Article: What "Rich" Feels Like: An informal poll shows that markers of wealth are less predictable-and more personal-than you think.

The actual felt experience of being rich is a rare, at best episodic, thing in American society. Consumerism is one reason for this. You can never get to "enough" via the accumulation of toys, stuff, or any other sort of consumable. The aspirational society is another.

The third is subtler but relentless: the pernicious instability of a society endlessly tossed about by insatiable appetites, unappeasable ambitions, unpredictable markets, unfathomable and unreliable bureaucracies (e.g., health insurance), fraying entitlements and so on. Being rich used to mean being (relatively) invulnerable to harm. But in an act of societal egalitarianism unique in history, over ...

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