Do You Have Real Wealth?
Some years ago, a study concluded that above $75K of household income, happiness did not appreciably increase. Inflation and location bloat that number for many families. Income of course, is not wealth. Wealth is what we do not see.
The pursuit of wealth and the power and influence it brings animates many people to focus on acquiring more wealth and power to their last day. But are dollars, shares, addresses, companies, sparkly things, and toys wealth?
Paraphrasing one of my favorite books, we should aim to die with a big pile of memories, not a big pile of dollars. We’ll need some dollars to create those memories, but dollars can become virtually un-spendable at some point. Even if you have enough to purchase an aircraft carrier, who will sell you one, and what can you do with it? When we’re in our eighties, we rarely have the health and stamina to party like rock stars, whether or not we have the cash to do so.
What is Real Wealth?
The happiest people I know have deep, meaningful relationships with other people. The 21st century has far too many distractions and detractors from those relationships, and those distractions, including the one I’m writing on now, erode our relationships.
Attention is 21st-century oil. Companies create addictive electronic products and software to keep us tuned in so they can sell ads, promote viewpoints, and extract our dollars.
The online world craves our attention, causing distraction, separation, and loneliness. While we may need to give our dollars in exchange for food, clothing, shelter, and other basic needs, no such requirement exists for giving away our attention to things that rot us.
To get sciency for a moment, dopamine is the hormone our body releases to reward us for doing things that feel good. Cortisol is somewhat its opposite—a hormone released in response to stress and fear. When you think about online content, it keeps you in a loop: dopamine flowing from the funny and engaging picture/reel/meme, cortisol from the doom/vitriol/other-bashing. The online world, and even TV infotainment seem built to keep us in a dopamine-cortisol loop, spiking from happy to anxious, laughing to seething, wealthy in time to poor of it.
If our time enjoying deep, meaningful relationships requires our attention and generally causes the release of dopamine, perhaps real wealth has to do with that 21st-century oil—attention.
How to Create Real Wealth
Management theory suggests that “what gets measured gets fixed.” If we track how many times we step late to the jet vs. other metrics, we determine the effect of stepping late on downstream outcomes. Likewise, if we curate what receives our attention, we curate the growth of our real wealth.
Creating and curating boundaries for our attention gives us the time and energy for those fulfilling relationships with humans that characterize true wealth. It doesn’t matter what some attention-seeker flamed on social media if you never scrolled past it.
Curating our interests rather than grievances is another path to wealth. Focusing on grievance leads not only to poor policy outcomes, but also keeps the cortisol flowing.
Remember the last time you felt stressed by all of the bad news and bad people your attention had been siphoned off to and the happiness that flowed from that stress? Me neither. But the 21st-century digital world is designed to draw us to all of the “if it bleeds, it leads” content. We have a choice. We don’t have to promote or even tune into it.
Real wealth is living a life with relationships that endure. Real wealth is intentionally controlling our attention, not letting companies and politicians/politicos insidiously pilfer it. Real wealth is seizing the power to focus on our interests, not drifting to the siren song of grievance. Real wealth has little to do with dollars.
Fight’s On!
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