What Is True Wealth?
The Great Illusion of Wealth
There is a scene in Margin Call that stays with you long after the film ends. I am appending below a few relevant excerpts of a monologue, at a crucial juncture, from an important character from the film named John Tuld.
...."It's just money; it's made up.
Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It's not wrong.
And it's certainly no different today than it's ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 37, 57, 84, 1901, 07, 29, 1937, 1974, 1987- Jesus, didn't that fuck up me up good-92, 97, 2000 and whatever we want to call this.
It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it. Or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react.
And we make a lot money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers."....
Then the machine starts again. The dates change. The names change. The financial instruments become more sophisticated. But human beings remain remarkably unchanged.
We have been doing this for centuries. We create something that has no intrinsic value, collectively agree that it is valuable, attach numbers to it, trade it, speculate on it and eventually mistake the number for the thing itself.
A piece of paper becomes money.
A number on a computer becomes a fortune.
A company valuation becomes wealth.
A rising property price becomes prosperity.
And somewhere along the way, we stop asking the most inconvenient question of all:
What is actually valuable?
Perhaps the greatest deception of modern civilisation is that we have become extraordinarily efficient at measuring wealth without necessarily understanding it.
We know the price of almost everything.
But do we know its worth?
A man may have a house worth several crores, investments worth millions and a bank account that makes other people envious. Yet none of those numbers can buy him another year with his parents. None can restore a friendship he sacrificed for success. None can return the childhood of a son he was too busy to watch grow up.
Money can buy a beautiful bed. It cannot guarantee sleep. It can buy medicine. It cannot guarantee health. It can buy a house. It cannot manufacture a home. It can buy company. It cannot purchase companionship. And it can certainly buy a coffin, but by then the distinction between rich and poor has become rather meaningless.
Perhaps actual wealth is everything that remains valuable when money becomes irrelevant.
A healthy body. A peaceful mind. A family that wants you around. Friends who remember you when you are not in the room. Work that gave your life purpose. Memories that become more precious with age. The freedom to spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing without feeling guilty. The ability to sit quietly and realise that, for one fleeting moment, nothing is missing. These things rarely appear on a balance sheet. Yet they may constitute the only balance sheet that ultimately matters.
We spend the first half of life learning how to acquire. Then, if we are fortunate, we spend the second half discovering what was worth acquiring in the first place. And perhaps that is the cruel joke of wealth.
We chase money because we believe it will eventually give us freedom, only to discover that we have spent so much of our freedom acquiring the money.
We postpone living until some imaginary future when we will finally have enough. Enough for what? Another house? Another car? Another investment? Another zero at the end of a number?
The tragedy is not that money is worthless. It isn't. Money matters enormously. It feeds families, educates children, provides security and gives us choices.
The tragedy is mistaking the instrument for the destination.
Money is a tool. We turned it into a scoreboard. And then we began measuring human beings by their scores.
But history has a peculiar way of correcting our arithmetic. One day, every account is closed. Every property becomes somebody else's. Every portfolio belongs to another generation. The numbers stop moving.
And what remains is not what we accumulated, but what we experienced, whom we loved, whom we helped, what we created and what part of ourselves we left behind in the lives of others.
Perhaps that is real wealth. Not having the most when you die. But reaching the end and realising that you did not spend your life merely becoming richer. You became richer in life itself.
And when the final balance sheet is drawn, perhaps the most valuable assets will be the ones that were never for sale.
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