It’s a Leap Year day today, and as such there’s the need for an extra post this month. I didn’t have time to write one, but luckily the wonderful from has stepped in to supply us with a piece about the economics of, well, economics. I thoroughly recommend Stella’s ‘Stack; indeed, many of my recent subscribers came here from our recent exchange which you can find here and here. Enjoy!
I have so many friends who are rich but don’t describe themselves as rich, who are spending what’s left of their younger years, late 20s to early 30s, worried that they are not making enough.
Enough for what?
Enough to buy a house as big as the one they grew up in. Enough to send their kids to a private school, because they went to one and the human-animal never looks back, enough to dress said kids exceptionally well, to go on holidays that would look so damn good on Instagram, but which they will obviously not post about because that’s so 2008 petit bourgeois. The name of the game is quiet wealth now.
I am surrounded by friends who work in the private sector whose salaries and bonuses have multiplied over the years, but not fast enough, not as fast as the friends of their friends, the ones with the better this and the better that. Oh, they want the better everything.
They love to ask me how much I make from my side hustles - of which I have plenty.
How much do you make from your blog?
Enough to buy a coffee every other day. And you bet your arse I buy that goddamn coffee and don’t save a penny out of it. I buy a flat white with extra oat milk at one of those Scandinavian-style coffee shops. I drink it on an empty stomach off the back of an 18-hour fast, so the caffeine hits me like something much more expensive - for a charity worker, I know good return on investment when I see it. On my legal high, I toil on my blog, knowing it will never ever make me rich. I do it anyway. I am cool like that.
In high school, I was the worst student in my class. For a long time, my parents and teachers warned me I wouldn’t make it to university; I would need to go to one of these derided private colleges only losers went to, the ones the Greek state doesn’t even recognise as legitimate.
When I reached puberty, it hit me like a ton of bricks. With my first period came this unquenchable hunger. For boys, for fame, for beauty, for power. Money didn’t make the cut on that list; my parents raised me right, sorry if yours didn’t.
What others expected of me was so meagre compared to what I expected of myself. I had a mission and changed my ways, as teenagers on the cusp of adulthood often do.
When I got into law school, I exceeded all expectations. Everything after that felt like a miracle. So you see I have always found it obnoxiously easy to be satisfied with how my life panned out.
I have never worked a job I dreaded. Most mornings, I jump out of bed. Were I a London public school kid with neurotic upper-middle-class British parents, many things I have done to date would have been seen as expected and therefore not special. But for me, if I died tomorrow, you’d glimpse at my casket and see me smiling.
Still, I so appreciate your concern about my long-term financial prosperity; I understand this is why, whenever you see me dive headfirst into a new endeavour that makes my eyes light up, you ask: Where is this leading? Do the fees increase? Do you charge them for that? Do you add it to your CV?
No, I don’t post about my fucking sex life on LinkedIn. That is why I have a blog.
Don’t worry about me, gang.
You are spending so much money trying to look glamorous. Yet glamour is free when you are a starving artist. There is nothing more glamorous than knowing why God put you on this fucking planet.
In this life, I fully expect to be stressed and anxious as a result of my choice to adopt a vocation and move to a city that is ruthless with naive bleeding heart creatives like myself.
But one thing I will never be is depressed. I will never lay awake at night, wondering, why am I here?
I don’t care about my friends in the private sector because, frankly, they will never be rich enough; they don’t even know they are rich. They will die looking languishingly at the next person who is richer than them. Often, that person will be someone who was born into wealth and was able to capitalise on that, or, you know, inherit it and chill (which I would absolutely do in their place; becoming a trophy wife is still my plan B). But they are probably even more miserable because no matter how lacking they are in self-awareness, deep inside, they know. They know they didn’t work for it. They will never know if they are truly worth it and if they’d get there without the crutches.
Thank fucking God I am a child of the diminishing middle class. Being born into abject poverty is too hard; being born into wealth too easy; you want the right mixture of struggle and luck. My Vietnam War was the Greek financial crisis. Veterans were left with PTSD. I was left with nothing to prove.
Rich people would expect me to be shaken when my mother told me to go into my childhood bedroom and pick up anything valuable in case the banks put a lock on our home. But honestly? I was free. I have nothing left to lose motherfuckers!!! Fire me if you want, make me go on a forced diet; I hear heroin chic is back, and if you make me homeless well, my memoir needs material.
My rich friends always say they want to do something meaningful or creative. But their revealed preference (i.e. what they do versus what they say they want to do) is that they want to make more money than the next guy.
Why don’t they all move to a village in Siberia? There they can taste what being at the top of the food chain feels like, get that basest of human ambitions out of their system, then come back to the trenches and toil with the rest of the human race. Most people are poor, and most people are unhappy. But to be rich, by objective global standards, and to fail to find meaning? What a waste of a lucky strike.
So, don’t worry about me. Worry about yourselves. I am sorry you were taught life’s purpose was acquisition of materials. Your diminishing soul looks at your expanding wallet like a clitoris looking at a selfish lover. If only you knew how much pleasure you are denying yourself.
People don’t always end up richer than their parents; if it makes you feel any better, know you are not alone. History works like that: Sometimes family wealth grows, and at other times, it dwindles. But it is OK. You are probably well off enough to live splendidly. If your kids grow up with less than you did, that’s good. You were spoiled. Let the buck stop with you. What good did unearned wealth bring to you? Did it make you any less anxious and status-obsessed? I don’t think it did. So let it go. There is no long-term plan. All you have is the here and now. If you want a side hustle, delete that pitch deck from your MacBook; you are better off starting a blog.