All these things he listed (losing touch with friends, ruining business opportunities, treating people poorly, appearing 'higher class') happen to almost everyone at some point in life but without being rich.
All these things he listed (losing touch with friends, ruining business opportunities, treating people poorly, appearing 'higher class') happen to almost everyone at some point in life but without being rich.
Rich people have four things that go wrong in their lives: Drugs, divorce, very bad investments and entourages. Entourages being ever larger numbers of people hanging on to them and getting their expenses paid for just being friends.
Everything else pretty much takes care of itself and there are many trust funders who just live lives of little accomplishment and relative obscurity. This guy had most of those things go wrong, but he still made it out, the damage being he lost a zero or two from his wealth.
Just because one is wealthy does not mean that all your problems will suddenly go away. Yes, you won't end up on the street because you can't pay your rent, but it does create a ton of new problems that can lead to isolation.
A few that come to mind, that I've noticed with wealthy friends:
1. Time. You'll probably have plenty. You're free. What do you do all day when your old friends are working? That probably means making new friends. But it can also lead to disconnects with old friends. Most people don't understand.
2. Ulterior motives of people. Imagine you meet a person - any person. Most relatively wealthy people will assume this person wants something from them. Guess what, people DO usually want something from them. This can lead to problems bonding and/or having relationships.
3. Investing and taxes: what if I invest badly and lose all my capital? Ok, so you invest in a property in Spain and a few years later sell it. You pay $x tax. For some silly reason the authorities don't agree, and want to levy additional tax x2. On top of that, your tax lawyer isn't great, and you need to go find a new one. It'll drag on for years, going through the courts.
etc etc
Many people would say, cry me a river. Obviously it's better to be wealthy than to be poor, but it's not all it's made out to be. No therapist is going to fix that.
Problems are problems, and I personally respect that everyone has their own set of issues in life. Wealth can be a burden.
Seems like a false equivalence. What were the negative consequences of him being rich? OP laid out what he would have experienced as a minority. If the only negative consequence of being rich is every once in a while you are called on it, how is that at all equivalent to the experience described by OP?
What struck me about the experience wasn't the "Rich guy not made happy by wealth after all" part, but that he was so desperate for friends and just couldn't make them. That's why I thought it was relevant to the topic.
he describes essentially the problems and pains of 'new rich'. 'old rich' approach is different - have managers (concierge) of their wealth, of their lives, so they don't bear the burden of caring and managing the wealth in any way, only enjoying spending it. maybe it's more european thing vs US, don't know.
that said, most wealthy people and their lives are quite pathetic. deep issues inside, some described very well in the article (you basically don't have true friends, or if you have you can't distinguish them). boring easy life without adventures and intensity.
kids often spoiled beyond belief since they had super easy life without proper challenges (which is the only way to build some good strong character). if not spoiled, many are at least entitled a__holes. generally most descendants don't have the skills of their predecessors who earned the wealth.
yes they can drive around in their ferraris (great car for urban traffic), drink champagne on their boats and attend luxurious parties all the time. I have not seen a single person get truly long-term happy from it, confirmed by some people who are closer to these types.
definitely would not change my life with any of those. mountains and occasional backpacking around the world is enough to keep one happy for whole life.
The increase of wealth and fame leads to an increase of isolation and decrease of safety and trust.
Beyond a certain point, as a “known wealthy person”, you will never know if a romantic partner cares about you or your wealth. Same for your friends. Relatives. Anybody.
You will not be able to do things you’ve taken for granted - like go to the pub or to a restaurant or on a hike or ride your bike on the bike path - without additional effort and people.
I’ve thought about it this way, you have four options in life:
- not rich, not famous
- not rich, famous
- rich, famous
- rich, not famous
The last one is the best, IMO. And by rich, I mean to not need for anything. And that means having your ego in check. The worst thing I’ve ever witnessed is a literal 100+ millionaire with no peace, still trying to impress people of their wealth and self importance.
Wealth doesn't make automatically turn someone into an asshole (plenty of counterexamples). It does wreak havoc with one's social life and bring people out of the woodwork.
Since you're focusing on "normal" rich people: One of my best friends is smart but was extremely unwise when he was young.
Did a lot of drugs, didn't pay attention in uni, didn't work, didn't build the habits of a successful person. Still, he got one chance after another, and in his late 20s he actually did. From what he told me, realizing how insanely privileged he is was one of the major influences for him to change.
But still, a normal person would have been long out of chances at that point, and would fight serious debt and worklessness without any support.
You maybe cannot afford to be a total wanker forever as a rich person, but you certainly have a lot more leeway in your wankiness.
I think that’s true but the “rich” part is not really relevant. Personally I can sort of relate to his life journey, and I come from a very much not rich immigrant family. I just remember not understanding why people cared about money instead of say learning more math. But looking back there was always an implicit understanding that no matter how bad things got I could crash on the couch and get a meal at my parents place or something, so hardship never really crossed my mind.
This is correct. I mean that having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or are they just after some money? Probably the latter. It basically takes you out of the normal run of human affairs into a very isolated environment. It solves a lot of problems that, frankly, I can solve well enough now, in return for handing you a whole lot of problems that are basically unsolvable. And there are other levels that become very easy to accidentally blunder into, like blackmail, and you become the target of some fairly sophisticated actors, possibly even including state actors, looking to influence you, or drain your accounts.
Rich people tend not to talk about it as much from what I've seen, but you can, if you look a bit, find a number of accounts of people who got very famous talking about this, especially if they later fell from grace.
When I was younger, I kinda thought this was sour grapes or rich/famous people trying to feel bad for themselves, but the consistency of the stories, plus my increasing understanding of human nature and group dynamics as I get older and gather more data and think more about the data leads me to believe this is the expected outcome rather than some exceptional surprise. I also thought, eh, that's no big deal, those are the soft problems and money solves the hard problems, but now I rather significantly feel the other way around. (There is a class of money problems that is hard, especially in the medical area, but they are not all that hard.)
I'm sure there's some people who pull it off, but I'm not sure I'd be one of them.
(As a bonus observation, when you are born into and grow up in this environment, I think it produces certain characteristic pathologies that go a long ways towards explaining why elites act so consistently in certain ways throughout history. Same environment -> same result. It is not good to have leadership populated by people who have never really deeply connected with another human being, yet, the very act of being in leadership inhibits those connections, and being born into it effectively destroys them entirely.)
Here are some of the things I discovered after hitting it, and watch others do the same:
1. Getting rich makes you more of who you really are. If you're a jerk underneath it all, you'll be a bigger jerk when you hit it big...and vice versa.
2. In terms of problems, you're squeezing on a balloon. It's easy to pay the bills, but a whole new set of problems and hassles will present themselves. It's just a new set of irritants. There's just as much pain, it just comes from different sources.
3. When you can have everything you want, you have to learn to control your appetites. You can't imagine how much crap you buy when you can afford everything. It's surprisingly hard for most people to control their spending once they hit it.
4. You'll turn into the First National Bank of Bill, but your loan standards will be lower...and few people will ever pay you back.
5. Old friendships will wither and some of them will die, no matter how hard you try to maintain them. Jealousy is one reason. Subtile changes in your own personality will be the other.
5. If your pals aren't all in the same boat, and similarly rich, you'll have no one to play with.
In short: Money is a tiger. You master it, or it masters you.
I'm from a family that didn't grow up rich but a one member in particular did become rich from work. Another family member profited from a lawsuit. Both showed serious personality changes and became disconnected from the rest of the family and seemingly unaware of "normal people's" needs and concerns after that. I wonder if being rich doesn't kill a lot of the empathy we would usually have for others who spend their whole lives in financial insecurity. Once that's taken away as a worry, it's harder to relate in a genuine way to others who still think about it all the time just to make sure they can eat and pay bills.
Indeed and thus life is hard whether your poor or rich, especially for those who suddenly get mega wealthly or fame. They seem to cant handle it very well from Michael Jackson to Whitney Houston to Tony to many others.
A lot of us I imagine wanted to be in Tony's position, yet would you still want to be him with how it all went down? His mega-wealth and fame of wealth seem to be his un-doing.
It's disingenuous to say, "…regardless of what affluence he had." The thing about being wealthy isn't that you don't have to work as hard to succeed at something (well, sometimes it is). The thing about being wealthy is that you don't have to do anything, so you have all this time to focus on what you want to do—and you can fail while doing it without any major consequences. Most people can't do that. Hell, half of the people in the US are scared to take a day off of work for fear of getting fired.
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