Who Is That Rich Jerk?

There was someone very important that I met when I was a child. He always talked about how he would one day make it big. How one day, his family would be rich and get to live in luxury. How one day, he would have everything he ever wanted or needed. It seems like we all had the same dream back then, but only half of us got to see it come true. The other half got crushed by life and are now stuck in a job with no meaning or purpose while the other half lives out their American dreams and gets rich off of everything they touch without trying or asking for anything more than what's theirs by right... the fact that they're rich.

It was only a few years ago that I met the richest man I ever knew. He's the kind of guy who used to tell everyone in my classroom and then later on in life, people who were already successful, that they could do what he had done and be just as rich or even more so. We all talked about money, about getting it all and pretending like we would buy everything we ever wanted with it. We all thought his story was something out of a movie. It's something so crazy it's almost impossible to believe but something you'd look up to as an example of how great life can really be when you have money. Then he got sick and died due to complications from diabetes...

But the thing that makes it so hard to believe is that he was someone's son. I can see him now in his country home with his fine leather furniture and custom cabinets, the kind you'd see in the movies or on HGTV. I saw it all while I was at his funeral. It's crazy to think that all of this stuff belonged to someone who not only had a son but also had a family... life really is crazy sometimes.

Six years ago, there was this guy named John who worked at a company named One Stop. He had an apartment that was expensive and he had money. He was also very quiet and polite to everyone. He paid attention while his boss gave speeches and he would sit in the back during parties and even hire other people to serve him drinks or food. I never saw him throw a punch nor did I hear him speak out against anything that happened in the office. It's crazy how he got laid off from One Stop though because they were the ones who hired him just a few months before but then terminated him, for reasons unknown to anyone but themselves, after only six months on the job...

I worked there for a few years myself. During all that time, I managed to acquire many things that wealth affords. There was this guy named Bob who fussed about how he would never be able to afford those items I had acquired but then later on, he would buy everything from what I had and my stuff was some of the cheapest in the store. My best friend also owned stock in the company and eventually became the director of the company's 328 restaurant chain that was valued at $10 Million.

Conclusion and Future:

"The rich really are different people. They're the ones who succeed and get ahead despite all the problems they encounter. The rest of us get lost in issues we can't control." -Edmund G. Brown Jr. (1931-2012)

Thus, this is where I am now: I'm 6 Years removed from my time at One Stop and 13 Years removed from when I had first met John at the company's Holiday party six years before that.