“Maybe it’d stop you trying to be so desperate about making more money than you can ever use? You can’t take it with you, Mr. Kirby. So what good is it? As near as I can see, the only thing you can take with you is the love of your friends.” ~ Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff in the movie, You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
I’m going to emphasize this right up front. This is a think piece. I’m trying to figure out why a relatively small group of people are hoarding a huge amount of wealth and then telling the rest of us who don’t have wealth that we need to suffer. I mean as the quote above says, we don’t take anything with us when we die. So what is the point of accumulating so many things and so much money that you can’t even use all of it while your here? Does having all that wealth make them happy? Does keeping the masses down make them happy or are they just trying to protect themselves from some unknown threat?
Set backs, challenges, and tragedies happen to all of us. There is no getting away from those things. They happen to us to help us grow. The question is, do we accept the lessons or not?
Gary Zukav and M. Scott Peck, two people who wrote books that had a great impact on my life when I was trying to figure stuff out, made two good points. Zukav said in his book Seat of the Soul, that for some reason humans decided as a collective, that we were going to learn through chaos. We go along thinking everything is great, maybe half asleep to things going on in the world, or asleep to growth we need to make, and then a crisis happens and we have an opportunity to learn from what has happened. Or we can crawl in our shell and blame our lot on outside forces. Most of the time what happened was something inside of us that called the crisis to us.
The first line of M. Scott Peck’s famous book The Road Less Traveled is, “Life is difficult.” He goes on to say that if we accept that fact we can transcend the suffering that can plague us if we try to insist that life is meant to be easy. Life IS meant to be full of joy and connection but not necessarily to be easy. It’s meant to be full of love, creativity, and learning. But that’s different than having an EASY life.
Most of the great spiritual teachers say that it is possible to live a joyful life even in the midst of tragedy and turmoil. And perhaps learning to do that is why humans are here on this planet. It seems to me that the people who are accumulating all the wealth and all the toys don’t understand this simple truth. It has been proven that fame and fortune are not guaranteed keys to happiness. It’s only people who are willing to do internal work who have the opportunity to become truly happy. Maybe their life’s purpose brings them great wealth, but it’s not the wealth that makes them happy.
So what makes us happy? It’s nice to have plenty of money to be comfortable, as my brother says, but I wouldn’t want to have too much of it because I’d feel like I had to attend to it all the time. Maybe really wealthy people don’t feel that way. But I ask myself, how much money and possessions does one person need? And does all that wealth bring them true joy? It definitely wouldn’t make me happy unless I could use it to help lots of people.
What is true happiness and how do we acquire it? I guess the answer to that question is different for every person, but after nearly five years of chatting with people on Story-Power common themes seems to be universal. Happiness is being able to do the work that is the most fulfilling usually something creative. It’s having strong loving relationships. It’s being able to help other people, to enjoy travel, and being out in nature. Most of my guests work hard at learning from their experiences rather than concentrating on the bad things that have happened to them and replaying them over and over again to themselves and anyone who will listen.
I want to circle back to the point of the above quote with something my sister, Celeste likes to quote from one of the Kung Fu Panda movies that goes something like this, “When you try to take everything, you end up with nothing.” If that’s true, then we might be coming to the point where the billionaires might lose enough of their wealth so that the rest of us can live comfortably. I hope they have other things to help them feel fulfilled and full of happiness because it could be very sad for them if they don’t. Trying to control events outside ourselves is definitely a recipe for unhappiness.
Love, joy, contentment, connection, and happiness are all internal states of being that we cultivate as we live our lives. The outside world can be falling apart, but we can still find peace and safety by relying on something indefinable inside ourselves.
As I wrote the last sentence of the above paragraph I was reminded of the ending of the movie, Don’t Look Up (2021). A comet is going to collide with earth. If action isn’t taken to save it, Earth will be destroyed. But convincing government leaders of that fact is impossible. At the end of the movie, we see two different scenarios. The people on earth gather together to enjoy a meal, each other’s company, friendship, and love as the planet is destroyed. Only a small handful of people survive. While 22,740 years later, the wealthy and powerful people who secretly built a spaceship to take them to a distant Earth-like planet to start all over again, emerge from cryogenic sleep. The thing is, once they exit their spaceship, they are quickly eaten by Bronteroc, the inhabitants of that distant planet. It’s the perfect illustration of when you try to take everything, you end up with nothing.
Well, those are my musings. Do you have any insights you can share with me? I’d love to read what you think about this time of history in which we find ourselves and if you’re learning anything from current events.
Thanks for reading, liking and commenting.
Blessings,
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2025
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I’m so passionate about stories that I created the Story-Power Patreon Community so I’d have an excuse to talk story with other story lovers. Patreon is $5 a month for content not found on the Story-Power podcast, or on my Sage Woman Blog. They have recently instituted a free tier so you can try it out before you buy. If you’re passionate about stories, and want to talk about what you’ve learned from your favorites, come join me at patreon.com/StoryPower. Let’s share what we’ve learned from the stories we love.
Classic Cinema with the Sage-Sisters
Stories are a huge part of the way humans communicate with each other. I think all stories are allegories where we can learn all kinds of important things, not the least of which is how to understand ourselves and others better. The best stories can be told over and over from one generation to the next and still teach great lessons. Emotional Intelligence and critical thinking are two of those lessons. Celeste and I think there are many classic movies that show us the progression of where humanity is today and we want to share them with you.
Shakespeare was right, “All the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players.” The stories we tell and consume are us trying to figure out who we are, why we’re here, who we want to be, and the kind of world we want to live in.
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Sage Woman Chronicles 