When Earning More Makes Your Financial Anxiety…Worse?
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Listen to me, because I work with these people, I work with many of them. Money is not going to bring you happiness. A certain level of money is going to alleviate some stresses, remove some chAllenges, allow you to experience life from a higher level. But you have to understand what he is. Enough, enough is an incredibly difficult concept, because I have work people who have a hundred million dollars in the bank and say, I almost feel safe.

And one of the listener interviews that I did for our financial dismore fia episode, someone mentioned rather casually that they noticed their money anxiety got worse as they proceeded up the income letter. Here's that clip.

There is such a weird, contradictory experience. As soon as I doubled my income, when I was on earning, I was just in this survival mode. Oh, I was educating myself on personal finance and learning what getting my shit together with money would actually look like. So IT was all very theoretical on the data day. Reality of my life was that I was still in a really scary place financially.

And so in the back of my mind, I was kind of filing away all of this information that I would plan on using later, please, at that time, even though I knew kind of look what I needed to be doing this money, I didn't have the money to be doing IT. So there was nothing that I was doing in my day, a day that could actually make me feel Better because the numbers that I wanted to see, we're not there. And so when my income changed, I felt a lot of pressure to close that gap tween where I was under earning and not putting away the money that I wanted to be for a retirement and investment and things like that.

And then I also had this like backlog of just unprocessed guilt and fear and shame and embarrassment and anxiety about all of that time that I had lost because I was under earning, and there was only so much that I could do. IT was like all of these little factors lining up to work against me at a time when I was expecting to feel an immense amount of relief. IT was like, all of that responsibility, all of that pressure and all of this reckoning with what I had experiences as an under earner was really, really catching up to me.

I was like, oh my gosh. Now I will never be. I have safe.

That sentiment actually came up a lot during the interviews for that episode. This idea that becoming a higher earner actually exacerbated feelings of financial anxious that weren't there before, or at the very least were different and maybe more understandable before. So this week I was interested in speaking with a therapies to specializes in financial anxiety that specifically tied to make and having more money, not less.

As you can imagine, this is a relatively obscure h for theri. But I think nosy people are onna. Get an extra kick out of this one.

So welcome back to the money with Kitty show rich friends. I'm kd gei toys. And today we are talking about the unexpected anxiety that accompanies the very thing you would expect to make your money worries melt away, getting more of IT.

Now, this topic is inherently interesting to me, because IT is so anotheh al to the conventional wisdom that goes something like this, being resource scars causes anxiety. Once you have more money, your anxiety will go away. Now, to be fair, the first part is definitely true.

Being resort scarce does caux iee and depression and health issues and all sorts of my adaptive responses when human beings are starved of the things that they need to live. But what about the inverse relationship? Going from not thinking about money much at all beyond meeting your basic needs to feeling absolutely consumed by earning more of IT.

Fortunately, I found someone who is a theriere for ultra high net th patients. Ts, so think tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And I was excited to talk to him because I don't think we often have conversations about what can go or right at a human level when you take this dial and you turn IT up to its most extreme level.

I was curious if there were any themes that he notices in his clients. So my guess today, clay cockroach is someone I found via in interview with new york magazines Charlotte cows. He's a therapies to specializes in rich people.

yes. Seriously and admittedly, case clients are Operating on a completely different financial scale that I am talking about, which is for reference today. So we're all in the same page, something much closer to our listener who went from earning in the sixty k range to the two hundred k range.

So you might notice in his examples that his clients are stressed about things like taking a private jet to paris for dinner. Whereas the listeners who inspire this episode are stressed about things like, am I upgrading my vehicle too quickly, right? But while the scale, while the volume may be radical, different.

There is something that tells me the emotional tenor, the psychological processes that but the human brain undergoes when people come into more money are probably pretty similar. After all, we're probably familiar by now with the idea of diminishing marginal returns. Old studies said that happiness packed hold after seventy five thousand dollars per year.

And while we have reason to believe the number is probably a lot higher than that, especially post inflation, is true that after your needs and wants are met, you really aren't going to experience much in the way of lifestyle improvement from stacking ever more cash. But most of us probably don't think you would ever start to degrade our quality of life. I know I didn't until this conversation.

We might accept that becoming richer beyond a certain threshold won't make us any happier, but we also probably don't believe that would actively make us less happy. That's what i'm hoping. Click and shut some light on today using his twenty years of experience as A. After a quick break.

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So before I talk to clay, I want to lay out a few theories of my own for why this might happen. These are a couple observations that might help us ship away at the incredible problem that is, having a bad relationship with money, even after you technically have enough of IT. My first theory is unmet expectations.

So part of what people might have been describing in my listener interviews about money, a could be assertive response to unmet increased expectations, especially if those expectations went unacknowledged or otherwise unexamined. So otherwise, you have a vision in your mind that is going on met. For example, you may have had a narrative, consciously or unconsciously, that once you surpassed a certain level of income or wealth, that something about you or your life would feel different.

And if you didn't find that to be the case, being confronted with the reality that the problems you thought money would solve, like the problems you thought we're about money, are still round, can be just stabilizing. It's kind of lake. okay.

All this time i've been thinking that once I made six figures, or once I hit X, Y, Z at worth, I would feel Better, and I don't. So now, what do I need more money? Do I need something else or relatives? You start making more.

You start spending more. Your life is now scaled up to accommodate someone with your new income. And that means you're not accustomed to a lifestyle that requires a certain level of income to uphold.

Usually, the jobs that pay those types of incomes are harder to come by. They are harder to keep. Usually, they're harder to work in some instances. Then the newsletter, a couple of except a shared nick majuli thoughts on the instability of highly paid work based on the findings from twenty fifteen national bureau of economic research paper that supported this idea.

And so whether we're aware of this ambient sense of insecurity or not, IT seems reasonable to assume that climbing higher is often accompanied by a sense that one now has much farther to fall. And I think this is related to the next theory. Which is a fear of losing the ground that you have gained.

That's the paradox of my earlier point about problems you assume would go away once you got a little money, once you experience financial stability like deep, deep financial stability. And you can now compare that to how instability feels. You now know how much Better and how much easier life can feel.

And I think the potential of losing that are going backward in some way can lead to intense anxiety and over thinking of financial decisions. It's like the photo negative of the american dream. You work really hard. You obtain this future that you have always dropped up and now you basically have to spend every week minute defending with yours. There's also the element of needing to keep up.

And Normally we talk about this in the context of like the Jones is or the material arms raised, that of course, when you start hanging out with people in a higher social economic class who might Normalize spending behavior, that you may now feel pressure to imitate. But if I had to guess, based on some of the money, just movies, submissions, conversations with friends, my own experiences and quite Frankly, some garden variety fat fire, sub medic, creeping the comparison and pressure someone feels might actually be more about the literal dollars and cents, the score board. This is sort of what someone else told me in those interviews.

He said, when I was making sixty K I was not comparing myself to people who made three hundred k guy wasn't even in the same universe then, so I never occurred to me to compare myself. But now that I make great money, all I can think about is how I am not as successful as they are. And here's the thing, even being able to recognize that that's the sneaky source of your dissatisfaction is chAllenging because we don't really have a cultural script for i'm successful beyond my wild of dreams, and yet I am unsatisfied because I am not aware of people who have done Better than I have.

Now that is a very champaign problems psychological loop to find yourself stuck in, which can make IT hard to admit or even acknowledge without feeling intense guilt and shame. These are stories and scripts that usually lurk under the surface of our consciousness. And unless you look at them directly, IT can be easy to feel this way.

And like, not even realized that that is the source of your vae discontentment with an otherwise great situation. So I intend to ask clay about that. But we talk about systems on the show a lot, most notably with the deep dive into capitalism a couple of weeks ago.

This really does kind of feel like a sling shot from that episode, but there is no more powerful system in our lives than that which drives us told these goals. Most of the structures that we are compelled to pass through, beginning early in our childhoods, are in place to engineer this very outcome of compulsory striving and achievement. Doing well in school so that you can get into a good college, so that you can get a good job, so that you can make money.

Someone all that to say, if you end up doing wealthy yourself and you still have a hard time with comparing yourself to people who are doing Better, even if you are doing Better than you ever thought you would, I do not think that that is a unique personality trade that belongs to you. I think that is just the predictable outcome of a system that is inherently rooted and engendering a sense of competition amongst individuals. Money just makes quantifying those outcomes that score easier.

And finally, there are the complexity that accompany a heightened financial situation. So these are problems that are probably pretty hardest sympathize with for sure. But having more money does usually up the anti right.

The nicer, bigger house has more complicated, expensive problems. You have an estate. Well, congratulations babbit.

You need a state planning. A, you earn a lot of money. Amazing what? You probably now need new and expensive types of insurance.

And guess what, they are going to be a ton of people who wanna sell IT to you. You gotta a inheritance. cool. Now you're got to figure out what the hell you're gonna do with that inherent ance. In fact, you've probably noticed a few recent rich girl rounds ups.

This has been increasing theme in our submissions, in which even the possibility that an insurance is coming can send people into this hand ringing spiral about how their lives should change. Now that's a problem i'm sure we would all welcome, particularly if we are having a hard time. I don't know affording groceries, but IT still introduces options and access that you simply didn't have before, and by extension, obligations that you did not have before.

If you exist in A A set of systems that tell you over and over again that more money, more success, more accomplishments, right, more achievement, that this is always and unequipped a good thing. You may not be anticipating these changes, which means you might feel unprepared to deal with the uncomfortable and destabilizing emotions they can bring. I remember the first time I realized that I owed the I R S literally fifty thousand dollars, which was a panic inducing problem that I did not have when I made fifty K A year.

Now obviously, I was like, happy to make more money. I was happy to have a business that was doing well, but I was unprepared for what to do with IT. Like I did not grow up in a house where people had accountants, so I did not know that I needed an account.

And boom, fifty grand mistake. I can feel really overwhelming and really high stakes because now there is money on the line for your mishaps right now that you've heard my my baseline theses for the Operating principles of the at play. Here we're going to ask, claim what he thinks.

Our entire er economic model is sort of built around the idea that becoming wealthy is looking aspirational thing and that money is something to sacrifice for and to be disciplined for. That the experience of having access to more money is this inherently worthwhile pursuit. That is, I think, at least the subtext of the system, like you go to school, you do well, you try to get a scholarship in schools, you go code, you D, B, the whole of that you afford and money.

Is this motivating through line throughout this prize at the end of the race? But you told Charlotte cows for the cut, who is a friend of mine, she's wonderful. Her work is great, that not only does money not solve all your problems, but that I can cause a lot of problems.

And the stories that you tell about your clients are kind of this like succession level of wealth that probably isn't super reliable or sympathetic to the average person. But i'm curious, thematically, when people who earn more money report feeling increased levels of anxiety, what do you typically attribute that to? What do you think money brings anxiety with IT?

Well, i'll profess this that i'm sure there are a lot of wealthy people out there that are enjoying their money, but I typically don't see them. They don't go see a therapies with the problems related to IT. But I believe that money at this level is dangerous and can be toxic.

I think there is a nominees that goes, and therefore with that nominee's, there is a pursuit of the next thing, the address inland, of a gambling of climbing mountains, jumping out of airplane, something just feel alive, have some kind of level of risk. So I see that lot, and they put IT goes back to my point of this can be very dangerous. People die of this year.

What the drug overdoses, uh, suicide de. What IT does is IT isolates us from other people, because we like to spend time with people who are like us. And I think that um the anxiety comes from what happens if he goes away.

How are other people looking at me? How am I going to be able to to make new friends if I make a new friend? Is that personal? My life, because I can pay for dinner, IT can be very isolated and create a place where you are distrustful of others.

What do they want from me? How they judging me? And IT just brings a lot of issues that people without money don't have to deal with.

Yeah, I can appreciate that point about selection bias, but I do think that there is a level of truth and depth in some of the observations that you have about your clients or something you just said actually, that sticks out to me about people who achieve a level of ultra abundance such that they now are searching for a drennan in other places like I hear that and I think, okay, you become wealthy and successful to the point that you're almost insulated from the Normal ups and downs of life in that nonetheless than to your point, you go out in your searching for that excitement, that texture in other ways. Is that a fair representation?

So absolutely, absolutely. When you've eating at all the best restaurant state and all the best hotels and you've experienced all the very best of life you've reached, the pinacle is like, what's next? What was Alexander of the great wept? Because he conquered all these worlds, that kind of what these people are dealing with. And my heart goes out to them because there is a nominees to life of, i've got all this. I should be happier.

Well, immediately i'm thinking of some of the most, I say, wheels off billionaire, learn the news in these people where they behave in such counter intuitive ways like I would think that if you got billions of not in my yell would never hear from me again. I would not be anywhere. I would be so out of the loop.

I would not be on twitter, I would not be buying twitter, I would not be trolling people. And so I think though, that, yes, having a billion dollars is a an experiences that an infanta ly small group of people has. There are eight hundred billionaires. I think in the united states.

money allows us. Power is not good for you. And uh, you begin to make a really poor choices because you are living in a bubble.

nobody. He's going to say, hey, body doesn't make sense if what you're doing IT doesn't make sense. You are surrounded by people who are dependent upon you and therefore are going to make you happy and say this is a great idea. That's absolutely you're right on. I keep saying it's not good for us.

but I think that IT IT is a sort of instructive use case for like if you turn the dial of wealth and access up to its logical extreme, these are the sort of perverse outcomes that you get where I I think a lot of us, they'll speak for myself, Operate with this idea that there is some level of wealth, access, money at sra that would make your life so friction. Listen, so easy and so lovely that your problems that kind of go away.

But like, well, then I would really be happy. And and I almost feel what i'm hearing you say is that you get to work with and speak to the people for whom this would all sensibly be true. And what you find is that they also thought that they would be happier than they are. And now it's like, okay, it's something wrong with me because this has not actually solved all the problems that I thought I was going to solve, which there's a lot in there that is worthy of further inspection. I think absolutely.

He h, you hit IT on that. And that life that you are looking at is incredibly complicated. IT sounds like first world problems, because IT is first world problems, but they are problems.

IT is a complicated life because you think is going to be a frictionless experience. Now I have all this money. No, it's true. More money, more problems, different problems, interesting problems. What problems are there?

We'll get right back to IT after a quick break.

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So you wrote a piece for the guardian and that you tell the story about having clients whose access to lavish things often creates an obligation to do lavish things. And i'm curious, do you think it's possible that suddenly having access to more options? And i'm talking now in my frame of reference.

You know, you are somebody that maybe went for making seventy thousand dollars year, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars years like now your expectations for your life are going to be different, but that perhaps having access to more options creates this paradox of choice discomfort like we over estimate the marginal utility, I guess, is what i'm trying to say. I mean, do you think that that's what's happening here? Or is there something else?

No, I think that there's some truth in that, but too many options gives you a lot of pressure, especially when your options are are infinite. I had a client who like, for example, with my wife had a birthday and let's say the eagles were in town. I get her ticket.

We go see the eagles. Her husband is having a birthday. She's going to hire the eagles to come and do a concert.

Not kidding, not kidding at all. That is an option for her. And then you go close that too much.

Is that austen's tious? Is that showing off? What are my friends going to say?

Well, and how do you typically council someone who might not even realize that they are feeling that pressure or obligation? How do you help them recognize A N D construct that feeling like? What does that look like? So my theory .

of therapy is that there is healing. When we put a vocabulary around our internal thoughts and tell IT to another person helps us to understand anymore. What I bring to the table is years of experience of working with this particular population.

And there is so much relief and joy coming from them to be able to say what's going on in their life without judgment. And also an awareness of hear, somebody that validates my experience, that wealth is not all it's cracked up to be. So so that ability to talk about IT with freedom, that validation of hate, this is, this is problematic.

Now we can get IT to a place of what can we do about this? Let's begin to think about how money is complicated your life and begin to to change that to have a different relationship with your wealth, that your identity as a human being is separate from what your bank camp shows. Maybe your, you're funny, your loyal, your, your curious. You are depressed. Let's deal with the person, the actual human being.

In your conversation with charley, you mentioned that you've seen people who accumulate a lot of money end up becoming so in roiled in lives that are so complicated by that money that a kind of ceases to be fun, that, like all the benefits that you expect as you gain wealth, are sort of overshadowed by the complications that IT introduces. And I can see that happening into ways in a Normal person's life who may find themselves moving up the income letter, especially if they are one of the first people in their family to find that type of financial success in life. I think the first is I now have become so accustom to a lifestyle that requires my higher income, and I feel a little bit trapped by that, or that having these resources has isolated me from my friends and family who do not have these resources.

So sometimes I wonder personally, like, what would that look like to use intentional downsizing as a tool to prove to yourself that you are adaptable, that, like you are still resilient, like there is a part of me that goes, maybe you should try moving back into an apartment or you should try a smaller space just approved yourself, that your happiness level is not going to change, that these material things are not really going to impact you're baseline in state, right? To prove to yourself that, quote, going backward doesn't scary. But even as I say that IT occurs to me that that might be a sort of my adaptive response.

And i'm curious how you think about that. Like if someone who has begun earning more money and may have expanded their lifestyle a little bit came to you and said, like i'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that I used to live pretty happily on a couple thousand dollars a month. And like now before I know IT, i've got a family, i've got a kids, I bought this nice house, I drive this nice car. And like, I can even believe, like how much i'm spending now. But i've feel a little bit trapped by this reality.

I hear that every day, absolutely. I hear that every day that my life has gotten too big. I'm not used to. And now that we're going to think about, there's two buckets of people were talking about here right now.

There are there are people who have earned their money and all these they were brave and they did not grow up with wealth. And then those people who did grow up with wealth and generational wealth, and they're used to IT. And they're two different, a lot of similar problems, but two different populations.

But that person who is not used to this larger life is uncomfortable. And there is this degree of, I don't want to go back, yes, this is nice. And yet there is a lot of pressure here to stay here because my wife, depending on me, kids are depending on me.

If I screw up and the money goes out, what am I going to do? But the scenario you propose actually happened to a client of mine last year. And so I i'll change about the details here before.

For whatever reason, the home that they were going to be preparing was not quite right. And just because of numerous factors had to move to a smaller apartment. IT was a nice apartment, but IT was much smaller.

And the happiness that they found there of just kind of being on top, on another was revealing. And that gave them A A sense of security of, you know what, if we all had to go back, we could, and I would, I would actually gone to be nice. IT was a nice thing for them to experience. But without that actual lived experience, there's a lot of fear that if I go there, this is visit, not gonna go .

for there's a bit of a larger theme here that I feel like we're kind of circling, which is the idea that the grass is not always Greener. And I know that feels really right when we exist in a world where so many people lack access to things like food and shelter or are experiencing resource scare. But I actually think the point of them about to make is more compatible without reality than IT might sound on the surface.

So if you'll indulge me, I think if we accept the premise for a moment that having a bottle of money is actually, in many ways, like one headache after another, and that constantly aspiring to more and always kind of arranging your life around wanting to gain more more and more and more turns out to be this profoundly ly soul sucking human experience and that like, once you get there, you're kind of like, well, now what now I think go parasites ing to like a little little excitement in my day because I have I have basically paid to remove any friction. What do you think that says about the fundamental logic of the existing system that I kind of described or laid out for us in the first question? Like we urgently defend the right to accumulate as much money as possible in the us.

IT is this very powerful economic narrative of paramount importance to the law of amErica that, like your success, can be infinite. And the more infinite IT is, the Better your life will be, and the happier you are and the more successful you are. And the economic importance of that ability to accumulate as much money as possible, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, is sort of, by my estimation, used to justify then, whatever societal issues is gonna create, because it's that important that people are able to do this. But I just sitting and I go mean, what does that mean if even like the winning est of winners, still don't really feel like they are winning?

Yeah, i've learned to not read the comment section because the anger that I receive from people of being the the therapies to the alter high network individuals. And I think it's because it's chAllenging to people. Here I am.

I'm getting up every morning. I'm going to work. I'm busting my boss to make a living to get there.

And you're saying that when I get there, i'm not gonna happy. That's incredibly chAllenging and anger producing because IT is IT is chAllenging their fundamental belief system. And I think that's good.

Listen to me because I work with these people, again, skilled, but I work with many of them. Money is now gone to bring you happiness. A certain level of money is going to alleviate some stresses, remove some chAllenges, allow you to experience life from higher level.

But you have to understand what is enough. Enough is an an incredibly difficult concept because I I would people who have a hundred million dollars in the bank and say, I almost feel safe. Yes, there there is an addiction level to this that is important that just a little bit more and then i'm going to to feel safe.

I'm going to feel good and i'm finally going to have no joy comes from spending time with your family, pursuing pursuit that that make you happy, hobbies, travel, working hard, having a chAllenge in your life that you are working hard to overcome. That is her joy comes from. We have complicated our bank accounts that number in there of of just a little bit more.

That's where joy is going to come from, that what contents and fulfilment. And i'm talking to you from the other side, that's not where IT is, which then is actually hopeful. Pull back, pull back.

You're spending eighty hundred hours a week or whatever IT is away from your family, trying to build something, trying to to get a little bit more. And I understand if if you are are a middle class and you are struggling, but if you go to a certain level and you're still doing that, pull back. Joy comes from watching your kids get up in the morning and degrading them bedtime stories at night and sitting on the porch with your wife.

This is where joy is. I think that there's something helpful in that to remove this rat race that we're all in and go. I don't have to do that.

I think it's a john steinbeck quote socialism never took root in amErica because the portion themselves, not as an exploited pileated, but is temporarily embarrassed millionaires um I can't help but think about that quote though when we talk about this idea like it's the anger you're describing because I think the surface level read of that anger is like. Yeah people are life is hard. The economy is kicking the shoot out of everybody. And so if you are having a hard time and you're working really hard and then you're hearing someone be like, my god, it's like, shut up so I get the surface level anger.

But then the deeper story, and I think the more interesting story and interesting piece of this is like, what's actually feeling that well, spring of fury is that chAllenge of the fundamental belief of the word view, that if I were there, I wouldn't be unhappy, I would be so happy, and I would be so much Better at being rich than that person, is what becomes very insidious and very easy, too slowly, without even realizing IT. Shape your life around and arrange your life in your decisions around that kind of empty pursuit, and to be padded on the back for IT by a society. Yes, good job.

Look how successful ly you are. Yes, keep going. Keep going.

Without really taking that step back to question, like do I have enough? Should I be kind of like shifting my priorities now? Because i've already like reached to the point that I decided ten years ago would feel like enough.

You also talk about in some of the pieces you've britain, the way that your clients like have this range of personal narratives about how they have gotten, where they are. And I think this narratives sing is also a really crucial piece of what enables and what is necessary for economic systems and inequalities. Kind of like the ones we have that you have these like exam spectre of outcomes um to perpetuate. And I think that the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives, how we've gotten, where we are, how we have, what we have, are very powerful. And you mentioned that many of the very wealthy people that you've work with tend to believe that there is something special about them that LED to their financial success.

Yeah, I think that you have found a really good point here IT IT is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves that help us understand our life. And when you're in such an on you usual situation, you have to be able to explain that to yourself. So I I think there's a dichotomy too.

There is a part of them that because i'm here, because I am special, right? And if that guy sitting on the street begging for money, if he just worked a little harder or figure things out like if I did IT, then he could do IT. So there's there's that thought process, but is that I am special, but then are not special, and that this could go away at any, at any moment? interesting.

So there is this, the degree of alcoholic and fear that is fact into all this. But the story keeps changing of, I made IT here because of all my heart, or because i'm somewhat special, or because my family gene is certain way so that, you know, weird, this is just how we're made. But then also are looking down on another person of, if I can do this, then they could probably do IT too.

Therefore, I am not special. It's it's a complicated mess inside people's heads depending from one moment to another. I think through for all of us. But I I think that they also that is that story inside of us that that narrative that helps us come to terms with any unusual situation.

Yeah, it's like a constant effort to resolve that cognitive distances, I guess. But you mentioned guilt. And I think one of the things that I enjoy about this sociologist named mat dozens work is that he talks about the psychological degredation that humans experience in the mist of, kind of like, visibly intense, that consciously subconscious sense of, like unfairness.

And I think that, like, if you end up as the winner in a system like this, and you're feeling both the need to, like, justify your position as a winner, but also guilt because you can see that that you have so much more than you need and there are so many people that do not have what they need. So like, yeah, you have to tell yourself a story about the guy on the street corner. He's begging for money and why he's not you and what you're Better than him and why you'd deserve to be here and if he just did that.

So I just think that, like most people morally, are going to feel funny about that. And I think that that feeling funny happens a lot sooner than one hundred million dollars. So like I think most people who start to feel extremely secure and have enough are then running up against that kind of dull track to your point about the complicated, massive like, well, i'm not that rich, so I should keep striving and keep hurting and keep accumulating. Well, at the same time, you do have that sense of like, I have plenty, I have enough. Like I need to be finding ways to to give back, to make the world around me Better, to not be so singularly focused on what I can do to make the number in my bank account a up.

You look around and go and this is not good for any of us. Yeah it's not I don't have an alternative. I don't have a different proposal. I'm just dealing with the impacts yeah ah of this system on people .

on the winners.

right and on the winners.

You're the touch on the winners, the people that we are. I don't know again, it's like i'll kind of told that that so you get when you win the game right.

which can be very chAllenging people like me who are still playing the game, trying to figure out out you will pay my mortgage and all the service right, but is is not good for any of us. Therefore, we come up with these stories that are untrue on on both sides of the argument. I am special and i'm not special and that's hard to to take IT.

Are there any signs that you notice themes, trans patterns of like when someone's relationship to money, wealth, striving is attra is maybe turning the adaptive or like has gone beyond the the sort of what I would call like us healthy and Normal striving within the context weeks just before we're like some of this is necessary to survive and has kind of surpassed that and is now taking a turn. Work like IT might be leading them down this sort of path.

The word that comes to me is loneliness. Ss, you look around and you don't feel a connection with your kids, your spouse, friends IT may be because you've made some choices that have driven people away. And I think that that's a sign to maybe begin looking at.

Maybe this is not going well for me on top of that stress, like why are you so stressed? You've got all these resources are complicating factor, but but loneliness because a lot of the wealthy people that I work with have isolated themselves with only other wealthy people because it's just, just easier. We we like hanging out with people who are similar to us. So they push people away from their childhood because IT feels weird and all something wake up and they feel lonely. And I think that's that's a sign that maybe this is this is not going well, very IT tracks.

I think feeling lonely and in this idea of kind of feeling constantly stressed, if you are someone who used to feel constantly stressed for reasons like resource scarcity, you are living paycheck to paycheck or sort of paycheck to paycheck. And so you get into that mindset of like I am constantly hustling to try to make ends me and then and start meeting and then they're more than meeting and now you're really cruising and now things are going really well.

And now, oh my gosh, like you're accumulating all this money, but that I can see how that underlying feeling or mode of kindly got to keep going that stress becomes almost a someone like the w you know, like it's the predictable feeling that you're just kind of your used to being in that mindset and now you're being really rewarded for being in that mindset because you have this quantitative feedback mechanism that the harder you work and the more stressed you allow yourself to be, and the more you burrow into that feeling and assure yourself that will no one else gets IT. There is no mechanism in society that's gona tell you to stop short of. I would note really the only time i've ever talked to anybody for this show that has been in that zone and has been in that mode and then stopped was because they had a health condition, they had a problem, they were diagnosed with cancer, that someone died like there were some major shakeup that made them see their lives differently. But they had gone on for years, lonely, stressed and accumulating more money than they know what to do with.

right? People drink alcohol because that works. People have a, they work at work and they get more money. And IT works.

I'm outside of my one bedroom apartment, and now I have bedrooms for my kids, right? And good work a little harder this year, i'm going to go on a nice vacation. So IT works until IT doesn't, is this magical level.

And I think it's different for everybody. Of course, IT also different on what the country, our world we live in. But there is a level and we've we've got to understand what is enough. This works, working hard, making more money. It's going to solve a lot of in your problems until you go cross over that thresh hold and then IT just stops working as well and then IT becomes to work against .

you in the thresh hold you mentioned. It's not like, I mean, I wish there was a formula. I wish I could be like, well, once you have twenty five assets in the bank and then right then, then you'll know. But it's like that is, I think the level of designation, and I think those two points that you highlighted, lonely ess and stress, are kind of the say, the two horseman of, like the threshold ld, has been crossed.

Yes.

I think so. I can imagine. How do you deal with that? Do you ever feel like a little bit like are you must be constantly having to do your own kind of a mental recency?

Not so little because you lose touch with reality. You really do of what what is Normal 嗯。 And and I had IT to check myself going, okay, wait to me.

I I talk with these people all day wrong. That's not my world and and I worked with people who knew private Butlers and um yeah money managers and other people that have to interact with them. And when we all talk about it's a little complicated, weak.

We are in that world, but we're not of that world and we've got to remain grounded and I don't want that world. That's uh, something that I have to remind myself all the time. I I don't want to that, no, I don't want that is not good. IT IT looks attractive, but i've seen inside. And I don't want that so so staying grounded, I think among the people who interact with alter high network individuals of this priority.

Thank you. Thank you for joining me to um to talk about this is such an interesting subject, the lifestyles and the problems of the region famous maybe why the lifestyles are are not as aspirational as we have been LED to believe. As we produce the episode, I think we all on the production side, felt like I was in such stark contrast to the conversation with Grace Blakely about the project of creating a truly democratic society and a truly democratic economy.

Like I said, I kind of feel s like we sling shot from one end of the spectrum to the other, from imagining the world that might do away with these psychological hangs by prioritising humanity to understanding how we might be able to duck tape. All the maladaptive is in the meantime. And if that doesn't encapsulate our project at the money with Kitty show, i'm not sure what does.

So that is all for this week, and we will see you next week. Same time, same place. Our show is the production of morning brew and is produced by hand of the eyes and mek with our audio engineering and sound design from nick ti D N M. Arif content officer. And additional fact check in comes from Scott Wilson.