Do You Know How Rich You Are?

The point of money is that it’s never enough

Recently, I found out that I’m rich

You wouldn’t know it from my crooked teeth, my sweatshop clothes, my piece-of-shit car. The cracks in my cell phone screen and the cracks in the bathroom tiles conspire against the truth.

But nevertheless, according to this study, I’m actually rich.

To be considered rich in France, where I now live, you need to make €3673 per month. Do that, and you’re making double what the average person makes. Only 4.5 million people, out of France’s population of 67.3 million, do better than that.

I’m in the top 7% of the country.

That’s a low bar. And if you make that much or more — especially in the Anglosphere — you probably don’t feel all that rich.

That’s not an accident.

It’s fun to hate the rich

Capitalism is a zero-sum game, after all. Every dollar Jeff Bezos has is a dollar you don’t get. And vice versa, I suppose.

But being rich is a moving target. After all, the point isn’t really to be rich, but to be richer. Once your material needs are met, money is just a way of keeping score.

That’s why billionaires still go to the office every day. They wouldn’t know what else to do with themselves. The nickel-plated mind it takes to acquire a fortune is not the kind of mind that can enjoy it. The train tracks and glass-smooth roads that bring me my consumer goods were built on the orders of men who couldn’t stop, who could never rest and enjoy the world they built.

Because of that, I can.

None of us, with the exception of the very sickest, actually want money. We want the things money can provide. Safety. Security. Comfort. Excitement. Peace of mind.

That’s the point of money. To be wanted. Like Sauron’s ring, like ten million TikTok thirst traps, there’s nothing behind the desire but more desire. The idea of money is that you’ll never have enough.

The characteristics of money

Look. This is the trick. Keep your eye on the cup with the ball underneath, and don’t be distracted by what my hands are doing.

Portability. Durability. Fungibility. Limited supply.

These are the characteristics of money. The whole point of the cash in your pocket, and even more so, the point of the lack of it.

Money exists because real wealth is rarely portable. A pig in the yard and a cord of firewood and a year-round creek tend to stay put.

Real wealth isn’t durable. In a bad year, the creek may run dry. You can only kill that pig once. And although you can use two pigs to make more pigs, it only takes a bad roll of the dice, a flash-in-the-pan pandemic you can’t control or foresee, to take all your little piggies away at once.

Real wealth isn’t fungible. One pig, one creek, one house is not the same as the next. Everything is worth what someone will pay for it. And what they will pay is proportional to how badly they need it.

Lock Bezos in a dungeon long enough, and Amazon is worth less than a glass of water.

Real wealth, like money, does have a limited supply. Everything real does. Even the ocean. Even the sun. The only limitless things are the things we invent.

But limitless money would be worthless. As we are all finding out in this Weimaresque inflationary period, the more money that gets passed around, the less useful it becomes. So we invented something that makes no sense, that doesn’t fulfill its fundamental function, unless some of us — lots of us — don’t have enough.

Maybe $75,000 is as good as it gets

That’s what this 2010 study by Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson school found. The old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, but we all know that isn’t true. If nothing else, it really takes the sting out of being poor.

According to the study, making more money does indeed make people happier — up to a point. But once your income reaches $75,000 per year, your happiness stops increasing.

In a PBS Newshour interview, Warren Buffet, commanding a $77 billion fortune at the time, stated that he could be very happy making $100,000 a year. His Berkshire Hathaway stocks, he claims, can’t buy him anything that he wants. He already has everything.

What about you?

How much money would make you happy?

That’s the question this study recently posed. Eight thousand people were surveyed from around the world. The majority of them settled on a figure of US$10 million.

Certainly enough to never work again. Enough for a nice house, a nice car, and a good education for your kids. Enough that you shouldn’t have to worry about money ever again.

But of course, people from the US responded differently. Most US respondents said an ideal life would cost at least $100 million. The most popular response, at 31.7% of those surveyed, said it would take $100 billion to live their ideal life. A plurality of people think they need to be richer than Luxembourg.

I don’t mean to pick on the US. You guys do a good enough job of that for yourselves. Your problems are your own, except that they have a way of not staying within your borders. Especially in the Anglosphere, we giddily import the madness of the US even as we pretend to be better.

$100 billion, obviously, is a completely obscene amount of money. Not only enough to buy everything you could possibly want, but enough to buy everything your great-grandchildren might want, too. But the ads and the social media and the relentless online bullshit has you convinced otherwise. Bewitched by plastic palaces, we walk straight into the trap.

What’s the point of being happy if you don’t know it?

What use is it to be rich if you don’t realize you are? Back when we use to frame society as a conflict between the bottom 99% and the top 1%, instead of these endless earthquakes on race and gender and identity fault lines, few of us bothered to ask ourselves what side of the line we were really on.

In the 2018 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse, a net worth of US$871,320 puts you in that global 1%. That’s everyone who owns a detached home in any major Canadian city, or any city anywhere near either coast of North America. It’s more than 19 million Americans. Maybe it isn’t you — although Medium’s audience demographics suggest it probably is. And if it isn’t you, it’s probably someone you know.

It ain’t me. I ain’t no fortunate son. But I’m still rich. And I know, looking out over the wine-dark Mediterranean in the sun-drunk town I live in, that there are boats full of desperate people risking storms and sharks and hunger and thirst to be destitute in the place where I’m so fucking rich.

Of course, I didn’t need some half-baked study tell me I’m rich. I’ve known it for long time. I know it because I ask myself this question:

If you got a fortune tomorrow, how would your life change?

For me? Not much.

I’d stop working. My brother and sister could stop working if they wanted to. Their kids could choose where they wanted to study or what businesses they wanted to start. And with more time on my hands, I’d travel more.

That’s it. Like Warren Buffett, I don’t need more than this. I didn’t need to amass $77 billion to figure that out. I’ve been poor enough to understand what real wealth is, and that it has almost nothing to do with money.

It’s the food in your pantry. It’s a roof over your head. It’s the clean water that pours out of your faucet when you trouble yourself to turn a finger, that most of the world can only dream of.

A million type A personalities had to work their lives to dust to give you the world you scoff at. And yes, it’s far from perfect. But it’s the best we’ve ever been able to do.

The trick our society plays on us is to pretend we haven’t arrived. That there is some other mountain to climb, and beyond that glittering peak, another, higher one. Keep moving. Keep trying. Keep risking it all to achieve your dream. And when you achieve it, find another one and go after that.

But there’s no point being rich if you don’t know it. Happiness is worthless if you don’t know you have it. And until you realize just how rich you are, you’ll spend your whole life chasing the top 0.01% and never realize that to the vast majority of your fellow human beings, you’re already living in unbelievable, jaw-dropping, insane extravagance.

That’s the trick that is being played on us. That’s what makes the world go around. Desire swelling like superheated steam to turn the pistons and keep this machine hurtling down the rails laid out for it.

But the truth for so many of us is that we already live in paradise, or the closest thing to it that has ever existed. And we’re going to ruin it by not realizing it.

© Ryan Frawley 2023

All proceeds from this article will be donated to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers.