Everyone thinks they want to be rich but The Great Gatsby makes it seem like being extremely wealthy is a bad way to live.  Money and power can warp your perceptions and make you careless, like the Buchanans.  Daisy runs over Myrtle because she is careless. She doesn’t stop because she doesn’t think she should have to deal with the consequences of her actions because she is rich.

Jay Gatsby is incredibly self-centered.  He doesn’t care about anyone else.  He builds a fortune only to impress Daisy and win her back.  He has no real friends and doesn’t even seem to enjoy the things his money can buy.  

I had a hard time relating to any of these characters.  I don’t have their values or kinds of life experiences.  This book, to me, was escapism, except I didn’t want to be in that world.  These characters are mostly bad people.  Nick is neutral. He has no opinion and just goes along with whatever is going on.  Having him as the narrator made it hard for me to enjoy the book because he never really spoke up when he saw things that were wrong.

Both stories emphasize the parties hosted by the main characters as ways to show just how rich they are.  It feels like a way for them to get praise from other people because they don’t really like themselves.

Their wealth makes them careless as they continue to try to find something in their lives to give it meaning.  In the case of Jay Gatsby, he thinks that winning Daisy back will satisfy him. His pursuit of Daisy ends up being the reason he gets killed.  He took the blame for Daisy when she ran over Myrtle. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Bellford gets addicted to drugs and loses his family and finally gets caught by the authorities.  He goes to jail and loses all his money.

The story of the poor boy who becomes rich is supposed to be the American Dream, but both of these stories show that there is often a bad ending to the dream.

This text is more relevant than ever, with billionaires like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk having such high profiles and their personal lives being exposed for the world to see.  Like Jay Gatsby, these men seem to have everything but they are human and their mistakes become known to the world.

For example, Bill Gates was recently shown to have been friends with Jeffrey Epstein, who was in jail for sexual assault on children.  Jeff Bezos had his text messages with a woman he was having an affair with stolen and posted in the media.  Elon Musk seems to always be in the news and gets into fights on Twitter when that seems like a waste of his time.

Like these real-life billionaires, Jay Gatsby seemed to have a fairy tale life with enormous wealth.  However, it all comes apart for him. He has an affair with Daisy but doesn’t win her back as he had planned and everyone learns about it.  Also, he is exposed as having made all of his money through illegal activity.

The lives of the rich and famous have always been subjects for art – especially when those people have the same kinds of problems that regular people do.  It brings them down to our level.