Money and Worry

“I remember catching Born Rich back when it aired on HBO. …. But what really haunted me about the film and the people it depicted, what frankly still haunts me, is that while every character in that film seemed to be basically a human being with all the good and bad that implies, they were free from one aspect of the human experience that is totally universal to me and everyone I’ve ever known: Worry. There was a lot of the obvious (and not untrue) musing about the things money couldn’t buy, but in the end, what it could buy was totally clear: Freedom from worry. Freedom from being concerned about what would happen in life. I can’t even imagine what that would be like. And I think that from their side, that’s probably the aspect of the 99-percenter experience that the genuinely wealthy have the hardest time intuitively understanding—that most people live lives with the constant background awareness that all it takes is a little bad luck to put you in a place where you’re totally fucked, where there is nothing you can do, full stop. The wealthy cannot imagine being out of options.

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