The Problems of Wealth or Having What you Want
Contemporary society is fascinated by money and the wealthy. The exclusive objects and experiences money gives access to are presented as the most desirable good. We are offered the vision that consistently blissful and exciting things happen in that world.
Looking at the evolutionary and psychological context in which we have evolved, however, we will see that having a lot of money, or having what you want, can come at an unexpectedly high price.
The Evolutionary Context
Almost all animals have evolved in ecosystems where scarcity of resources, uncertainty and consistent exposure to danger are the norm. The risk of death due to lack of nutrients, injury, disease, rivals or predators are a constant. To face these risks animals have created complex strategies that increase their survival rates and reproductive fitness. Success depends on their genes, the specific environment they inhabit, and their social cooperation if they are social animals.
For animals who have nervous systems and brains, these have been evolutionarily wired to function optimally in these resource-scarce and dangerous environments, and to be able to withstand continual hardship. Their nervous systems are primed to thrive in tough conditions and to reward behaviour that leads to longer lives and the production of healthy offspring.
For the vast majority of animals, their existence is a relatively hard and short-lived game in their natural environments. Most try to survive and reproduce, and then die young. Human beings, up until very recently, have been no exception. For the better part of the history of our species, Homo sapiens, which appeared around 300,000 years ago, the average life expectancy was 24-33 years. Childbirth complications, infectious disease, malnutrition, famine and the wear and tear of harsh living conditions cut short most lives, in a way unimaginable to most of us living today.
A Momentous Change
But the industrial revolution, starting around the 1760s, and then improved nutrition, the development of antibiotics, widespread immunizations, and better sanitation changed everything. Infant mortality plummeted, and food became abundant. Human beings rarely died from infectious disease anymore, they were mostly safe from predators and weather, and the average global life expectancy increased to its current 74 years, about 81 for technologically developed countries.
This led to immense reproductive and expansionary success as a species.
It is difficult to overstate how enormous and how fast this change, mostly in the 20th century, is on an evolutionary scale. The genus Homo is documented to have appeared about 2.8 million years ago. These changes have come about in a tiny fraction of the time it took us to become who we are, and our current environment is nothing like the one we evolved to survive and reproduce in, the African savannah.
Through the industrial revolution, and everything that came with it, the human brain, which supports advanced cognitive abilities like complex language, long-term planning, problem-solving, cooperation, and abstract reasoning, succeeded in radically changing the habitat it evolved in. In an astounding break from the constraints of its natural environment, the human brain succeeded in creating conditions in which consistent abundance, certainty and safety, relative to the surroundings Homo sapiens evolved in, became the norm for most people, certainly for anyone reading this article.
But this did not come without a cost.
Our Evolutionary Programming
The quandary is that our inner wiring, and its reward systems, have not changed. We evolved in, and are built for, the scarcity and danger of hunter-gatherer societies, and our genes have not caught up to our new environment.
Neither physically nor emotionally are we built for consistent abundance, gratification, certainty and safety. Our bodies and minds do not thrive in the inactivity, pleasure and ease that these offer. In fact, the opposite happens, they will tend to deteriorate in these conditions: bodies become weak, overweight and diseased; minds lose a sense of purpose, no longer have pride in achievement, feel empty and meaningless.
The fundamental paradox is that what we are evolutionarily programmed to want ––abundance, gratification, certainty and safety–– in order to be able to reproduce successfully, is detrimental to our physical health and emotional well-being when there is too much of it.
The evolutionary programming built into us by millennia of small mutations in our genes, strives towards trying to attain the abundance, gratification, certainty and safety that lead to reproductive success in an environment where they were very difficult to achieve, where regular frustration of those desires was the norm, and constant efforts had to be made to try to satisfy much more basic needs and desires.
We are built for frustration and striving, but now gratification of needs and desires is the rule. We want constant gratification, but we are unprepared for it.
Given easy access to pleasure, and safety from danger, in whatever form it may be, will usually lead us to overindulge since our evolutionary wiring is made for scarcity of pleasure and constant danger. Easy access to pleasure was very rarely a possibility before. Our attraction to food, especially high-energy sugars and fats, to sex, to comfort, social acceptance, colourful visual stimuli, and the attention we pay to potential signs of danger, are extremely powerful motivators that are difficult to override, for they are key to survival and reproduction in a scarce and dangerous environment. Our natural tendency will be to want to satisfy or respond to them immediately, and it requires a significant learning process, starting from childhood, of long-term vision and self-discipline, not to do so.
Herein lies the link between biology, evolution and psychoanalysis: satisfying a desire or frustrating it. So, let us go inwards to the beginning of each human being’s life, in a scenario where there is a reasonably healthy mother and baby.
The Psychological Context
When a human being is born, it is entirely helpless and dependent on its mother. Its basic needs of food, attachment, physical comfort, soothing and cleanliness must be satisfied by an attuned mother, or someone else, in order for it to survive.
Mothers temporarily give up a great deal of their own lives and rhythms in order to adapt to satisfy their baby’s needs and rhythms, creating a kind of magical environment for the baby where its needs are, if all goes reasonably well, pretty much satisfied as they appear. Mothers willingly undergo this transformation of their existence in order to adapt to their babies because they instinctively know and can feel that newborns cannot tolerate much frustration. This does not mean that it’s a perfect fit between the two, nor that there is no frustration at all, but it does mean that, overall, there are significantly more satisfying experiences than frustrating ones for the baby.
A Protective Illusion
Since babies do not yet have a well-defined sense of self and separateness, and cannot yet realize that they are entirely dependent on someone else different from them, these regular satisfactions of needs, as the needs arise, contribute to a feeling called omnipotence in the baby. The mother’s care generates an indispensable omnipotent illusion for the baby that makes it feel that it is safe, all-powerful, and, since it doesn’t yet really know that its mother is a fully different person that is providing almost everything it needs, it feels that it is in fact creating its own satisfactions as the needs appear, and that it can control everything. The baby is living in a “when-I-need-it-it-appears” state of mind.
This illusion, co-created by the sensitive mother and her baby at this stage of development, is vital to protect the baby from experiencing the extent of its actual helplessness, an experience that would result in extreme anxiety and distress, and, if felt too often, would engender severe psychopathology.
As the baby grows, the consistent and predictable experience of satisfaction of its needs, in the magical-omnipotent illusion created with its mother, slowly nurtures a feeling of inner safety, a deep conviction that satisfaction will come, a basic trust that contributes to a maturational increment in the capacity to tolerate frustration.
When the baby feels a need, it begins to be able to remember-imagine the satisfaction of that need in its mind, and that remembered-imagined satisfaction allows it to wait a little. It develops a sense of time. The mother feels this, and cultivates it according to the child’s developmental capacity, slowly increasing the time intervals between the child wanting something and receiving it, thus augmenting the child’s capacity to tolerate frustration. A mother doesn’t respond to her newborn’s wail for her breast the same way she responds to her three-year-old saying he wants a donut fifteen minutes before lunchtime. The mother incrementally teaches the child to delay gratification.
This is crucial.
Delaying Gratification
The capacity to defer gratification and tolerate frustration to achieve higher and more valuable long-term goals ––not to be confused with masochistic self-deprivation or righteousness–– is arguably one of the most important developmental achievements, and one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child. It establishes the difference between being controlled by one’s moment to moment appetites, or being free to choose a more productive path; it liberates the child from being a slave to its passions, and makes the future adult a master of its life.
The common knowledge that it is not wise to spoil children stems from this fact. Giving children everything they want, or satisfying their desires quickly, may feel good in the short term, but it locks them into infantile dependency on others, or ties them to reliance on material things, and quells the development of their autonomy, their creativeness and resolve. Not to mention the significant social disadvantage of being spoilt, a quality few people appreciate.
As the child grows, it begins to develop both the ability to think about how to satisfy its wishes and needs, and the aptitude to actually go about it. If the parent doesn’t immediately satisfy the child’s desires, that ability and aptitude will slowly develop; they precipitate a feeling of effectiveness, which starts as a private: “I can do it!” then moves on to a: “Look at what I can do, mom/dad!” and then becomes interiorized as a sense of personal agency and pride. These are the bedrock of a stable sense of self-esteem and purpose.
Thus, biological evolution and psychological development go hand in hand. In order for an individual to survive and grow, basic fundamental needs must be sufficiently satisfied, but in order for it to thrive and develop fully it must also face certain hardships and frustrations that it learns to overcome.
Our current world makes the second part more difficult for all of us than it ever was before, and a great deal of the challenges of contemporary childrearing involve teaching children self-restraint and discipline in an environment where they increasingly could have, more or less, anything they want. To add to the difficulty, we are all surrounded by products ––material, technological, physical, foodstuffs–– that are ingeniously designed to be supernormal stimuli, signals that are very difficult to resist as they overstimulate our reward systems and hijack reflective self-control.
These problems are even greater for the wealthy, as money offers almost irresistible material and psychological attractions.
The Specific Problems of Wealth
Materially, wealth carries with it the ultimate promise of ease, pleasure, safety and abundance, which is what we think we want. Basic needs are entirely forgotten, satisfaction of simple desires becomes bland, and they are replaced with appetites that become more and more select as the once slightly beyond our reach ones, now so easily attained, lose their appeal. Captivated by the illusion that frustration and lack can be banished, a spiral of swelling material aspirations is set in motion.
The trouble is that past a quickly reached point, abundance satisfies less and less, novelty evaporates ever quicker, and instead of nourishing a deep need, or creating meaning, it does quite the opposite. It saturates a life with trivia, and creates a progressively insatiable hunger for more and different stimuli desperately aimed at the increasingly unattainable goal of keeping frustration at bay. To all intents and purposes, it is almost indistinguishable from a drug, where the original pleasure has vanished and all that is left is attempting to avoid withdrawal. Another paradox: to seek to dispel all ordinary frustrations by material means condemns one to restless, existential frustration.
Psychologically, wealth is often equated with the promise of freedom from any need or emotional dependency on anyone: blissfully immersed in a self-sufficient state, one can be above the fray, special and unique. Instead of having to take into account other people’s wishes or feelings, having to compromise or wait, or having to do things for oneself, one can marshal a group of people whose job it is to satisfy one’s wishes as quickly as possible, without making demands of their own.
Regressing to Paradise
If this is sounding familiar to the reader, then you will have recognized that money tends to exert a formidable regressive pull towards the fantasy of infantile omnipotence, which goes hand in hand with helplessness. The longing to return to paradise lost dwells somewhere in all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, and money offers the illusory hope of recovering that enchanted phase. A paradox again: to seek to disentangle oneself from emotional dependency on other people through material means sentences one to regress to the state of infantile dependency, inextricably bound to an incapacity to deal with ordinary reality, and with no awareness of it.
The crux of the matter lies in goals and means. Our evolutionary programming is geared to wanting the goals of abundance, certainty and safety in order for us to be able to reproduce successfully, but nowhere in that programming is there any provision for those goals being easy to attain. On the contrary, the whole system of genes interacting with social environment is geared to providing the individual, and the group it lives in, with the tools to be able to survive in a tough, scarce and sometimes outright hostile, environment. Tools that enable us to do difficult things, to fight, to overcome obstacles, to sacrifice for others, to make considerable efforts. Easily attainable goals, on an evolutionary scale, were never a reality to contend with, they only existed in dreams.
Doing difficult things is not, however, a purely goal-oriented activity that can be done away with, with no consequences, if the end goals are easily attainable.
Doing Difficult Things
In the environment we evolved in, the achievement of the end goals was rare, and the difficulty in attaining them was so prevalent, that some sort of built in reward system for doing difficult things in itself had to be established in order for the species to be able to survive.
This is a reality that has been captured by many philosophies and religions across the world, and indeed they have given us a lot of the language to talk about it. Getting what we want gives us pleasure, more or less ephemeral, but the effortful means we must deploy to achieve our goals bring satisfaction, and setting ourselves difficult goals that stretch our capacity affords deeper satisfactions as well as lasting meaning.
Doing difficult things, overcoming obstacles, fighting for what we want, knowing when to put other’s needs before our own, making efforts, not giving in to temptation, come with a host of intrinsic benefits. They give us a mature sense of purpose, something useful to muster our innate energies for. They give us a sense of agency, filling out our potential to act on the world and on ourselves. They give us a solid sense of self-worth, knowing what we are capable of. They give us a sense of moral worth, that we are decent people, or at least attempting to be decent.
These are far more substantial satisfactions than the simple pleasures of having what we want, but they demand effort and tolerating frustration. Humankind has been extraordinarily successful in achieving its goals, and wealth allows one to feel this even more keenly, but this success ––of which we are the benefactors but in which we have not participated–– has excised the efforts needed to achieve those goals, and is so doing we may have inadvertently complicated our access to adult deep meaning, and encouraged a recession to childhood.
When there is no effort in attaining something, it is reduced to a hollow shell of pleasure, it loses the intrinsic value given by the physical and mental resources we have invested in attaining it ––nothing worth having comes easy–– and, most importantly, we lose our intrinsic value of discovering what we are capable of. We lose our pride and self-respect. If this is a standard, repetitive situation, our lives become barren and we become worthless, which are painful inner experiences. To protect ourselves from this pain, monetary value and material things rush in to replace intrinsic value, flooding the mind with what feel like tangible, controllable pleasures to stave off the deep dissatisfaction. Herein lies the danger. Easy access to the rush of immediate pleasure, even in small quantities, is very difficult to resist, as any addict will tell us.
Such is the predicament of the wealthy: they have easy access to something that can be used as one of the most powerful drugs of all, that can fill them with brilliant, evanescent pleasures and drain their lives of any substantial meaning, if they make that choice. And far more dangerous than ordinary, forbidden drugs, that lead one to destitute lives shunned by most people, the things wealth gives one access to are admired and envied by our current society, so there is almost no societal pressure to resist.
But let us make some distinctions.
Different Kinds of Wealth
It is, of course, quite a different matter if someone has created their wealth out of their hard work and perseverance, such as a business creator, then if it has come to them without effort, such as an inheritor or a lottery ticket winner.
The business creator will have the deeper satisfactions of having built something through his or her efforts, but may face significant challenges as opportunities for superficial pleasures start to abound.
The inheritor or lottery ticket winner are in a much more difficult position.
Some wealthy parents believe that it is important for their children to get accustomed to having money, privilege and access to material things early on so that they can be ready for the moment when they will inherit their parents’ wealth or business. This is no doubt well-intentioned ––though often unconsciously motivated by the wish to project one’s desire for effortless omnipotence onto one’s children–– but it is a mistake. Ease and privilege are inhibitors of psychological growth. Having access to these early on does the opposite of preparing a child for future wealth or the realities of a business, it consigns the child to remain eternally a child, chained to short-term pleasures, and distanced from contact with the ordinary reality of his or her fellow citizens.
That said, some wealthy families, keenly alert of these dangers, forge a family ethos based on a profound awareness of their privilege compared to the lives of others, combined with a deep-seated sense of altruistic responsibility, that allows them to channel their resources not to the barren satisfaction of their individual whims, but to a greater good, outside of themselves, such as helping their fellow human beings, their communities or the environment.
Once basic needs are met, it is the struggle against possible odds that makes a life meaningful and satisfying, not to have what we want.