At this point in my life, I can say with almost complete certainty that enormous wealth and an exceptionally comfortable material life cannot bring happiness. At least, not for me.
I’m not saying this because I’ve personally experienced enormous wealth or some ridiculously luxurious lifestyle. But I have watched what money has done to people around me, up close, and I honestly find it hard to believe how much power we give it. Of course, I’m hesitant to say things like this because my life is comfortable now, so I don’t exactly have the moral authority to lecture anyone about money. But maybe I have at least a little right to talk about it? When I was young, I went through what my parents would call our poor years with them (trust me, below average). And I don’t feel that poverty gave me some profound baptism by suffering. I don’t feel particularly transformed by it. I’ve always had a strange distance from money.
Anyway, back to extreme wealth. I’ve started to notice that enormous wealth can prevent a lot of things from ever being triggered. It can make a person live in a kind of vacuum. Sometimes having too much money too early can leave an entire life strangely blank. And that blankness is not peace. It’s more like not even knowing what you’re missing.
I don’t know if this makes sense to everyone, but I think life sometimes needs small inconveniences. Extreme wealth can allow a person to keep postponing the search for who they actually are and what they actually want. Some forms of resistance are nothing but pain. Others force you to understand yourself. The difficult part is that you usually can’t tell the difference in advance.
I have two extremely wealthy friends. They basically never have to do anything again. Even by the most conservative calculation, as long as they spend less than eight million dollars a year, their wealth could sustain not only them but generation after generation of their descendants without really shrinking.
Do you think their lives are incredibly happy? Not at all!
I’ve spent a lot of time with them. I’ve watched the way they live, and honestly, I find it so boring. They are also trapped by problems that, from where I’m standing, sometimes look almost ridiculously easy to solve. Maybe ordinary people like you and me are supposed to envy them, but I have to say this: I don’t think their pain or their problems are any smaller than everyone else’s.
There is almost no friction in their lives. No resistance. And the emptiness and pain in their inner worlds can be enormous. Their relationships are also full of calculation. One of them worries that everyone who comes close to him is trying to use him for his money. At first I was pretty dismissive. I thought, this is so narcissistic. Who spends all day thinking about someone else’s money? Then I actually looked around and I realized something that made me deeply uncomfortable: if you removed money from the equation, a pretty large percentage of the people around him probably would not be there.
That was the first time I really began to understand a certain kind of loneliness that comes with extreme wealth, not in the cheap, sentimental sense of poor rich people having problems too. I mean something more specific. When your wealth becomes large enough to materially change the probability that people will approach you, you genuinely lose some of your ability to know whether a relationship is real. Money gives you choice but at the same time, it contaminates the data you use to understand why other people choose you.
I don’t lie when I write, so I’ve thought about this seriously: if I were genuinely given the chance to become one of them, I don’t think I would want that life. I really don’t. I believe that everything that has happened to me was an inevitable part of becoming who I am. It was the only road that could have produced this particular version of me. I have a very deep respect for, and trust in, my own fate.
After all this bullshit, I still have no idea what money actually is. I’m just increasingly suspicious that we have tied it far too closely to happiness. Money can remove a great deal of suffering. It can buy time, dignity, safety, freedom, choices, and many, many other things. But it still cannot tell you what to do with that time, who to choose, or what kind of person you have to become. Those questions always come back exactly as they were.