He had a life-changing amount of money, and he squandered it in less than two decades.

A great deal of society has contempt for poor people, but that contempt can come from very different places. If someone grew up poor and was able to work their way out of poverty, they might feel contempt for those who weren’t able to do the same. Likewise, a person born into and currently in poverty might resent a downwardly mobile middle-class person, because they had far more opportunities than they did, and they squandered their chance to be upper-middle class. 

There is one group of poor people that individuals across the political and socioeconomic spectrum resent: those lucky few who were given a life-changing amount of money, but squandered it all in a couple of years. Who among us hasn’t heard stories of a garbage man winning the $40 million jackpot and spending all of it on fancy cars and way too much house, forcing him to go back to his old job? We resent him because we think that we would’ve been better and smarter with that money if we had gotten it, whether or not that is actually true or not.