She is sad because others are saying yes to fancy popcorn. I am sad because no one's ever offered me fancy popcorn (whether I would I like fancy popcorn is a question for another day, but I am fairly certain given my like for popcorn and fancy things, I likely would care much for fancy popcorn albeit 100% hypothetical in nature).

Asking who is sadder, or who ought to be saddest won't solve anything.

However, maybe asking how to get to a point where everyone who may want fancy popcorn is asked whether they would indeed like some fancy popcorn could be a step in the right* direction. At the very least, it would be somewhat nicer than the present situation where there is clearly fancy popcorn to be had but not enough people to eat it, so there is tasty popcorn being wasted!

*my concepts of right and wrong may be improperly skewed because of the possibility of tasty popcorn.

"They’re unbelievably, remarkably, terrifyingly good at it. Every year around 25 percent of employed Yale graduates enter the consulting and finance industries. At Harvard and Stanford, the numbers are even higher."

All right, I'll join you in sadness.

The best minds of our generation are going into the consulting and finance industries?!

Oh, the humanity!

It seems on the face of it that a lot of smart people are worrying about money. But from where I stand and what little I know of the world and the world of smart people, it's more like they're choosing the path of least resistance...which is more or less the choice they're told they want which may be in part happening because if I had a TON of money lying around I'd probably be more inclined to trust smart(er) people with it. So I'd probably be willing to pay for that, and thus whoever had my cash would in turn prop up a system where I'd get the most bang for my buck.

Is money really the root of all evil, or is it greed?

It's greed, not money.

Money can be used to do wonderful things: have experiences, help people, build organizations.

Don't ever trust smart(er) people with your money. Smart(er) people have demonstrated that they're just as good at losing money as the not smart(er) ones.

And I can appreciate that right now it's hard just to live.

But I look back on my 20s and I admit that I struggled to live, too.

Knowing that it's greed, the next question would be how to eradicate it, since logically that's how you make things better, by getting rid of flaws. Or maybe we need enough of it to keep people motivated to do stuff to satisfy their little greedy desires, but it needs an off switch somewhere.

Everything struggles to live, although not always in the best of ways. For example, I almost stepped on a sparrow yesterday. It'd injured its wing somehow so it could only flap about a foot away from danger if it had to, so it figured if it stayed still most things larger than itself would ignore it. It didn't know how to take into account that it was in a parking lot, though, and people and cars usually don't stop to avoid squishing small birds.

Greed is hard to eradicate.

Every human seems to have some of it hard wired into our DNA.

The good news is that every human also has some capacity for compassion.