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Notes -
True. These days the lifestyle value of money hits massive marginal diminishing returns quite quickly. Even those who are fortunate enough to secure enough money to secure a good life in perpetuity tend to hedonistic treadmill themselves to death
These statements are contradictory. If you can run the hedonistic treadmill high enough to exhaust arbitrarily high amounts of money, either running it higher is actually getting you significantly more (so returns aren't diminishing quickly), or there's something wrong with human nature such that we chase ever-smaller pleasures -- and human nature isn't new, so it's not a matter of "these days".
Those are separate issues. I believe the gap between the lifestyles of the middle class and the top echelons in Western society are closer than they essentially have been at any point since feudalism. Most billionaires spend just as much time as you do scrolling their phone, etcetera.
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