In part five of our series, Finding Meaning, we look at one last place we often go to fill this lingering void in our lives: Wealth. Money is a tempting source of meaning because it can make so many things happen that seem to be on our behalf, but if contentment is the thing we are seeking in having it, we are going to come up empty. Contentment has another source. Keep reading to find out what that is.
The Problem with Wealth
Have you ever felt like the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy and at the expense of the not-so-wealthy? The odds are that unless you happen to feel like you’re part of the “wealthy”—that ubiquitous class of people who are imprecisely defined as folks whose net worth number has a couple more zeros than yours does and who serve as a convenient villain for all kinds of occasions—you’ve probably felt like this before. As fair and impartial as our system is supposed to be, having money has its advantages. And the more money you have, the more you are able to tap into those advantages. We defer to wealthy people in ways we don’t similarly defer to not-as-wealthy people. Humans have always done that. We have always assumed that people who have lots of money have managed to get that money for some reason and whatever that reason is, if we haven’t been able to get lots of money ourselves, it must mean they’re better than us in some way. We can try and deny that all we want, but that’s how pretty much every human culture has always worked. It just is.
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The Nexus 