There is a quiet irony at the centre of modern wealth. What society most readily associates with financial success often tells the least about a person’s real financial position.
The car on the driveway, the watch on the wrist, the holiday photographs posted on the internet or the home in a desirable neighbourhood may all be indicators of wealth.
But they say little about what is happening under the surface: the quiet compounding of investments over decades, the lack of unnecessary debt, the capacity to absorb financial shocks, or the freedom to make decisions without being completely beholden to the next pay cheque.
That is, visible success is easily displayed. The real stuff is a lot more difficult to spot.
Morgan Housel did a powerful job of exploring this distinction in The Psychology of Money, defining wealth not by what we spend, but by what we don’t spend. It is the financial firepower you don’t see, sitting quietly in investments, businesses, and savings rather than being turned into something visible.
The old need to display success
The need to communicate status is not a modern invention of social media. Humans have always used external symbols to signify their place in society.
In earlier centuries, these symbols may have taken the form of land, titles, jewellery, dress, or architecture. The symbols are different today, but the underlying psychology is surprisingly similar.
Status signalling is often much less about the object itself and much more about what the object represents at its heart. A luxury watch is not just a timepiece, and a sports car isn’t just a mode of transportation. These possessions can become symbols of success, recognition and belonging.
There’s nothing wrong with this per se. It’s human to want to feel that what we do has made a difference, that our accomplishments have been acknowledged. The problem is that the appearance of success becomes more important than building the financial base that provides real security.
The price of success performance
In our modern life, the strain has become far more complex. For most of human history, our comparisons were limited to a fairly small circle of family, friends and colleagues. Today, we have millions of carefully curated moments on our phones to use as reference points.
We are not comparing our normal life with others’ normal lives anymore; what we’re matching them with is their special moments, their once-in-a-lifetime holiday, the new car delivery, the career announcement, or the carefully staged image they choose to put before the world.
The bottom line is that the definition of success evolves.
Once we have lived in it for a while, a larger home becomes normal. In the garage, the luxury car becomes the daily driver.
The milestone that once signified you’d arrived quietly becomes the new normal.
Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation: our tendency to get used to improvements in our circumstances and soon start looking for the next upgrade.
The quiet opulence of fiscal freedom
Funny how the people with the most financial freedom are often the ones who care the least about showing it off. Because their relationship to money has changed, money is no longer a tool to demonstrate success; it is a source of optionality.
It provides the liberty to select work because it is meaningful, not because it provides good pay; to have more time with children or grandchildren; to beat a health setback without being financially devastated; to help out a family member; to embark on a new venture later in life; or to walk away from a situation that no longer aligns with one’s principles.
These are the kinds of wealth you rarely see on social media. Nobody takes pictures of the comfort of sleeping soundly because they don’t have financial anxiety weighing them down.
No one ever posts a picture of the freedom that comes with having enough. But these may be the greatest luxuries that money can buy.
A more grown-up definition of success
Maybe the real difference between visible success and invisible wealth isn’t the size of a home or the brand of a car. The question is whether we are spending to gain others’ admiration or to buy more freedom for ourselves.
The most financially successful people aren’t necessarily the ones who have accumulated the greatest number of visible symbols of wealth. They are more often than not the ones who have quietly learned to live their life on their own terms, by their own values and not by someone else’s expectations.
Because at the end of the day, the best expression of wealth might not be what money lets other people see, but the quiet confidence of no longer needing their approval.
