Opinion: Bottom Line - Video

How Does it Feel to make... x?

     In the video above there are two men working for a living in the US, one's income is $11,000 per day, the other is $60 per day.  The video follows each through the day as they work.  One works in Day Trading on the Stock Market, the other works by app-based, food delivery.

    Below is my commentary and opinion on this video and it's impact on me.

Disparity

From the get-go, it is fairly apparent that there is a HUGE disparity between the two men.  One's income is roughly 150 times greater than the other.  The monstrous difference in income between these two, who may not know about the other, is it a commentary on life?  Is this a commentary on choices or even a commentary on race?

I think that the way that YouTube is going with actual shows, leads to these sorts of short-documentaries.  People are discovering that they can showcase lesser known issues on a grand scale, like 60 Minutes in 6.

The commentary is left out.  There is no famous person, voice-over telling us what it's about.  We're left to figure that our for ourselves.  Maybe you wish to vastly wealthy, or maybe you're the wealth that you have isn't monetary and think that vast wealth isn't what brings the true joy into your life. But it's hard to judge one's reaction to something one can only dream about.  Until you live with it daily, you'll never really know it.

The video does seem to bring into contrast a difference based on money alone, likely because it is a pertinent topic in the world.  The lower earner does say that he wishes that he had more money, but that it probably wouldn't change him. I'm sure that the wealthier person doesn't wish to be poorer, but he never talks about how the wealth changed him (although he does say that he's always been frugal).

There's a ticker in the upper right-hand corner of the frame that shows the amount of money that each man is making through out the day and it keeps the tally for each. The lower-earner gets excited when he gets a tip of $35 from one of the deliveries, while $35 ticks by every 5 minutes for the high-earner

Pursuit of HAPPYness

Toward the end of the video each is asked if he is happy and we get a slightly different response.  One is happy, but feels an emptiness in his life, the other is happy and says that he would be regardless of how much money he had.

Each man appears to be happy in the video and most might assume that having a significant income would make one feel that way.  But for the man who has never had millions, he cannot comment on having had millions in order to know if it would have changed him.  Whereas the one who has millions recognized that money-issues had caused trouble in the lives of his parents.

Society and culture often repeats to us that we all need to get as much as we can to have a good life, but the pursuit of happiness is never defined as the acquisition of wealth, although often circumscribed as such. It might be generally accepted that a person with vast wealth will live better and be happier.

Comparative Dissonance

This video, I feel, attempts to bring to light the large financial gap between the lives of two people in who live in the same place.  But it, like so many other videos that show only a difference in money, miss out on so many other good comparisons that might not carry the same weight in the world.  It may be because we all have a shared experience in money and that trying to show a comparison between two religions, political perspectives, or moral attitudes is more difficult.

Conclusion

There's no two ways about it, one of these people is running a business of his own and the other is just working for other people.   The higher-earner is generating income from many sources and definitely did not start out that way, he worked his way up to where he is now.  The other, lower-earner has yet to make his move to create a business (albeit he does run a YouTube channel with about 5k subs).

On the surface, just watching these two men live their lives, it is apparent to me that there is a difference, but very little back-story is given.  The story-tellers seem only to want to compare the current perspectives of difference of income. It's almost like taking a quote out of context.  No person is dimensionally flat either physically or characteristically. As I noted earlier, there is no commentary, so we can draw our own conclusions.  But like so many other click-bait shows and links, maybe the implication is all in the deception of the title.

What is the Bottom Line.