Why I Don’t Envy the Rich

One of the best mental exercises I’ve ever done and one that I’d recommend to everyone reading this right now is to game out this scenario: “Suddenly, out of the blue, you get Elon Musk-level wealth… 200 billion dollars in the bank.

After a month of vacationing and buying things for your family and friends, it’s time to plan. Your kids? If you have kids, they go into a super special, super elite camp that will last all year long. Your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse? They are going to be gone, too. Maybe they join the military and get deployed, are sent away for work, whatever – and they take your pets with them. In other words, for the next year, you have no responsibilities, unlimited free time, and 200 billion dollars. So, what do you do with yourself during that time?

Know what’s really interesting about this exercise? When MOST people do it, they realize that their dreams are much more achievable than they thought. Maybe not perfectly. Maybe not exactly as they envisioned them, but closer than they might have expected.

For example, when I did this exercise, I had heard that Ann Coulter had several cities she liked to travel to and that she had bought apartments in each of them so she could easily move between them at will. I liked that idea, but it was too expensive for me. So, I did the next best thing for a couple of years. I got an apartment in Raleigh and traveled back and forth between there and my house in Myrtle Beach.

I was also a huge fan of the “Dog Whisperer,” Cesar Millan, and loved the idea of having my dog trained by him. That would have been too expensive, but I was able to take my dog to a local dog trainer. MOST PEOPLE who do this exercise have similar experiences. They realize that the things that excite them, the things that make them want to get up in the morning, the things that help them fulfill their dreams are more achievable than they realize.

How can this be?

Well, I’d say it’s because of a simple reason; Almost the only significant advantage of being rich-rich (we’re not even talking about being a millionaire here, we’re talking about having Musk, Kardashian, and Oprah-level money) in 2024 is the freedom to choose what you want to do and status. You may not think that sounds right, but actually, the average middle-class American who has enough money to comfortably pay their bills lives just as well as the ultra-rich in MOST ways.

That may seem like a fantastical statement, but let’s compare.

The ultra-rich may have a beautiful mansion in an incredible location. For example, here’s a picture of a mansion on the water that I took on a trip to Miami in 2021:

Pretty phenomenal, right? But, doesn’t someone in the middle class also have a roof over his head? A place to sleep, a kitchen, a bathroom, air conditioning? Yes, that’s a pretty locale, but you can make your own yard look nice if you’re so inclined. Even the local neighborhoods I walk through are full of houses with beautiful, well-manicured lawns and tasteful gardens.

Sure, that mansion has a lot of square footage, but no matter how big a house is, what you will generally find is that most people usually inhabit a relatively limited amount of space. In fact, most families that aren’t huge spend almost all their time in about 1,000-1,500 square feet of a house, no matter how big it is. Three-quarters of that gorgeous mansion probably isn’t used unless friends or family visit a couple of times per year.

Well, how about the fancy cars? Whoever owns that place probably has a Lambo or a Rolls-Royce, right? Heck, maybe they even have a “Yeezy Cybertruck”:

Well, a Toyota Camry won’t get you where you need to go in as much style, but it’ll comfortably take you to the same places.

How about food? Truthfully, there’s not much difference. Sure, the people that own that mansion might pay $200 to get some tiny, beautiful, artisanal dish created by a 5-star chef, but having eaten that kind of thing before, I’d generally prefer to go to the hole-in-the-wall Chinese place with a big helping of fried rice, beef, and broccoli.

We can go on and on in this vein, but the way the world tends to work is that the newest technological advances and cool things come to the rich first, then get produced at scale, come to the masses, and then become so common everyone takes them for granted. If we named the leaps forward in technology that made the most lifestyle differences for people over the last century, it’d be things like electricity, air conditioning, antibiotics, television, computers, streaming services, etc. Pretty much everyone reading this has the same access to those things as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Sure, there may be a few things that enhance the day-to-day lives of the rich that the middle class doesn’t have access to, but almost all of them are going to be minor enhancements that come at great cost. If they really were major improvements, that same inevitable process described at the beginning of this paragraph would lead to it eventually being mass-produced and sold to hundreds of millions of people, because with the exception of a few high-end products, selling to half the West is much more profitable than selling to tiny groups of the ultra-wealthy.

All that being said, again, there are two big advantages of being wealthy.

First and foremost is freedom.

To me, freedom has always been the primary reason to focus on making a lot of money. Having Zuckerberg or Walton-level money means you don’t ever have to work somewhere you don’t want to work or live somewhere you don’t want to live. It means if you want to change directions in a wide variety of ways, you can.

That’s a real advantage.

However, the other big advantage is a bit of a two-edged sword.

It’s status.

It’s admittedly cool to own a mansion, drive a Bugatti, and throw money around like water and we human beings love status. We both want to acquire it and we gravitate toward it. Hence the double-edged sword, because if you’re rich, everybody will want to be your friend, but is it because of you or the money? Will your wife divorce you one day because she wants “half?” Heck, would your girl still love you if you weren’t rich? Sometimes, yes, but probably most of the time, no.

Additionally, if you have money, you’re going to find that everyone else wants your money. You can be writing a check for taxes big enough to fund a city and the politicians will still be saying you aren’t paying your “fair share.” Your friends will regularly hit you up to drop massive checks on politicians and charities. People will look for opportunities to charge you more and sue you over anything. Elon Musk has literally been sued THOUSANDS of times. If you are that level of wealthy, you also need security all the time just to protect yourself. Back in the day, well before he ran for president, I can remember Donald Trump walking through CPAC, where he was generally well-received. I would have loved to have gotten a picture with him, but he was surrounded by eight security guards just to be able to even walk through a friendly crowd.

No matter how good-hearted you happen to be or how much you try to help the world, if you’re rich, large numbers of people will hate your guts no matter what you do because you have status. They want status and they subconsciously feel like they will move up one spot on the status hierarchy if you lose it all.

You may say, “Okay, this is all true, but what is this? Is this some kind of ‘money can’t buy you happiness’ screed?”

Not at all.

It’s just balance to what you hear from the rest of our society.

Rich people aren’t heroes who are better than the rest of us because they have money or demons that are the reason why we don’t have as much money as we want. It’s better to be rich than the alternative, but it’s not the solution to all your problems, it’s just a different set of problems.

Envy is generally a bad thing, but it’s particularly foolish when it comes to the rich because many of them aren’t necessarily even living a better life than the rest of us on a daily basis. If you’re seeing a blockbuster movie at home and they’re seeing it at the Cannes Film Festival, are they really better off because they flew on a private jet to France to watch the same film you’re watching on your couch? If you’re playing games on a PlayStation and they’re playing the same game on 1 of the 4 special PlayStations crafted out of gold on the whole planet, well whoop-de-doo. You’re still playing the same game.  

At the end of the day, it’s good and healthy for people to try to make as much money as they can. We shouldn’t hate people who succeed at that or falsely think it puts them above everyone else. Have a little perspective on this subject. It will serve you well in a world where everyone is trying to convince you that you’re worthless if you’re not rich or alternatively, that you should want to bring down the people that are already wealthy because it’s “unfair” that they’ve succeeded somehow.

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