People talk a lot about how being rich doesn’t guarantee happiness. That’s evidently true, and it’s also true that deprivation guarantees certain forms of unhappiness, but these obvious observations are not what I want to comment on. It’s also true that “everyone in the West is rich compared to blah blah blah”, but what I mean by wealth is as compared to cost of independent living within one’s home economy, not absolute wealth or wealth relative to the value of one’s labour, etc.

With that throat-clearing out of the way, I come to my comment.

What these unhappy rich people often draw attention to is things like boredom and lack of purpose. This is however kind of unrelatable to me, because if I were rich, I would spend all my time doing mathematics, creating art, learning ancient languages and reading. No matter how voracious the appetite, one can never exhaust these things…

But if you aren’t interested in these things and/or don’t have actual skills with them, the opportunity to find purpose in them is really limited no matter how much money you have. It is obviously true that if the only cultural skills you have are doomscrolling TikTok or tweeting, that will get old very quickly. This is why Elon Musk is both the richest and most miserable man in the world.

So maybe the real truth is, “Being rich doesn’t guarantee that a cultural philistine will be happy”. I am fully certain that being rich would make me very happy, and that is because of all the years I spent developing skills and interests at the kind of depth that could keep me busy till the end of my life.