The positives don't look so impressive when the rich have so much more. My perfectly adequate condo mocks me with its small size and proximity to others. Ugh if I only had the income to have a house as big as my parents'. Not making as much money as my father is going to lead me to a life of mediocrity surrounded by mediocrity. True it's not a life of poverty surrounded by poverty, but there should be an aspirational desire in all of us no matter where we start.
Everyone here is aspirational as hell, but we aspire to actually BE rich, not just to
look rich.
More importantly, we aspire to happiness first and foremost - regardless of money.
Does it help you at all to know that the rich generally aren't any happier than you are? Repeated studies show happiness stops rising with income somewhere around $50K.
Does it help to know that many of the people with nicer houses and cars actually
aren't rich, just high earners locked into a treadmill of debt and lifestyle creep?
Those are the facts.
I live in a $130k house (optimistically, after adding solar panels) in a $100k neighborhood, in a city where the average is $260K and $400-600K McMansions are ubiquitous. I drive by the high-end houses all the time (I'm a Realtor, among other things) and in my mind all I see are severed arteries gushing wealth, piles of dollars spiralling down the drain. Why would I want to pay more for the privilege of... paying more,
forever? That's all it really is: more debt, more taxes, more insurance, more utilities, more maintenance? Hell no. I'm the guy whose mortgage is 4% of household income and who's saving more money than some people are making, without giving up one bit of happiness in the here and now.
So I say, aspire to greatness by all means. But don't confuse that with aspiring to bigger and shinier piles of shit to take care of.
