( reading time: 3 min 46 sec )
Is it human nature or culture that drives people to pursue riches? Beyond arriving at riches, what makes people pretend they are rich when they are not?
Pride, ego, and trying to exploit wealthy people are key motives for pretenders. The best way to avoid becoming a pretender or reform from being a pretender is to conquer the root causes. Learning why we struggle with pride or ego and how to correct our thinking is powerful. Learning what we think more money gives us that it may not be is also effective in curing a blind obsession with being rich.
We don’t plan to cure the world’s distracting obsession with excess riches in a single article, but it will give the basis for anyone who wants to pivot. If someone is moving down that road and wants to get off, these may be the answers you are looking for today.
What do real riches look like?
True riches have no visible markers other than the absence of poverty. We can look at what people have or claim to have ownership of and assume that it gives them an advantage others do not have.
An RSA video on YouTube talked about people who earned five thousand a year and were struggling, dependent on others. If that person moved to fifty-thousand a year when the video was made, it would allow them much greater personal liberty and options. There would be things they could afford that previously they could not afford. They would even have money beyond personal needs for personal choices and pleasures.
If that same person, whose income grew tenfold, had another tenfold income boost, the change in life would not be as drastic. The first jump in income would provide for a car, housing, food, and more routine living expenses. A second jump could get a more expensive vehicle or two cars, but one person can only drive one at a time. It could provide for a fancier house, but we only sleep on either income in one bed at a time. The lifestyle change in the first jump was drastic. The later lifestyle jump when we look at the fundamental changes are not genuinely significant in comparison.
Riches do provide opportunities, but many of those opportunities are illusions that someone is better off. Two people with dependable, comfortable cars have the same intrinsic value. I am not saying wealthy people wasted their money. The extra things they acquired are things of lesser value than our core needs. Yet, these added accessories and options make the cost of the car many times the price.
When people say, I need a car they don’t usually mean a luxury car. They don’t usually mean a mansion when they say I need a house.
Why do many rich people avoid looking wealthy?
Last week, I listened to a podcast where Dave Ramsey talked to a business owner who was doing well and wanted to know how to handle his money. It is fair to say this business owner was becoming wealthy. One thing Dave suggested was living humble in public so people didn’t put a target on him for lawsuits. He also suggests good liability and how to organize his business to protect his core life from the company being a risk to his family resources.
The strong point is that most rich people don’t walk around looking rich. They avoid it. We might assume it is to keep their money for themselves and hoard it. Yet, most of these people I meet are generous in ways that are not publically visible. They don’t give to be seen. They give because they have an excess, and they can. They like to provide unseen and know the impact on the people it was given to without any desire to be seen as the giver.
Easy riches do more harm.
People who have learned to build wealth often have acquired some wisdom in business and working with people. They have seen the impact handing riches down from one generation to the next has on those who do not know how to manage it. Getting wealthy with the lottery has a similar impact.
The lives of the people getting the wealth they don’t know how to handle are not the only lives that get impacted. In the case of the lottery, I have seen personal friends of our family have it negatively impact three generations. We have heard of this pattern as the typical result of easy wealth.
Conquering Ego and Pride
If we learn that most rich people have no significant advantage over those with a good living, then we learn those who cluster around the visible rich do not want to be their friend as much as ulterior motives. Being fake rich is one of the best ways to attract fake friends. To impress real friends, we have to have actual results and wisdom.
I would also suggest reading “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware. She researched people who became terminally ill. None of the top regrets were related to riches or ego. Learning from people with this kind of struggle will help us reevaluate what is truly more valuable. It isn’t a fancier car or a mansion. Again, it is not saying anyone who has them is wrong. The top value is not those things.
Our conclusion
Learn what matters most. Learn to focus on the first things first. Enjoy it if you do well without sacrificing those things and become wealthy. If you do well and don’t become wealthy, enjoy it without pretending the less important things are more important than they are.
