Do you want to be rich? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course: I am sure you do.)
Well, you probably already are. And if not, it is not hard to become so.
It’s actually very easy to dramatically increase your wealth, at least in theory, and you don’t even need any more money. But first it’s important to think about how we define our personal wealth. There are bad ways to do so, and good ways. I’ll mention one of each.
Comparative Wealth
“Wealth is any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.” – H L Mencken, A Book of Burlesques
The above quote, while humorous, contains an important truth and reveals how most of us think about our level of wealth, even if unconsciously. Most of us consider ourselves wealthy if we have more than those around us. This is “wealth as status game,” and if we have more wealth and/or status than the people we compare ourselves to, we feel pretty good about ourselves.
A short blog post isn’t the place to get into all the ways in which status and comparison with others is a bad way to approach your personal sense of wealth (and self-worth). I will presume that you already intellectually understand and agree with this basic idea.
But, even by this measure, I am almost certain that you are damn wealthy. There’s a high chance you are even in the reviled/envied “one percent.” You probably just aren’t thinking globally enough. Because when we take the entire world into account, earning about $55-60,000 per year puts you in the top 1%.* And earning half that ($28-30,000/yr) puts you in the top 5%. In fact, making just $20,000/yr makes you one of the top 10% of wealthiest people worldwide.
So if you are making over $20,000 per year and don’t feel well-off, you are probably comparing yourself to the wrong people. Such a mistake is easily understood: we all tend to compare ourselves to those we see most often, and it’s easy to lose proper perspective in a society filled with advertisements and constant media barrages about the “rich and famous.”
I can’t know any anonymous reader’s financial situation, but I suspect that if you have the interest and ability to read a blog post, you are quite rich, at least in comparison to the rest of the world.
But then again, comparing yourself to others — while natural and understandable — isn’t really the best way to define your wealth (or anything else about you).
The Wealth Formula
Here’s a better way — an actual mathematical formula for calculating your level of wealth:
W = H / D
(Where W= wealth, H= “what you have”, and D= “what you desire”)
In sentence form, this reads: Wealth is equal to “What You Have” divided by “What You Desire”
Like all mathematical formulas, this definition ignores subtlety and nuance in favor of pointing out an important truth — that there are two ways to increase one’s wealth.
You can increase your wealth by increasing what you have, which is obvious enough. But you can just as readily — and with less effort — increase your wealth by decreasing what you want. (Recall that decreasing the denominator in a fraction increases the resulting whole number: eg, 100/20=5, and 100/10=10).
Increasing what you have is the typical path most people take in trying to become wealthy, and its the one favored by a consumption-addicted culture like the US.
On the other hand, virtually all philosophical and religious traditions have stressed the importance of reducing desire, the denominator in the above equation:
“Anyone who is on good terms with poverty is rich.” – Seneca, Letters on Ethics (4.11)
In fact, if you think through the math carefully, and remember that any number divided by zero is infinite, you will realize that if you could reduce your desire to zero, your sense of wealth would be unbounded:
“When you realize there is nothing lacking / The whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (ch 44)
This insight is a core teaching of monastic and mystic traditions the world over. And while I cannot personally attest to the truth of attaining nirvana by reducing desire to nothing, I can attest to the fact that you can become much happier — and subjectively wealthier — by reducing your desires.
I personally felt the poorest, in fact, during the years that I was making the most money I ever made. This was at least in part because I lived in an expensive neighborhood in a big city and spent a lot of time with people who had more disposable ncome than me.
Conversely, living for several years in a thatch hut on a semi-deserted island in Panama (where the average person’s income was not much over $10,000 per year) did wonders for my ability to see through the false values associated with the pursuit of money — as well as teaching me how little one truly needs in order to “realize there is nothing lacking,” as the Old Master above said.
How to Become Rich
I’d need much more than a single blog post to fully describe how you might go about achieving such a realization for yourself (in fact, this will be a major theme spread across multiple chapters of the practical philosophy book I am writing). But here are two quick tips:
First — with respect to status and comparison — simply read a bit to learn more about what life is like for those who do not live in the developed world, or what life was like for the richest people just a couple hundred years ago. Really meditate on those peoples’ lives. This simple exercise alone should go a long way towards helping you realize just how much you already have.
Second — with respect to desire reduction — try cutting something pleasurable or luxurious out of your life for a couple weeks. You will probably realize that this thing isn’t actually all that important. If so, keep it out of your life, and then repeat the exercise with something else.
Both of those practices provide excellent paths towards immense wealth, and you don’t need to earn an extra penny for either.
Notes
*- All incomes are post-tax, and for an individual (not a household). Multiple calculators exist which provide slightly different results; I used https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i