[jamesgreenleaf]

One simple and obvious lesson to point out here is that you better make peace with yourself before coming into possession of any large sum.

Money can destroy you just as easily as it can empower you. Look at what happens to a significant percentage of lottery winners.

It's an amplifier, and it can amplify your problems and self-destructive tendencies along with your desire to do good.

[datavirtue]

I've seen quite a few people go out like this. Back in the late 1990's I founded a head shop that later gave birth to multiple locations and had family members and friends getting rich. Lost two family members (dead), can't speak to another one (my father), I ended up arrested as a consequence of my brother's withdrawal symptoms, a business partner went off the deep end smoking crack and meth while leading an entourage of prostitutes and flipping a vehicle or two while ditching his family of twenty years, and my father was doing nearly the same shit while secreting hookers at his elderly mother's house. He ended up in jail on serious drug charges.

This isn't even about half the shit that went down.

So yeah, success and money can really trash lives if people aren't ready or they have underlying issues, but a lot of times you don't see it coming.

Before that we ran a fairly uneventful chain of video rental stores and otherwise led a bog normal and happy middle class life.

[avrionov]

What is a head shop?

[pasttense01]

"A head shop is a retail outlet specializing in paraphernalia used for consumption of cannabis and tobacco and items related to cannabis culture and related countercultures." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_shop

[fuzzfactor]

Money can buy so many things that people crave, and in itself has always been a subject of craving.

When toxic or habit-forming materials are involved a craving can be observed which is the type very difficult to control.

But an excess or virtually unlimited supply of a craveable requires an unusual degree of control otherwise it often does not end well and more than just the excess is lost.

Cravers will be drawn like a magnet.

Toxic materials which affect decision-making and are accepted as eccentric within popular culture can give rise to some of the most volatile situations.

[Barrin92]

Young athletes seems to be another really big case of this. Lots of people with short careers but huge earnings who either cannot handle the money or hand their finances over to people who try to take advantage of them.