The Wealth Trance: Why We're Obsessed With the Rich

There's a collective spell we've fallen under.

We scroll through the lives of billionaires, devour the habits of the ultra-wealthy, and parse the routines of the rich as if they contain the secret codes to a better existence. We know their homes, their vehicles, their vacation spots. We can recite their origin stories like creation myths. We follow their investment strategies, their morning routines, their dietary restrictions.

But why? What exactly fuels this obsession with wealth and those who possess it?

This isn't a casual curiosity. It's closer to devotion—a modern religion with its own high priests, sacred texts, and promised salvation. Understanding the roots of this fixation isn't just interesting; it's essential for anyone trying to break free from the wealth trance and rediscover what actually nourishes a human life.

The Manufactured Gospel of More

Our obsession with the wealthy didn't happen by accident. It was carefully cultivated over decades, through stories told and retold until they became the water we swim in.

The system that profits from your constant striving needs you to believe that wealth indicates worth. It needs you converting your irreplaceable time into productivity, your attention into consumption, your energy into climbing ladders that lead to summits you've been told are worth reaching.

Movies, television, advertising, social media—they all preach the same gospel: the wealthy have unlocked the keys to happiness. Their lives are frictionless, their problems solvable, their existence proof of their superior choices and character.

This mythology serves a precise function: it keeps you working, consuming, striving, sacrificing. It keeps you believing that your emptiness stems from not having enough rather than from having been sold a hollow promise.

The Immortality Project

Beneath our wealth fixation lies something deeper, something primal: our desperate attempt to deny death.

In cultures where religious frameworks have weakened, wealth has become our preferred immortality project. The rich appear to transcend ordinary human limitations. They buy the best healthcare, live in the safest places, and seem to defy even time itself with their access to youth-preserving treatments and technologies.

The wealthy don't just have more things. In our collective imagination, they've cheated death. They've transcended the common human fate. They've achieved a kind of secular immortality.

We don't just want their money. We want their seeming invulnerability to the raw, brutal facts of existence that the rest of us must face.

The Starving Gods of Belonging and Recognition

Humans evolved in small bands where being recognized and valued by the tribe meant survival. That primal circuitry still drives us, but now it's been hijacked by systems that profit from our disconnection.

When we obsess over the wealthy, what we're often really hungry for is belonging and recognition. We sense that in our culture, wealth functions as the ultimate marker of being "someone who matters." The wealthy are seen. They count. They belong at the center of the story.

Our fixation isn't really about their bank accounts. It's about a deep, animal hunger to be recognized as valuable, to matter in the stories we tell ourselves about what makes a life significant.

We've been taught that financial wealth is the most reliable path to this belonging. That the alternative is invisibility, insignificance, being forgotten.

The Displaced Longing For Sovereignty

Listen closely to how people talk about wealth and you'll hear it: the desperate longing for freedom, for sovereignty, for the ability to say "no" without consequence and "yes" without permission.

"When I'm rich enough, I can finally..."
"If I had that kind of money, I would never have to..."

These aren't just statements about purchasing power. They're expressions of a primal human need for autonomy that's been systematically stripped from most of us.

In a world where most people spend their waking hours following someone else's schedule, living in fear of someone else's judgment, and working toward someone else's goals, the wealthy appear to have accomplished what seems increasingly rare: they own their time. They make their own choices. They live by their own rules.

Our obsession with wealth is partly displaced longing for the sovereignty that should be everyone's birthright, but has become a luxury product.

The Myth of the Meritocracy

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of our wealth obsession is the story that the distribution of resources reflects a natural ordering of merit and value. That the wealthy deserve their position because they are smarter, work harder, think more creatively, take more risks.

This story serves a crucial function: it justifies the staggering inequality that might otherwise be recognized as obscene. It transforms what could be seen as systematic extraction and hoarding into "reaping the rewards of superior effort."

We obsess over the wealthy partly because we've been taught that their path is replicable. That if we just decode their habits, mindsets, and strategies, we too can join their ranks. That the distance between their lives and ours is a matter of personal choices rather than structural advantages.

This myth keeps us studying them rather than questioning the system that produced such radical disparity in the first place.

The Secularization of Divine Favor

Historically, kings and rulers claimed divine favor to justify their elevated position. God had chosen them to rule, to have more, to sit atop the hierarchy.

As religious frameworks weakened, this narrative didn't disappear. It simply transformed.

Now wealth itself is seen as evidence of favor, not necessarily from God, but from the universe, from fate, from some cosmic ordering of deserving. The "law of attraction" and "manifestation" frameworks often function as secular theologies that preserve the fundamental belief: the worthy are rewarded with abundance.

Our obsession with the wealthy partly reflects this quasi-religious belief that their material success must reflect some special worthiness, some elevated consciousness, some superior alliance with the forces that govern success.

We study them like pilgrims seeking revelation from those who have been touched by providence.

The Fear Beneath the Fascination

Beneath our cultural obsession with wealth lies something darker, something we don't like to name: fear.

Fear of scarcity. Fear of being left behind. Fear of meaninglessness. Fear of abandonment. Fear of suffering without remedy.

We study the wealthy partly as a talisman against these fears. By emulating their choices, we hope to ward off the vulnerability that comes with being merely human in a system that treats your worth as contingent on your production value.

The wealthy seem to have transcended these fears. Their money functions as a buffer between them and the raw edges of existence. And so we watch them, study them, emulate them—hoping to absorb some of their apparent immunity to what terrifies us.

What We Actually Hunger For

When we peel back these layers, what remains? What are we actually hungry for when we fixate on the wealthy?

We hunger for sovereignty—the ability to direct our own time and energy according to our own internal compass.

We hunger for recognition—to be seen, valued, and treated as someone who matters in the story of things.

We hunger for security—to know that our basic needs will be met without constant anxiety and struggle.

We hunger for meaning—to feel that our existence isn't just consumption and production, but connected to something larger than ourselves.

We hunger for ease, not endless luxury, but the simple freedom from constant financial pressure and strain.

These are legitimate human needs. The tragedy is that we've been taught to channel them toward a single solution—wealth accumulation—that often fails to satisfy the very hungers it promised to feed.

Beyond The Wealth Trance

Breaking the spell of wealth obsession requires more than intellectual analysis. It requires a visceral recognition of the gap between what money promises and what it actually delivers.

It requires listening to those who've reached the promised summit and found it hollow. The wealthy individuals who confess in private moments: "I have everything I was told to want. And I'm still waking up at 3 AM wondering what any of it means."

It requires reconnecting with non-monetized sources of meaning, belonging, security, and sovereignty.

It requires bone-deep recognition that what makes a human life valuable is never its price tag.

None of this means rejecting material sufficiency. Having enough to meet your needs, to weather emergencies, to make choices from a place of relative security—these matter deeply. Money solves money problems, and those problems are real.

But our obsession with extreme wealth, with the lives and choices of the ultra-rich, with the bizarre mythology we've constructed around billionaires? That's not about solving problems. It's about having been hypnotized into worshipping false gods.

The Quiet Revolution

The most radical act in a culture obsessed with accumulation is to name, without shame, what is genuinely enough for you.

To say: This much is sufficient. Beyond this threshold, I choose to measure wealth differently—in time unrushed, in relationships unmediated by transaction, in work that creates rather than extracts, in attention undivided.

To recognize that when the spell breaks, what remains isn't deprivation but possibility. Not the narrow measuring stick of financial accumulation, but the wild, unmapped territory of what a human life might actually be for.

This isn't about glorifying poverty or minimizing the very real suffering caused by economic insecurity. It's about questioning whether the path to a life worth living runs through the mansion gates of the ultra-wealthy—or in a direction they themselves might secretly envy, toward a wealth that can't be hoarded because it multiplies when shared.

Maybe then we'll understand that we've been obsessing over people who aren't actually ahead of us at all. They're just differently lost, in more expensive surroundings.

And the real wealth we hunger for—meaning, connection, sovereignty, ease—was never for sale in the first place.

Perhaps what we're truly seeking isn't the manicured garden of wealth, but the untamed wilderness of our own authentic nature—the part of us that remembers what it means to be gloriously, unoptimized human. The part that recognizes what truly nourishes our soil.

The wild in me sees the wild in you. May we both remember what wealth actually is.

Chandra Nicole

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