Saving Her Billionaire

Chapter 2

As Nate buried his hands in his face he realized that he was doing this for the first time in his life. He found this rather odd, and he found his contemplation of the oddness of the first time he had ever had to display his grief like this to be rather odd as well, but this was beside the point.

His analysis of this expression of grief helped him to cope with what he was currently dealing with, so Nate decided to proceed with this line of thought. He decided that being able to simply ignore the problem for just a moment, the smallest of segments of time, would allow him to give himself some time to process what he was going through, and in doing so be able to deal with the situation in a way that was responsible and mature.

And so, he began to contemplate the fact that he had never before in his life buried his face in his hands. He pondered the reason behind this and realized it was because he had never before had a reason to bury his face in his hands. He had never been faced with a problem so overwhelming that he had to do this, hide himself from the world in such a way, hide behind the curtains of his own two hands in a rather futile attempt to insulate himself from the world and its relentless cruelty.

Nate realized that, for the first time in his life, he was coming face to face with the cruelty of the world so many people faced on a daily basis, and this unsettled him. How privileged was he? How utterly spoiled had he always been? Had his life really been spent in such a bubble that he would be able to spend it without ever doing something as seemingly innocuous as burying his face in his hands?

Nate had always been well off. He was the son of the majority shareholder, CEO and chairman of one of the world’s most valuable commodity trading companies in the world. His father’s company dealt in transactions that accumulated to the billions every single year. His father earned so much money that the very thought of poverty was alien to him. The very concept of not being able to afford something was utterly foreign to the point where he simply couldn’t comprehend it at all. Even if it was something luxurious like a private jet, Nate and his family had always been able to buy what they wanted. Luxury was the norm, and if one lived their life utterly mired in the most grandiose and decadent of luxuries one tended to become separated from the day to day activities of life. Life became a series of parties and social events, it became something you took for granted, and now that his father had died Nate was starting to realize just how much he had taken the very concept of life for granted.

He was extremely upset right now, but he had to not think about it. He felt like if he thought about the fact that his father had suddenly had a heart attack he would end up going crazy. How could this be happening? How could his father, a man that had always seemed utterly invincible, die in such an innocuous way? A heart attack seemed so… normal. It did not seem like the way a financial juggernaut like his father would die. It was the way common people died.

Nate realized that he had never even considered the possibility of his father’s death. In his thirty years of life, Nate had never once pondered the fact that his father would die some day, leaving him to run everything. He was starting to realize just how privileged and insulated he had been all his life. He was starting to realize that the bubble he had spent his entire life in was exceptional, singular even amongst the bubbles the rich put themselves in. Being the son of someone that was not just rich but among the ten richest men in the entire world meant that one was considered rich even among the rich. Billionaires looked at his father with awe, because where they had a few billion his father had a few dozen.

He began to reflect on how he had always gotten everything he had wanted in his life. He began to realize the extent of his privilege was such that he had not just gotten everything he could possibly have wanted, he had gotten every single thing that anyone in the world could want, and this was not just confined to the ability to buy what he wanted when he wanted it.

Nate had gone to the best private school in the world. This school was so prestigious that pretty much every student that went there was the son of either a billionaire or a very high level politician or government official of some sort. Nate had grown up among incredibly powerful people. He had grown up in an environment that was so sequestered, so separated from the real world that it was absolutely ridiculous and it was only now, with Nate over a decade into his adult life, that Nate was beginning to realize it.

Going to this school had gotten him a lot of privileges that he hadn’t even thought about. He had gotten the kind of privilege that people in the middle class didn’t even dream about because they simply could not imagine it. The computers in the lab at his school had cost as much as two months rent for most normal people. This was ridiculous, of course. What need did school students have for such powerful machines? What could such expensive computers give that slightly cheaper computers would not? The only reason anything is ever this expensive was that it was a status symbol, and that was exactly what these expensive computers had been. In fact, pretty much everything in Nate’s school had been nothing more than just another status symbol, just another way for the students of the school to feel superior to everyone else.

Nate was starting to realize that that encompassed a lot of what the rich tried to do. In everything they did, they attempted to distance themselves from the real world. With their yachts as big as houses, costing as much as most people made in ten years, with their houses so ridiculously huge that it could span the entire square footage of a small city, with their cars that had bells and whistles that most of them would never even use. The rich simply tried to make themselves better than the common man, they tried to portray the people that could not afford such things as some sort of ‘other’, a foreigner that was not welcome even in the headspaces of these phenomenally wealthy people who ruled the world and all of its money.

He thought back and began to count all of the things that described just how privileged he was. He began to think of all of the things he had gotten in his life and tried to think of how they were different from what normal people received. As he buried his face in his hands for the very first time in his entire life, Nate tried to check his privilege and count all of the things he had taken for granted that normal people would have treasured. After all, he had taken his own father for granted.