Thread by @abigaildisney

Hello to the folks at @Upworthy I have always wondered about who you all are and what your mission is. I am aware that you are looking to promote wellbeing and positivity and that is great, but I fear that when you filed this piece under "prosperity" 1/
upworthy.com/abigail-disney…

You might have missed the point of my whole piece. Perhaps I neglected to explain this part of it. Having too much money is the opposite of "prosperity" if you define prosperity as something more expansive than having money. Yes, I was taught how to grow money, 2/

How to hoard money and how to keep it away from the government lest it get "wasted." Whether that little chestnut is indeed true is a discussion for another time. But if you have a lot of money and you do not spend significant time 3/

understanding how to grasp the meaning of money you will be a miserable and unhappy soul. Many people with money are therefore not "prosperous" in the way I suspect you mean to use the word. Quite the opposite, in fact. A feeling of impoverishment can run quite deep 4/

In the people who never grasp that money is a social tool, not a marker of significance or a measure of a person's value. And as a social tool, it only matters insofar as it acts within the lives of others and not just your own. Once one opens up to the idea that money 5/

Has meaning when one uses it, the impulse to amass and to hoard drops away and one begins to wonder why one thinks that leaving it, for instance, in the form of shares of stock in companies that do active damage to the world (as most wealthy people do) 6/

is a morally neutral act rather than one that dishonors the social and ethical obligations of a person with money. One will also wonder how, then, to use one's money in a way that is positive rather than negative or neutral. 7/

Urging people to follow the "advice" (tho I prefer the word indoctrination in this context) of my class, as this piece seems to imply people should, is destructive and problematic. I wish every wealthy person on earth would read 8/

and take to heart @mackenziescott 's announcement from earlier this week. It is the antidote to my peice in the Atlantic. And it ends in a spectacular manner we would all do well to take to heart.. that is with Rumi's beautiful exhortation 9/
mackenzie-scott.medium.com/seeding-by-ced…

“A candle as it diminishes explains,
Gathering more and more is not the way.
Burn, become light and heat and help. Melt.”

May all wealthy families begin the process of melting, welcome the gift of diminishing, and enjoy the pleasures of rejoining the human race. END/