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I had very mixed feelings visiting the Mercer Museum. It's basically this guy who was obsessed with castles his whole life and always wanted to live in one, backpacked around Europe for 8 (!!) years after graduating college, and came back to use his rich aunt's money to build himself a castle and live in it.

I thought the collection was interesting, but his whole life seemed kind of one long vacation where he tried to learn a lot of different things and achieved nothing in particular.



So what?

Dude was a collector of art and old tools, sold his own art, was the architect for his own buildings, and wrote several books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Chapman_Mercer

Most people (including most scientists, artists, writers, businesspeople, etc.) never “achieve something in particular” by this kind of standard.

Certainly plenty of “idle rich” do significantly less socially beneficial work than Mercer. If you start looking around at the rich more generally (e.g. people whose names are on university buildings) a substantial proportion were crooks of one type or another.




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