Failed Stewardship and Family Unhappiness

From the point of view of the poor and of levelers everywhere, it might seem to be only simple justice for the rich to be wretchedly unhappy. Alas, this is not the case—the rich are as happy as anyone else, although the particular challenges to happiness that the wealthy face tend to be somewhat different. But there is one certain route to unhappiness for the rich: If stewardship of the family's capital is so poor that it disappears, disappears to the point where the family is no longer wealthy and can no longer deploy its capital in creative ways, unhappiness will descend like a dark curtain on the family, perhaps for generations.

It is always a wrenching experience for any family to slip down the socioeconomic ladder, and it almost always leads to misery in one form or another. When a working-class family, clinging precariously to its hard-won respectability, slips back into poverty, an infinitely sad event has occurred. And in every high school, the most unhappy children are those whose parents are high achievers and whose expectations for their children are correspondingly—and all-too-often unreasonably—high. The fact that Daddy chairs the symphony board shouldn't have implications one way or the other for whether little Billy becomes a truck driver, but in fact the implications are huge. Even when the socioeconomic slippage occurs primarily as the result of broad economic dislocation—as in the Great Depression, when many families fell one or even two rungs down the ladder—the pain of the experience often persists for generations.

How much worse it is, then, for a family that is rich to cease to be rich solely because some generation of the family has failed in its stewardship of the capital. The sense of failure and the shame associated with that failure, the pressing weight of abused privilege, always results in unhappiness, and frequently it results in multigenerational neuroses that settle like a miasmal haze on subsequent generations. These are the families with dark secrets, the families with rigid and brittle personalities, the families with a perpetually negative outlook on life and its possibilities, the families pathologically concerned with appearances, with social slights, with the need to associate with the right people.

If we wanted to prioritize them, then, the challenges for the wealthy come down to these: