тёплая велюровая классовая ненависть
“Often the word rich becomes a pejorative,” Kenny says. “It rhymes with bitch. I’ve been in rooms and seen people stand up and say, ‘I’m Bob Kenny, and I’m rich.’ And then they burst into tears.”
на протяжении четырёх лет сотрудники Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy проводили анонимные опросы среди самых богатых слоёв населения планеты (Roughly 165 households responded, 120 of which have at least $25 million in assets. The respondents’ average net worth is $78 million, and two report being billionaires.) на тему главного вопроса жизни, вселенной и всего такого. результат получился довольно предсказуемым, но всё равно исключительно интересным.
Among other woes, the survey respondents report feeling that they have lost the right to complain about anything, for fear of sounding-or being-ungrateful. Those with children worry that their children will become trust-fund brats if their inheritances are too large-or will be forever resentful if those inheritances (or parts of them) are instead bequeathed to charity.
WORK
“One of the saddest phrases I’ve heard,” Kenny says of his time counseling the wealthy, is when the heir to a fortune is told, “‘Honey, you’re never going to have to work.’” The announcement is often made, Kenny explains, by a rich grandparent to a grandchild-and it rarely sounds as good to the recipient as to the one delivering it. Work is what fills most people’s days, and it provides the context in which they interact with others. A life of worklessness, however financially comfortable, can easily become one of aimlessness, of estrangement from the world. The fact that most people imagine it would be paradise to never have to work does not make the experience any more pleasant in practice.
Career advancement is the standard yardstick by which most people measure success, and without that yardstick, it’s not easy to assess whether one’s time is well spent. “Financial freedom can produce anxiety and hesitancy,” writes one respondent to the Boston College survey. “In my own life, I have been intimidated about my abilities because I inherited money.” If the rich do take jobs, they sometimes find that co-workers resent them on the grounds that they’re “taking away the jobs of people who need them.” The rich also leave jobs more quickly than others, for the simple reason that they can afford to do so. Karen Weisgerber, a senior adviser at the center who also works with Kenny at North Bridge, describes an heir she counseled who had earned an M.B.A. from a top-tier school and was an obviously intelligent man. He nonetheless moved from one high-tech job to another. “At some point, something would happen at each job that those who have to work for an income would learn to tolerate,” Weisgerber says. “And he’d just say, ‘I don’t want to deal with this.’ Eventually he had to say, ‘I don’t have a career.’”
LOVE
One issue that Kenny says comes up frequently is the question of at what point in a relationship to reveal one’s wealth-a disclosure he makes sound as fraught as telling your date you have herpes. “When do you tell someone that you have got a huge amount of money?” he asks rhetorically. “If you tell them too soon, you are going to worry that they want you for your money. If you wait too long, can the person really trust you?
OPPORTUNITY
As they get older, many children of privilege take either too many risks, because they know the consequences of failure are minimal, or too few, because they feel assured in their financial well-being. Kenny says they, like their parents, can grow bored with one line of work and make consequence-free shifts to other jobs-until finally they reach middle age and discover that they have put together the résumé of a dabbler and haven’t made the impact that they had hoped. “They get to be 50 years old,” says Kenny, “and all of a sudden they say to me, both in their love life and in their work life, ‘I have to stop hitting that reset button.’”
IN THE END
At its core, the survey underlines the fact that money may ease some worries, but others always remain. [...] If anything, the rich stare into the abyss a bit more starkly than the rest of us.