The things money doesn't buy...
And the nouveau riche effect.
You’ve heard that “money won’t buy happiness”, that money does not matter that much in your life, and so on… But why do we still seek money so much ?
Security : we want to be relieved from the fear of lacking resources. While this is a serious concern, the likelihood of losing your house and being unable to feed yourself is relatively low. Financial downfall is most of the time a consequence of disproportion between expenses and income. If you keep your expenses low over time, you are unlikely to experience personal bankruptcy.
Freedom : we want to have choices, and not to reduce the number of things we can’t afford. We want to avoid constraints. Yet, true freedom is not so much about having the ability to do whatever you like*. It lies in the fact of choosing the law by which you abide. So it is much more useful to have character and backbone, to be capable of commitment if you want to have real freedom, than just having a lot of money.
Desires : we want to satisfy them. All of us have, to various degrees, materialistic desires. Pervasive marketing wages war to empty your pockets and conquer, inch by inch, every bit of your brain and attention. Obviously, the more we want to spend money, the more we need to make money.
Status : this might be the strongest driver for money. Especially among the most poverty-stricken ones of us. Many expect money to improve the quality of their social lives, to get respect and consideration from others, especially from members of the upper layers of society. What they want is to be part of the so-called elite.
People want to “join the elite”, for the elite holds power.
Yet, many “candidates” to joining the “elite” miss their goal, because they fail to understand what makes the elite. Sure, the elite holds a vast amount of economic resources and wealth. That is financial capital. But the elite has much more than that, it has access to exclusive networks, knowledge and experiences.
You can easily notice it when you don’t have any financial capital. But when it comes to education and, most importantly, sociocultural capital, it is a different story. You don’t know what you don’t know. Most of the people who have low sociocultural capital don’t know it, and when they do, they wonder how to improve it.
No matter how much money one possesses, they hardly get access to these exclusive networks and connections, opportunities for work and experiences and access to scarce knowledge, if they have a low sociocultural capital. For the elite has a dual feature : it has both high financial and sociocultural capital.
If you are curious about this kind of capital and how to improve it, do not miss next week’s publication, which will fully focus this topic.
Paul
*Visit this page if you are curious to know why freedom isn’t just doing whatever you want whenever you want :
