Fable Number Five | The Entrepreneur

Once upon a time, there was an entrepreneur in a big city who was known for having money. He’d made millions of dollars in his career, moving from one economic triumph to another. No one knew where he got his money from. All that they knew was that he was always doing something. He was always busy with creating some business deal or finalizing an invention. Being a lawyer by trade but no longer practicing, he’d amassed a wealth of information about business and the law, but also human nature. No matter what the various economic cycles did, he appeared to be making money. Even during the worst of times, he seemed opulent in his acquisition of riches.
People around the city often asked him where he got his money from.
“How does one amass a fortune such as yours?” they would often say. “How does one be rich?”
“I don’t know,” said the Entrepreneur. “What I do is really very simple, actually. It’s not that sophisticated. Anyone can do it. It just takes a little bit of effort.”
Nobody believed him when he said this. They seemed to believe that he had some magic powers or that he had some otherworldly intelligence. They couldn’t believe him when he said that he was just a normal guy.
At one point, there was a deep recession in the land. Everyone was losing their shirts, and it was possible that the global economy, not just that of the nation but the entire world together, could shrink soon.
But the Entrepreneur was unphazed. Having survived many downturns in his life, he was certain that this would pass as well. When people asked him his outlook on the world which lay ahead, the Entrepreneur simply replied that he would take it day by day, that he would not rush into any preconceived notions of how the world should work or how things would happen.
Eventually, the general malaise of the body politic turned into a full-fledged panic. People pulled all their money out of the banking system; books were burned. There were protests, which turned into riots, which turned, finally, into organized criminal enterprises. There were many kidnappings. The Entrepreneur was single, lived alone and didn’t have children.
Every night, the news was full of stories of death and destruction, the ravages of time, the elimination of freedoms and the increasing of taxes. There were calls to oust the president on one side and for the other they felt that all future elections should be canceled.
People responded as people do. But that didn’t change the Entrepreneur’s approach. Calm and centered, without ceremoniousness or self-doubt, the Entrepreneur was on vacation during all of this: taking his Yacht out to the Atlantic Ocean, visiting Rome, going skiing in Aspen. He thought of things as they were and then smiled.
Writing to his mother, he told him of all the grand adventures he’d been on. How he was able to achieve many of his longest-desired goals and how he was thinking of expanding his operations yet again. His mother had no idea of what he could be doing, but she knew one thing: it was working. He’d achieved so many of his goals in his life. Things weren’t perfect for him – they never were, not for anybody – but he was living a life of opulence and success that many could not claim.
The economy continued to slide into decline.
One day, the Entrepreneur went to his doctor. The doctor informed the Entrepreneur that he had a rare illness that could not be cured with normal medicine. The Entrepreneur was nonplussed. What would he do about this?
He expressed his fears to his mother both over the phone and in person.
“What am I going to do? I always just dealt with illnesses in the past. I always just had enough money to buy the medicines that I needed. Everything would clear up in a week, no matter how painful the illness was.”
“And now?”
“And now, I don’t know where to go. I’ve been thing about this lately. That life often feels like it’s slow, thinking death. Don’t berate me.”
“Son, I raised you well. You are the strongest boy I ever gave birth to. It’s true. You are so strong. You’ve done so much in your life, traverse every mountain and dove into every river. You came out on the other side. And now is the time when you must just give up control. You’re not in control of this. This one thing, just this once is above your pay grade.”
“Do you want me to believe in God? I can if that will help.”
“This isn’t about God. Don’t bring him into this. This is about you, son. This is about what you want. This is about creating a life. A future.”
“You think I have a future?”
“Yes, son. If you have breath in your lungs, you have a future.”
The Entrepreneur left his mother that day and went back to work. Making business deals. Doing the kinds of things that only he could do. Creating the kind of wealth and prosperity that would have been impossible just a few short decades ago. This was his life. This was who he was.
The economy continued to get worse. More people lost their homes in the next six months than had lost them in the previous five years. Years of irresponsibility and silliness had resulted in a glut of waste that could simply not be eradicated. Yet there was a feeling that they were in the eye of the storm. Maybe it was so bad that it was kind of manageable. They at least knew what they had.
One day, the Entrepreneur received a message. It was from the IRS. It claimed that they had made a clerical mistake, resulting in a debt of 10 million dollars, which he would have to pay, unfortunately.
At the same time, his illness took a turn for the worse. Completely wiped out financially, and with little energy to continue, within a month the Entrepreneur had left his home and moved into a hospice. He slept there every day, the world around him going mad, never being able to express his feelings on the issue or even see a way of making it better.
The Entrepreneur got so sick that he started to forget who he was. His hair turned white and then fell out. His teeth fell out. He could barely breathe, much less eat. He spent hours sleeping. One day during morning exercises, he died peacefully.