(Dobbs) What DON'T Power, Fame, and Fortune Buy?
You might be ultra-successful, but you probably still have to do a stint in the dentist's chair.
How different are our lives from the lives of people deemed by some as the most successful in society? The super-powerful, the super-famous, the super-rich?
In some ways, monumentally. They live in bigger homes for sure, and have more of them. They have their own airplanes, and don’t have to take off shoes for the TSA. They can have someone else go fetch fresh milk when they run out. And they don’t have to think twice when they have their eyes on a fancy new car.
But notwithstanding those standards of success, in other ways both major and minor, their lives are no different than ours. Like for example, in a dentist’s chair.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was the one in the chair, my mouth wide open, instruments poking and probing and piercing at my teeth. It’s probably fair to say, while we appreciate what our dentists do, none of us really relishes the time we spend in their chairs. It doesn’t qualify as “torture,” although “pleasure” doesn’t pop into my head either.
But here’s the thing: anyone lucky enough to have a dentist at all has to endure it. None is exempt. The likes of Bill Gates, Meryl Streep, LeBron James, Ariana Grande, Stephen Spielberg, Nancy Pelosi, Tom Brady, Elon Musk; you just know, they all put in their time at the dentist’s. Even the Queen of England has to sit still, mouth agape, for the dentist. So does the President of the United States. Vladimir Putin too. That shiny new ring on the Super Bowl’s winning quarterback doesn’t spare him a stint in the chair.
No matter who you are— including those with power, fame, and fortune— there are some things in life that are common to most of us, rich or poor, black or white, female or male, gay or straight, educated or uneducated, conservative or liberal, compassionate or corrupt.
There’s one man who is super-rich and, because of it, super-famous and super-powerful, who talked about this to his company’s staff several years ago. Warren Buffett joked that because of his wealth, he can buy a more expensive suit than most of us can, yet when he wears it, he said self-deprecatingly, he still manages to make it look cheap. But he also made earnest observations about what we all, in some ways, experience— and sometimes suffer— no matter how successful others think we are.
On the mundane side of life, he pointed out to his audience, “Seven hours a day, you’re in bed. You’ve got exactly the same mattress I’ve got. We’re at parity, I can’t outdo you in terms of my sleeping enjoyment.”
Pretty true.
“We live in a place that’s cold in the winter and warm in the summer,” he went on, “we watch the Super Bowl on big screen TVs, you do it and I do it.”
True again, even if he has the means to escape to a better climate when his (in Omaha) goes bad. But watching the Super Bowl? From the size of the screens I see at big box stores, I doubt that just because he’s super-wealthy, his is any bigger than what anyone can pick up at Walmart.
“Health is enormously important” he said on a more serious note, “and that’s a matter of a fair amount of luck.” So true. How we take care of ourselves plays a role in the state of our health, but how we’re born— the genes passed on from our parents— plays one too. Power, fame, and fortune can’t conquer dire DNA.
That’s a theme I sometimes struck with donors when I was the fundraising chair for a superb non-profit hospice where I live. I usually summed it up in six words: “Disability, disease, and death don’t discriminate.” Cancer’s the most obvious example. Some people get better care of course than others, but for the most part that only mitigates the trauma. It doesn’t prevent it.
And for all his wealth, a man like Warren Buffett, just like the rest of us, runs the risk of cancer. And has to ache his way through the flu. And change the roll when the toilet paper runs out. And put in his time in the dentist’s chair. There are just some things we can have in common, no matter who we are.
Then there’s been Covid. When you saw Queen Elizabeth sitting isolated and alone in a pew at the Windsor Castle memorial service last year for her husband Prince Philip, you had to understand that everybody was vulnerable. Lockdowns and masks and social distancing didn’t just disrupt life for us mere mortals. They disrupted life for all of us.
Columnist Frank Bruni touched on this last week in The New York Times, telling how he awakened several years ago with blurred vision and doctors told him he’d had a rare kind of stroke. At best, he’d have permanently poor eyesight. At worst, he’d go blind.
He says it made him newly alert to a fundamental truth: “There’s almost always a discrepancy between how people appear to us and what they’re actually experiencing; between their public gloss and private mess; between their tally of accomplishments— measured in money, rankings, ratings and awards— and a hidden, more consequential accounting.”
Put more simply, you never know what’s going on behind the closed doors of the powerful, the famous, or the indescribably rich. But it’s a safe guess that some of what’s going on behind their doors isn’t much different than what’s going on behind ours.
The delusion, Bruni writes, is "that you’re grinding out your days while the people around you glide through theirs, that you’ve landed in the bramble to their clover.” The metaphor to remember is, everyone with a dentist has to sit in the dentist’s chair.
Which brings me back to Warren Buffett. He would be the last to rebut Mae West, the Hollywood sex symbol from the 20th century who famously said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, rich is better.” But while acknowledging that “rich” buys security and comfort that “poor” doesn’t provide, Buffett told his audience that those are not the best measure of success. “You will measure your success in life,” he said, “by how many people really love you. You can’t buy love.”
The truest of anything he said.
He then went on to tell a story about his measure of success.
“I’ve got this friend who came out of Auschwitz. She still, when she looks at people… the one question in her mind is, ‘Would they hide me?’ I know people who have a tremendous amount of money. No one would hide them. They don’t have anyone’s respect. They’ve got their attention maybe with money… but the truth is that nobody would hide them. And if you’ve got a lot of people that would hide you, you will have a very successful life.”
Although you still might to abide a spell in the dentist’s chair.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Well spoken" as always Greg. And--===death is the price of life for all of us.
Wonderfully written, oh so true, and a great perspective. Thank you