Such is the headline of this Wall Street Journal article, and the content of a number of quotes inside it.
This is not just a function of the people interviewed in the article who make more than than $400k as a household annually. Indeed, almost no one thinks of themselves as rich, and it has basically nothing to do with how much money we make. There is always someone with more, and we are exponentially more comfortable comparing ourselves to those folks (rare as they may be in any local or global sense) rather than the scores of people poorer than we are.
My dad worked at least two jobs for the entire duration of my childhood, and this was before the days of work-from-home double dipping. This was I have three kids and groceries to buy. But one of his most common refrains was “I am the richest man alive.”
This was a song of freedom. It was reframing wealth in objective terms based on the content of one’s life rather than the moving goalposts of a consumption-based lifestyle. It is raising an ebenezer rather than building bigger barns.
Meaningful Returns 