We all want the good life. We want to succeed in what we do and reap the financial rewards to ensure a comfortable lifestyle that practically eliminates the worries that come with not having enough money. Suppose you make it, and after a long and arduous journey, you get everything that you decided to get. You now have a stable financial income, the bank account is nice and fat, the future is looking bright. Do you really stop there?
The reality of it is that most people who have made their dreams come true will continue trying to accumulate wealth. This is a logical progression in a businessman’s career. After having proven his/her worth, more business possibilities will arise, appealing to the opportunistic nature of a career-oriented man/woman. In time, these people will overshoot their initial goal by a large margin, and end up having an obscene amount of money. The financial stability has long been secured and yet the business is still booming. Why shouldn’t they take advantage of it?
Your lifestyle changes when you have a lot of money. I’m stating the obvious here, but I don’t think that people understand just how pricey it can get. The living expenses of a regular person are nothing compared to what the rich pay for their extravagances. This is one of the reasons why the rich want even more money. When they start out, they plan on amassing a fortune based on their regular person assessment of what the dream life totals up to. Having never experienced it, they miss details that turn out to be very costly. After they manage to get the sum that they originally intended, they realize that it is simply not enough to support their current and future “needs”.
There is always a discrepancy between the expectations of the good life and the reality of it. The things you thought you might like may very well not be for you. This realization sparks an expensive search for what is suitable to be included in the perfect life, which usually crystallizes in a system of values based on having “the best,”the tippity top of everything. The tippity top costs a lot of money, especially in our fast-changing world where the best that you can buy today will be overtaken by something better in a surprisingly short amount of time. The peer pressure exerted by others, who have the more advanced “whatever,” weighs heavily on the person who decides to be the best and have the best. This competition gives birth to a generation of over-spenders, who cannot settle for the best from last year, and perpetuate an unhealthy, obsessive-compulsive disorder of out-matching their contemporaries. That's kind of sad and juvenile, like kids on the playground boasting about who has the coolest bike.
Rich people are afraid of losing their wealth and with it their defining value. This is especially true for those who have started with nothing. The fear of losing everything and going back to the poor lifestyle pushes them to gather as much money as they can, in an attempt to minimize that dreadful probability. This hunger for more money is a sign of a traumatic past and works on a subconscious level. The same concept can be observed on WWII survivors that have pantries overfilled with food because they are afraid of being as hungry as they were during the war.
You are never rich enough as long as you hold onto the childish mentality of wanting everything, as quickly as possible. The responsible adult develops a level of maturity that puts him beyond such puerile dreams and grants him the capacity of self-restraint in a world hell-bent on consumerism. That does not seem to be the case in our society, where most of our successful individuals have been swept by the wave of opulence, and feel this need to show off, hooking the attention of the impressionable youth and guiding them on the same path. I have no affinity to the Bible, yet this situation keeps reminding me of Sodom and Gomorrah. I think that tale is meant to symbolize the fall of human values when the mind is corrupted by superficiality.
When are you rich enough? There are as many answers as there are people, and the funny thing is that many of those theoretical answers change when people are faced with the reality of being rich. It is said that money corrupts the soul, but I believe that an elevated financial status offers a new perspective on life, allowing for desires which have been suppressed to emerge and manifest, justified under the guise of the capable adult doing whatever he pleases with his hard-earned money. So, to answer the question that makes up the title: When are you rich enough? NEVER!
