Comment by ericmcer

Necessity is too fallible though, if Bezos was driven by necessity he would have sold Amazon in 1996 and retired.

That level of success requires either just pure psychopathic drive or some kind of deep anger that forces you to keep proving yourself again and again.

Beyond the lack of safety nets, etc., we just have a culture in the USA where you continually have to compete to prove your value as an individual.

There was some story I read where Farmers wanted to get immigrant laborers to work longer hours, so they offered a temporarily increased hourly rate. Like for the next month we pay $5/hr instead of just $3. The thought was workers would work like mad to hoard as much of the increased rate as they could. The opposite happened, they started working less because they just wanted $X/month and then to relax the rest of the time. That always stood out to me as a stark example that our American psychology is not at all universal, and is kind of perverted in certain lights.