started off poor and was unhappy. Then I thought that having more ‘stuff’ would make me happy so I worked hard, generated income and became wealthy – and was still unhappy. So now I’ll have a knee-jerk reaction in the opposite direction and this time I’ll be happy. I’m just sure of it!”
Um. Maybe you’re just an unhappy person, Herr Rabeder, and it has nothing to do with your material possessions or lack thereof. Perhaps you should have started small and traded in the glider collection for some decent therapy. And – I don’t know – maybe stop hanging out with pretentious assholes. I do up a pretty good pulled pork and cornbread BBQ – swing on by some time. I won’t even charge you an Audi. But keep your damned money – you earned it, it’s yours and enjoying it doesn’t equate to victimizing people who haven’t made themselves multimillionaires.