Cornucopia

09 Learning to be rich

January 27, 2023 Karim Benammar Episode 9
Cornucopia
09 Learning to be rich
Show Notes Transcript

Are you rich? Do you feel rich? What does it mean to feel rich? And what would it take for you to feel rich? I argue that we haven't learned to be rich, partly because we have been poor for most of human history, and partly because we are stuck in an endless competition for positional goods. With the shift to abundance, we realise that many of us have access to all that we need to lead fulfiling lives, that we are living lives of plenty, and that we can let go of our fear of coming up short, now and in the future.  

Learning to be rich

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we explore what it means to live abundantly. My name is Karim Benammar. Today, I'm going to argue that we don't know what it means to be rich. We, as humanity as a society, as individuals, haven't learnt what it means to be rich. And let's see if I can convince you that that's true, or at least to get you thinking about this issue: what does being rich mean at the beginning of the 21st century?

First of all, let's see if we can come to a definition of what it means to be rich. And I mean, rich in terms of money, I mean rich in terms of wealth, in terms of prosperity, in terms of access to funds, not rich in terms of love, or rich in terms of luck, or rich in terms of joy, which are all things that we could be rich in as well. But when we think of being rich in terms of money, when would we call somebody rich? When do we call ourselves rich? 

There's a first naive definition that would be, well, the person is the richest who has the most money. So we have these lists, the Forbes list of the richest billionaires in the world for example, where people are assessed according to their worth, and we can make a ranking and decide that this is the richest person on the planet, and the top 10, etc. Now, first of all, there is a bit of a problem in calculating somebody's worth by counting the amount of shares they own in the company, because they can't just sell all the shares at the same time. Then, as soon as you start selling those shares, the shares go down, you have to pay taxes on it, etc. So, a lot of these calculations about people being worth several hundred billion are really just estimates or, in fact, we could argue that perhaps they're worth quite a lot, or they're very rich. But in fact, they would never own that amount of money, because it's not possible to liquidate shares that way, and the value of the shares fluctuates very rapidly. So, we're told this person gained ten billion in a day, or lost ten billion in a day, and of course, that's pretty absurd.

On the other hand, of course, it's true that some people have a portfolio of shares or other property, and are in fact, massively wealthy. So, we have plenty of billionaires whose wealth is not dependent on a certain number of shares, or a certain single company, but who've diversified. But, apart from this little caveat, this little technical caveat about how we calculate wealth, I think that there's not much point in calculating that way. That list of rich people doesn't really tell us anything about who is the richest person, because the first thing we really find out about being rich is that it's not a question of an absolute wealth. It's not a numbers game, where if you have the highest number, you win. It's not like an Olympic race, where if you come in, in the quickest amount of time, you beat everybody else.

In order to understand this, and to realise that an absolute number is quite naive, we have to understand that wealth is really a relative term. Feeling rich, is rich compared to what, and especially compared to whom: we feel rich when we are richer than other people. That's why we make a list and compare ourselves. And so often, it doesn't matter so much what the absolute amount is, because you could never spend it anyway, but what position you are on the list. Some people don't want to be on the list at all. Some people don't want other people to know that they're on the list of the richest people, and some people are actually quite competitive about being number four, or five, or one or whatever. You can see that in order to feel rich, and really rich, we want to have more than somebody else. In that sense, being rich is a relative position. And we can say that we are rich, we could say as a second definition of being rich, that we really are rich if we have more money than the people we compare ourselves to. And so, we have rich countries where the average GNP, or the average production, or the average wealth per population, is higher than other countries, we have rich neighbourhoods, we have rich families, etc.

This relative definition of wealth tells us something about human nature. There are psychological experiments where people have been asked: “would you rather have, say, $100,000 a year and live in a neighbourhood where everybody around you has $50,000 a year? Or would you rather have $200,000 a year, but then be surrounded by people who have half a million, for example? So, would you rather have less in absolute terms, but be surrounded by people who have much less than you have? Or would you rather have more, but then be surrounded by people who have even more?

And we find out that people are genuinely happier, and they prefer actually being the richest person around, or at least they prefer not having less than their neighbour, and their neighbours or their group that they're comparing themselves with, etc. So a deep source of unhappiness, and a deep source of feeling poor, is really not so much feeling poor in absolute terms, but feeling poorer than other people, feeling poorer than other people you compare yourself to. And you might compare yourself to in terms of where you live, it might be in terms of education, it might be in terms of age, it might be in terms of the job that you do, it might be in terms of the choices you've made, in terms of houses you've bought, or something like that. Anything really.

And so, really, we could make people richer, by just surrounding them with people who have less money. Don't try and keep up with people who have more than you, but go and live amongst people who have a lot less than you, and you will feel richer and better immediately. And anybody who's had the experience of travelling to countries where people are generally a lot poorer, a lot poorer than the country that you live in, you feel incredibly rich, you feel incredibly wealthy. You feel incredibly wealthy because the money that you have goes a long way in those countries, because things seem absurdly cheap, because you realise that the kind of lifestyle you have is so much more than the average person in that country can afford. And whether you feel happy about this, or perhaps guilty, or perhaps uncomfortable, it's this experience of suddenly having a lot more, suddenly being in a different category.

[music]

But the second definition of being rich carries within it a large problem. And that's the problem that we are always competing with each other, and that there are always losers, and always winners. So, if everybody grows in terms of wealth, everybody becomes richer, then people are still competing with each other to be richer than their neighbour or their reference group. And so, it really becomes a question of Keeping Up with the Joneses, having the same status as they have, living in the same kind of house, having the same kind of car, or cars, having the same kind of holidays, having the same kind of expenditure, having the same kind of luxury items.

Once it becomes a comparison thing, then the comparison is usually not to people who are far less well off than you are, but it's usually two people who are the same as you or slightly better, and it becomes this incredible competition. And of course, advertising is a way to stoke the fires of that competition, this kind of envy of other people's lifestyles, “oh look at them, they have a nicer car, or a nicer house, or a nicer expenditure, or they dine in finer restaurants, or whatever your expenditure is”. And so, you can be made miserable by always comparing yourself to people who have more than you. And if advertising always encourages you to compare yourself to people who have more than you, or people who live fantastic lives because they drink this kind of alcoholic drink or wear this kind of perfume or this kind of watch - as if these things were related. But anyway, you get the drift. Advertising makes you feel deficient, makes you feel uncomfortable, makes you feel that you're lacking in something, and makes you feel that you would be a lot happier if you possessed that, or if you bought it, or if you had access to it. And so, it encourages you to spend more to buy things and therefore to try and require to have the means to buy that.

In that sense, we could all be getting richer, and we could all still feel poor. Perhaps this is a way in which we can explain the fact that even though in absolute terms, we can calculate how much richer we've become in developed countries over the last decades, the last half century, perhaps we're eight times or ten times richer than we were half a century ago - in objective terms, and that's by the things that we can buy and have access to - but we don't necessarily feel that much richer. If you're living in a time where very few people have access to certain things, and you don't have access to them, you don't feel bad. But if you live in a time where certain people have access to all these things, and you don't, then you certainly feel bad. We've got to be careful that this definition of being rich, or if we think that being rich is associated with this comparative, relative way of thinking about it, then we are doomed to this everlasting race, this everlasting competition, where there are no real winners, because everybody's constantly competing.

How do we get out of that bind? Because I think the definition of relative wealth is the correct one, there is a lot of research to back that up. But I would argue that there's a third definition of being rich. And the third definition is, how much do I have to spare? Am I so wealthy that I'm not using all of my wealth. I have so much more than I need, I have plenty, I have a surplus. You know I'm coming from this argument of abundance, and we're exploring what it means to live abundantly. So, I'm trying to think of a way in which abundance is also a way of being rich: we feel rich, we can feel rich, because we have an abundance of means, because we have an abundance of money, because we have an abundance of wealth, because we have an abundance of prosperity. 

And by abundance, we mean the sense that there's always more coming. Abundance, of course, is a metaphor on some level: it means a flow, a flow of water. There is an abundant flow, there is more than then you need. And the flow keeps coming. You can think of a waterfall, or a river, or some kind of bath overflowing. And whatever you do, there's so much coming from the source, so much coming from the tap, that you're never going to be short. So, if you were in a situation where you had more money coming in, say than you were spending, then you would feel “well, no matter how much I spend, there is more coming in, and I never need to feel short of that”. And in this case, because you don't have the fear of feeling short, you don't necessarily need to compare yourself to other people so much and, also, you have less worries about it. 

Now, this is a tricky thing to explain. I've tried to explain it to quite a lot of people over the last few years. I've come up with arguments, or stories, I've been trying to tell people: “listen, we really are very rich, and we haven't learned how to be rich, because we still feel strange and uncomfortable about feeling rich, but we are rich”. And this has led to quite a lot of resistance. People have said, “well, you know, I don't feel rich, because I still lack x, y, or z”. Or: “speak for yourself. I don't know how much money you have, but I think that I need more just to feel safe, just to feel comfortable”. They see a lack, they see a fear, they see a worry, they see a comparison with other people. And they say, “well, I wouldn't quite consider myself rich”. 

If you get resistance like that, and you get resistance from quite a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people you having a conversation with, you realise - or I realised - that I'm onto something. I realise, of course, first of all, that my explanation is still not convincing, or that maybe I'm the one who's wrong when everybody else is right. That's quite possible. But I also think that I'm onto something because I think that the resistance to the idea shows that we're struggling with it on some level. So, let me see if I can convince you of this idea that we can define wealth and being rich by how much surplus we have, by how much abundance we have, by how much we have more than we need.

[music]

First, we have to examine briefly this idea of limitless desire. If there are limitless desires, if we can always desire more, if we're always comparing ourselves to the neighbours, then we can never really be rich, or we can never be really assured of being rich, however much we have amassed in terms of numbers in bank accounts or possessions. But I want to argue that that really goes against our existence as human beings in time. At some point, if you have access to everything, you are rich, and having more access to everything doesn't change that. If you already have access to everything, if you already are rich in that sense, then you can't be more rich; this comparison and this number only works mathematically. So yes, mathematically, you could always increase the number. And so, you could always make a little comparison. But that is meaningless. If it's much more money than you can ever spend in your lifetime, then it's meaningless. And you can say, well, yes, but I could give that away. Yes, well, but if you give it away, you could give it away now, you're not spending it on yourself. 

And let me again give you the example that I use quite frequently, because I think it is, in a certain sense indicative, it's an emotion we already have. I want to talk about access we have to music, for example. When I grew up, I had a certain record collection. And I could spend this much of my pocket money on music, on buying records, or tapes, or whatever, or copying tapes from friends, but it was limited by the amount of finances I had. 

Now that we all have access to pretty much all the music that is out there through streaming services, which we can get for a fixed fee, or which we can get for free if we listen to some advertising, basically, this has become a level playing field: everybody has access to all the music. Even if you have a lot more money to spend on music, that becomes nonsensical, because everybody already has access to everything.

Yes, you could have a better stereo, you could buy better equipment, you could be a real audiophile and say “oh, I want the vinyl version of this or that”. There's always ways to have luxury goods - we will talk about luxury goods in a minute. But in terms of the quality and the wealth, and being rich in music, we're all rich in music. We're all incredibly wealthy in music. In fact, we're all as wealthy as we could possibly be.

The counter argument is always: “well, yes, but that is true of something that is digital”. If we had the same system with books, we could all have access to all the books that were written, we could have access to all the films that were ever made, we could have access to all the information. With the Internet, we are already quite a long way there. We can have access to all kinds of programming, and all kinds of tools, and all kinds of apps, which allow us to do certain things. And again, still people say “this is digital, what is true of music is not true of housing, it's not true of other things”. But I do think that it's more true of things than we believe.

I don't think it's true of housing. Partly because there is a scarcity of housing in many countries, somehow we build less than we need, or our needs outpace our building. But in terms of health care, for example, if you're in a country with a national system of health care, you have access to the same health care whether you're wealthy or not. Now, in other countries where you have access to a private system, being rich matters. The same thing is true of schooling: if you live in a country where admittance to certain schools is just about where you live, and admittance to universities is regulated by your grades or something like that, and not by your capacity to pay for it, then basically, we all have access to the same system. 

And so, that teaches us one thing: basically, communal wealth - “common wealth” - is much easier to achieve and, in fact, much cheaper than individual wealth. To take the simple example of health care: if everybody needed their own hospital, with doctors at the ready, and hospital beds, and intensive care units, and ambulances, and you wanted private health care which was just for you, just for your family, it would cost you a fortune. If you had your own school, with your own dedicated teachers, it would cost you a fortune. If you had your own cultural system, where you would have to put up your own operas to listen to them, it would cost you a fortune. And so, basically, we don't organise it that way. We realise that you might need to have access to health care at a certain time, and we provide it for you. And we provide it for you either through a National Insurance System, or through a private insurance system or something or other - there are different ways to do this.

One of the ways, interestingly enough, to increase everybody's wealth, is to make it communal wealth. I don't think there's anything wrong with some of these communist ideals. There is an argument to be made that Karl Marx, the communist thinker, was, in fact, in the abundance thinker. He was thinking “how do we produce value?”. Now the value is taken by a small group of capitalists, who own the means of production, and they are exploiting the workers, and they are keeping the workers poor, because they want a “reserve army of unemployed”. And so, there's this argument that the system is keeping people poor, so that a small group can profit. You want a revolution, you want the workers, the proletariat, to take over, and eventually to come up with a situation of abundance, where the means of productions are freely shared, where everybody works to their skill and to their capacity, and everybody takes what they want, and everything can be produced. So, there's quite a lot of utopian thinking in this communism, because in fact, communal wealth creation is a very efficient way to create wealth: it makes us all richer.

So, if we go back to the individual, we are rich, we are wealthy, we are prosperous if we live in a society, where we have access to the things that matter to us: where we have access to health care, we have access to education, for ourselves, for our children, we have access to safe forms of living, we have access to food, we have certain degrees of freedom to decide our own lives. That is wealth. We have access to cultural products, music, videos, art, museums, libraries, Internet, etc. You create wealth for everybody. And at that point, when you have access to all of it, there is no more competition.

Let's go back to the argument about music. If we have access to all the music, then having more money doesn't make a difference. And we are rich, we've made it. The economic problem, the problem as to how to have more has been solved, we are no longer engaged in trying to overcome a lack. We are living in a situation of overflow, of abundance, of surplus. I'm kind of asking you to think about that, to feel that. If you look at your own life, in what situation are you deficient? Where do you think “I do not have access to the things that I need to live a good life”?

[music]

I think perhaps you might not be completely convinced yet, because part of the reason we want money, or part of the reason we don't consider ourselves rich, is because we look to the future. Many of the things we do are to have a good life in the future. Money is a is a form of time travel, really, because the money that we save now, the money that we have in reserve - the reserve of water, if you will, if you keep using that analogy of abundance - because that water is dammed, we have a reservoir in terms of our bank account, and if we need money to flow in the future, we release some of that water, and we have energy, or in this case money. We do this of course with our pensions, we do this with things that we save for, which might be the purchase of a large item, which might be to pay for our children, or whatever. 

And so, when people have anxiety about their wealth and they don't consider themselves to be rich, even though they have quite a lot of money, it's because they fear for the future. One of the reasons we've seen is you don't have access to health care, or education, or cultural products, or freedom, and it costs a lot of money to have access to that privately. And the other reason that you might not consider yourself to be rich, is you have fear for the future. So, in fact, the other way that we can make people feel richer, and be richer, by definition, is by ensuring that they have a common future. So again, if you have countries or systems with a general pension for old age, then people don't have to be fearful of the future, they don't have to have their own retirement accounts. If you have a system where people are taken care of if they become unemployed, or if they lose the capacity to generate funds for themselves in the future, then again, you are taking away that worry.

I want to assure you that not I'm not arguing for this because of my own political preference. I'm arguing for this, from the perspective of the argument. What would make us all richer? Well, systems which guarantee access to goods for everyone, which guarantee future access to goods for everyone, are systems, which make everybody richer by definition of what it means to be rich. And systems, which don't do that, which make everybody solve their own problem individually, require huge amounts of wealth, because you don't know who's going to need access to what, in what future. You have all this excess wealth, but people don't feel rich, because they still worry about the future. They worry about getting sick, they worry about losing their job, they worry about these things. And so, again, creating common wealth, creating communal wealth, is really a lot easier. Maybe it's ten times easier. I don't know if we need to quantify it, but it's certainly significantly easier than creating private wealth. 

Now, does that mean we need to pay a lot of taxes? Well, again, why not? If taxes are a way to achieve this, if taxes lead to that kind of common wealth, then they're a good thing. And, again, it's been proven quite conclusively by research, that countries which have high tax rates for its inhabitants, tend to be countries which create a lot of wealth for their inhabitants. And conversely, countries which have low tax rates, or deficient tax systems, can't provide this common wealth for the citizens, and everybody is a lot poorer. 

So, let's recap. We had three definitions of what it means to be rich. We have the definition of just absolute numbers, which we argued didn't make much sense, because in fact, people are much more concerned with relative numbers, with their position with regards to other people, a peer group, or the place that they live, or whatever. We have seen that relative wealth could lead to the problem that we're engaged in an endless competition, and therefore, everybody continues to feel poor. And instead, we argued, that if we take the definition of how much surplus you have this feeling that I have more than I need, I have much more than I need now and in the future, we would feel rich. 

And I argued further that giving people this feeling, giving ourselves this feeling, ourselves experiencing this feeling of having more than we could ever need, which we have with music and certain cultural products, certain digital products, we could also feel that with the things that matter for us in life. So, with health care, with education, with housing, with foodstuff, with possibilities, with freedom. And we could also feel that abundance not just now, for our present moment, but also for the future. We don't need to amass vast amounts of money to take care of a possible future in which we have less money, because we are guaranteed to have money coming in.

[music]

Now I'm about halfway down the mountain. I can see the village with whitewashed walls, and the city further on, and then the sea. The sun is still quite high, setting slowly, this golden path in the sea moving towards the horizon.

Let's ask what it means for ourselves: do you feel rich?

It's a strange question, isn't it? Because you might think about your bank balance. You might think about loans that you still have to pay. You might think about uncertainty or fear. You might not want to feel rich. You might think, “well, I'm reasonably well-off”. There are always other people you could compare yourself to. “Well, I'm rich compared to these people, but I'm poor definitely, or not well-off, compared to these people. My question would be: what is holding you back?

What is holding you back? Not of a get-rich-quick scheme where you can increase the balance on your bank account. But what is holding you back from feeling rich? From this sense of achievement: “wow, I'm rich. I've made it. Whatever it was, I've made it. I've achieved this. Being rich means not having any worries about health, education, foodstuffs, housing, energy, possibilities, travel, cultural products. And I am amazingly wealthy in those regards. I can imagine becoming a little bit wealthier, perhaps. But I am rich, I have achieved a certain state, which we could call wealthy, rich, prosperous. And, yes, I can still compare myself to other people. But that doesn't really matter. Because in certain respects, when we have access to the same things, we are equally rich.

How does that feel? 

I think it's tricky. I think people still find it very difficult to call themselves rich. We don't want to. Perhaps we think that there is some honour in being poor, or not being rich, or we associate people being rich with a certain behaviour.

There are two more things I want to discuss. The first is luxury goods. And the second is: well, how do you then live, if you're rich? How does it change your life? Let's talk about luxury goods. You can always buy more toys: you can buy better stereos, you can buy incredibly expensive cars, if you want to. Don't get started with boats, because you can spend a fortune on boats, going from a small fortune to literally buying boats that cost, say, a billion dollars. The same thing is true of property and mansions and housing, especially if it's in the kind of neighbourhood where everybody else wants to live. So, we read about these ridiculous sums being paid for certain things. And when I say ridiculous sums, it's not necessarily a value judgement. I mean, it is a value judgement, I think they're ridiculous sums, I think you can get same kind of thing for a 10th or a 100th of the price somewhere else. You're just buying a whole bunch of hype, basically. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I'm not judging it in the fact that if you want to buy the hype, and you feel that's a good thing to do, then go ahead. There's a certain economy of luxury products, which I think is very important. We can't just discount it, because it keeps a lot of our economy going, that we spend so much more on things than we actually need to.

Why are luxury products so expensive? Well, because, generally, they're scarce. There are only so many mansions in that corner of Hollywood where everybody wants to live to be a star among stars. There are cars, which cost a million dollars or $5 million, because there's only 10 of them made. The value of luxury goods is always associated with scarcity. If you think of works of art, which are unique, then they also cost huge amounts of money sometimes. And so, this is interesting, because leaving aside for the moment what it does to our economy, it also shows us that the people who are very interested in luxury goods - or if you are fascinated by luxury goods, and you feel poor because you don't have access to luxury goods - you are not living in a situation of abundance, you are in fact, still playing a game of scarcity.

Even though you are wealthy, even though you are rich, even though you're rich because you have access to all these things that you need. You refuse being rich, you haven't learned to be rich. You don't consider yourself rich because you want to continue playing this scarcity game. You want to continue comparing yourself to others who have more than you. And when most things that you need are easily accessible, the only way to keep playing that game is to play it with luxury goods, with positional goods, with restricted goods, which scarce goods. And so, we can have an art collection, we could possess several mansions in amazing places, we could have a collection of cars, we could have expensive clothes, etc.

I also think that it's quite possible for you to be mathematically well off, to have a bank balance with lots of zeros, which would suggest that you are incredibly wealthy, but to still be poor. So really, being rich or being poor is not really related to your bank balance.

Now, don't get me wrong. Up to a certain amount of money, having more money makes you happier, it gives you access to more goods. Up to a certain threshold, having more money gives you more opportunity, gives you more possibilities. But beyond that threshold, it doesn't. I'm not claiming all of us are wealthy on this planet. Many people still live in abject poverty, we'll get to that in a minute. But there is a group of people, hundreds of millions certainly, probably a couple of billion people, who are living on that threshold, who, in fact, are rich, who have access to all the things that they need. And if you're still playing the game of competition, of comparing your possessions with other people, then you will always be poor, no matter how many luxury goods you own. And, in fact, as a society then, we are still stuck in scarcity.

So, now that I'm coming to the end of the walk - I can see the village below me, the sounds of the village are coming up to me - I want to end with: what does it mean to be rich? How do we live as rich people? What does it change in our way of life?

First of all, I think feeling rich is an emotion. It's a state of being. It's a mindset. If we haven't learned how to be rich, because we haven't been in a position to have access to all of these goods, with hundreds of millions or billions of people, then this is a shift that we're making, a shift that we're making as a society, a shift that we're making as humanity. Suddenly, many of us are rich. And if we played the competition game for ever rarer and scarce luxury goods, of course, we can play that game forever, we can all stay poor forever.

 But, really, the other opportunity is to make that shift: to realise that being rich, feeling rich, is having access to the things that you need for the life that you want to live. Having access to healthcare, to education, to cultural products, to foodstuffs, to housing, to energy, to transportation, having possibilities in your life, having freedom, and also the lack of fear and the lack of worry about falling short in these resources for yourself ,or for your loved ones, falling short today or tomorrow or next week, that the future is a future of plenty. It's again this sense of plenitude, the sense of having plenty, having more than you need, more than you need at the moment, and more than you will need in the future. 

If we keep with the metaphor of abundance, the idea of water flowing, it could be that your bath is overflowing, you have enough water, water keeps coming in, there is more coming in all the time, your inflow of value is higher than your outflow. And your inflow may be through something that the community provides for you. It may be your work, your present work or your past work, it may be your savings, it may be the things that you own. And if this inflow is larger than your outflow, if the source keeps providing, then the easiest thing is to share is to let that flow flow in different places, where it is most needed.

If we think of giving, not out of obligation, not out of some mathematical idea that we're going to give 1% or 5% or 10% of our income, not out of some sense of guilt, not out of some sense that we are better human beings if we give money away, not out of some sense of pride or pleasure in giving, but out of a sense that we through, whatever situation, whatever fluke, whatever happened in our lives,  are capable of generating more wealth than we know what to do with. And in that sense, generating that wealth is not painful, it's actually quite pleasurable, it's actually quite enjoyable. We take great pleasure in doing so, so we can keep doing it.

We can do this individually, if you do a job that you love doing, and it generates more money than you know what to do with. But we can also do this as a society. When, as a society, we've created systems that can generate the things that our society needs: the healthcare, education, transport, etc, all the things we've named before. Eventually, we'll get better at this. Eventually, the systems will get better. Eventually, we'll have machines and robots and energy sources to do the work for us. And so, we will go to a future of more resources. Unless we mess it up, of course, or unless we keep playing this game of pitting the one individual against another in an endless competition. If you are like that you are poor: you might have enormous access to very rare goods, but you are still poor in your mind.

[music]

So, to sum up: I started by saying that we haven't learned what it means to be rich. This is a transition that we're undergoing: that being rich is not a matter of having the highest number in a bank account. It's not a question of an absolute number, because that number at some point is meaningless. It's a matter of relational wealth, of how much you have compared to others. And we've interpreted this as a game of competition for ever more luxurious products, ever more scarce products, to compete and feel ourselves to be wealthy or not. But there is a third definition, which is a sense of plenty: a sense that you have more than you need, more than you need today, more than you will need tomorrow or next week or next year or in the future. This absence of fear and worry about the future, for yourself and your loved ones. That being rich is a state of mind, it's an emotion, it's a way of being in the world. 

Because we have created access to all of these things that we need as human beings, and we can create access to these things communally, we can make everybody rich. It doesn't have to be a competition. It doesn't have to be some rich people and some poor people; everybody can be rich eventually. And, in fact, we should be looking for the ways to do that. And one of the ways to do that is to spread the wealth around. If you have more coming in than you know what to do with, then the natural flow is generosity, to pass that on, to let the flow of value creation or idea creation or the things that you can build, and make them available for others.

Now, I don't know if I've convinced you. I doubt it. I think that the shift of feeling rich is quite difficult to make, because a whole communal, social, historical mindset is against it. Because it may feel strange, or naïve, or lead to all kinds of resistance. “Well, it's easy for you to say that you're rich, but what about this, this, and this? What about poor people? And again, I'm not naive in thinking that everybody is rich. A very significant number of people has achieved this state of wealth, this threshold, if you will. But a whole bunch of people hasn't. And in fact, giving those people as much possibility and as many means, and as much money as you can spare to achieve that threshold, I think is very important. But that's a topic for a different walk.

The question I want to leave you with is: what would it take for you to feel rich? What would it take for you to have this sense of plenty, to let go of this sense of worry, not to have that sense of worry about the future, about the things that you need? To realise that you have access to everything you could possibly want, and that really the question of how to live your life is not a question about means. It's a question about how you're going to use those means. That the goal of life is not to make as much money as possible or to get rich quick or whatever. 

You are already rich. The quickest way to get rich is to feel rich now. You don't actually have to change numbers in bank accounts in order to do that. And if you haven't reached this, and there may be lots of good reasons why, in your particular case, that is not the case yet, what would it take for you to feel richer? What would it take for you to feel rich some of the time? Is it a certain number? Is it a certain place? Is it a certain lack of worry? It's worth thinking about that. So, I hope you feel a little bit richer after this talk than you have before you started listening, and I will see you on the next episode of Cornucopia.