Being Able to Afford to be Eccentric

I've been reading a lot of articles in the news lately about the gap between the rich, poor, and middle class. One thing I've noticed and thought about is the fact that if you're a multimillionaire or a billionaire, you can do stuff that, if you were poor or even homeless, would make you look insane; people will instead refer to you as eccentric. People will celebrate so-called eccentric behavior that a billionaire might do, that they would look down upon if a homeless person did it.

Here's an example. The late Steve Jobs, despite his contributions to our modern world (although from my understanding Steve Wozniak was more of the actual computing genius while Jobs was much better at the business aspect, but I digress) an extremely eccentric person. He was not only a vegetarian, but ate strictly only certain types of fruits, which would make the average vegetarian do a double take. At least during his early years Jobs went about barefoot in the Apple offices (and at Atari where were worked beforehand), and would go without bathing for an extended period of time (not to mention he could be, quite frankly, a jerk to say the least).

One of the most eccentric aspects of Steve Jobs's behavior was probably the fact that he would stick his bare feet into a toilet and flush it. Apparently he found this therapeutic.

Now, if you went into a public bathroom and saw a homeless man doing this, you would probably think to yourself, "What the Hell?!" And even the most Steve Jobs loving people probably think this particular aspect of his behavior was above and beyond any resemble to normalcy. But Steve Jobs, due to this riches and contributions to the computer industry, his legacy is secure and people will at least look past his toilet-assisted foot massages. If anyone else did that people would write them off. And you would think that Steve Jobs, the billionaire, would have been able to find another way to relax, such as getting massages, maybe going to therapy (he seemed like someone who could have used it), and so on.

I'm not exactly sure what the takeaway is from my little stray observation. I'm not even sure it's a unique observation by any means, I'm sure that plenty of people have noticed this. I guess the lesson from this is, if you are a little bit different and people are ignoring you and putting you down, the best thing to do is create a company and become a multibillionaire, and then everyone will talk about how much of a genius you are.