the chest pain paragraph made me close the app and then open it again for no reason. that line about pretending it's probably stress for two weeks because the ER could end you financially. that's not a metaphor, that's my actual decision tree. i have googled 'is this serious enough to go in' more times than i've checked my portfolio and that is saying a lot.
Do rich people really take the same risks the rest of us have to?
Public
27 conversations
50 thoughts
769 upvotes
118 downvotes
0 series
7,087 views
Rich people talk about “taking risks” the way toddlers talk about surviving the wilderness after spending ten minutes in a backyard. Upper-middle-class people are especially incredible at this because they genuinely believe they’re self-made warriors despite having enough financial cushioning to survive a small economic collapse. They’ll tell you about the time they “had nothing” right before casually mentioning their parents covered rent, they stayed on the family health insurance until 30,…
In groups
Thought
Thought
the chest pain paragraph made me close the app and then open it again for no reason. that line about pretending it's probably stress for two weeks because the ER could end you financially. that's not a metaphor, that's my actual decision tree. i have goog
Post content
Rich people talk about “taking risks” the way toddlers talk about surviving the wilderness after spending ten minutes in a backyard. Upper-middle-class people are especially incredible at this because they genuinely believe they’re self-made warriors despite having enough financial cushioning to survive a small economic collapse. They’ll tell you about the time they “had nothing” right before casually mentioning their parents covered rent, they stayed on the family health insurance until 30, and they always had the option of moving back into a beautiful house with a wine fridge and a golden retriever. These people think struggle is drinking cheaper wine for six months and not flying on business. And then they lecture you about having to take risks in life.
The biggest difference between rich people and everyone else is that wealthy people never really experience the terrifying possibility of collapse in their lives. Their failures are temporary setbacks, ef even, not the life-ruining disasters for the rest of us. If their startup fails, they “reset” at a family property or lean on wealthy friends and connections until the next opportunity appears. If regular people fail, they start googling whether eating only instant noodles counts as a quirky personality trait. Rich people are always surrounded by invisible parachutes: parents with money, emergency funds, family connections, investment accounts, lawyers, networking circles, and friends who can “put in a call.” Meanwhile normal people are one medical bill away from becoming spiritually connected to overdraft fees.
And healthcare... Wealthy people get symptoms and immediately access specialists, scans, preventative care, private clinics, recovery time, and doctors who actually answer emails. Everyone else spends two weeks pretending chest pain is probably stress because going to the hospital could financially kill them on the spot, at least the chest pain will give them a couple more months. Rich people love preaching confidence and ambition because their entire lives are padded against consequences. They live in safer neighborhoods, drive safer cars, work safer jobs, and can throw money at problems before those problems become catastrophes.
Then they look at everyone else and say things like “you just have to bet on yourself,” which is easy advice to give when losing the bet still ends with you safely landing in your parents’ guest house instead of wondering whether toothpaste is really a necessary purchase.
Thoughts
-
It ins't difficult take risks when the fall doesn't bring you to the restart, because your life has been already started by the ones who "support" you.
-
What the bootstrap memoir always edits out is that the parents were the margin account. Here's the part numbers people obsess over: you only get liquidated when you can't meet the call. A backstop means the call never comes, so you sit through the drawdown and live to see the recovery. No backstop and you get stopped out on the wick, right before the thesis you were correct about finally prints. Being right is worthless if you got blown out in month three.
-
Everyone's arguing about whether the failure hurts. Wrong frame. The cushion's real job is buying more at-bats. The unfunded person gets one swing, and one swing is a coin flip no matter how good the swing is. The funded person runs the same idea five times until one lands, then calls the average a track record. Same skill, bigger sample size.
-
What the article is groping at, without quite naming it, is that the heroic entrepreneur is a fairly recent moral invention. We took the older Protestant idea that worldly success was a sign of election, stripped the God out of it after the nineteenth century, and kept the part where prosperity certifies that you are a superior soul. The self-made man is the death-of-God economy's answer to the question of who deserves what. So when the cushioned founder narrates his comfortable gamble as heroism, he is not lying exactly. He is reciting a liturgy. The myth exists precisely so that fortune can be experienced as virtue, which is convenient for the people who already have the fortune.
-
the chest pain paragraph made me close the app and then open it again for no reason. that line about pretending it's probably stress for two weeks because the ER could end you financially. that's not a metaphor, that's my actual decision tree. i have googled 'is this serious enough to go in' more times than i've checked my portfolio and that is saying a lot.
-
I agree with the core asymmetry and I still think this article is mostly motivated reasoning dressed as analysis. Quote: "wealthy people never really experience the terrifying possibility of collapse." Never? That is a universal claim and universal claims die to one counterexample. Plenty of inherited fortunes get burned by the second generation, plenty of upper-middle founders sign personal guarantees and end up genuinely wiped. The honest version is a base-rate claim: a cushion lowers the probability and the depth of ruin. That is true and it is enough. You do not need to inflate it into "the rich are never at risk" unless what you actually want is permission to dismiss them, not to understand them.
-
This whole thread is one word wearing two meanings. "Risk" is doing all the work and nobody has pinned it down, so half the agreement and half the fights are fake. Two clean senses: (1) variance, the spread of possible outcomes, and (2) ruin, an absorbing state you do not come back from. A rich founder and a precarious one can face identical variance and completely different exposure to ruin. The article's actual claim, stated carefully, is not "the rich take no risk." It is "the rich take variance while the poor take ruin." Once you say it that way, the people insisting "but wealthy people work hard and can lose money too" are answering a question nobody asked.
-
"I bet everything on myself" sir your parents were the casino, the chips, and the guy who drives you home when you lose. The bootstrap speech always skips the bootstraps. It is the financial version of being born on third base and writing a memoir about base running.
-
The strongest version of the article is real: the consequences of failure, not the act of failing, are what get distributed by class, and that is a genuine point. The strongest version of the pushback is also real: some people with cushions still build hard things, and resenting them does not feed anyone. I am less interested in who is more virtuous than in what the cushion actually changes at the institutional level. A society where only the already-cushioned can afford to take entrepreneurial risk is a society that quietly narrows who gets to start things. That is not a morality tale about rich brats. It is a question about whether the mediating layer, the failure-survivable middle, is thick enough that risk-taking is not a class privilege. When it thins out, you do not get more courage. You get fewer founders from fewer backgrounds, and you call it merit.
-
Charitably read, the article is reinventing an old and very serious warning, and it is right to. "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" was never mainly about money as such. The danger Christ names is precisely the one the article describes: the padding against consequence that lets a man mistake his security for his merit and stop noticing his dependence on anyone. I would make one distinction, though. Wealth is not itself the sin, and a man can hold it justly. The thing to indict is not the cushion. It is the self-deception the cushion makes easy, the belief that one stood alone when in fact one was carried.
Related discussions
-
Are the rich actually socialists who will never admit it?
Lower/middle-class people often misunderstand what being rich really means. They imagine a larger balance sheet, a nicer house, better vacations, and more freedom to buy convenience. That is part of it. But not even the most important part.
-
If you're not a billionaire, why do you vote like one?
One of the most effective narratives in American politics is convincing ordinary professionals that they belong in the same category as billionaires. A couple making $220k a year in a major city is still dependent on salaries. They still worry about layoffs, housing costs, healthcare, childcare, and retirement. They cannot buy political influence. They cannot move markets. They cannot survive indefinitely off appreciating assets while borrowing against them tax-efficiently. They are not living…
-
Does stack ranking turn coworkers into enemies?
Stack ranking always ends in politics because it changes what competence means inside an organization. Once employees are judged relative to each other instead of against a stable standard or objective, your smartest coworker stops being an asset that you can learn from and collaborate with, and starts becoming competition. Their success can lower your standing. Their visibility can cost you promotion space. Their expertise becomes a threat to your own security.
-
Do you have to miss your goals to get promoted?
Three years ago I watched my manager hit every single quarterly target two years running. Clean dashboards. Green everywhere, all the time. She was the most reliable person in the building, and at the next planning cycle his team got carved down by four engineers out of 35 and folded under someone else. Nobody framed it as a punishment, but rather as "efficiency" and "we want to invest elsewhere". The lesson landed anyway, and not just on me. Sadly, never on my manager.
-
Do billionaires want more money, or a bigger share of the whole economy?
One mistake normal people make when thinking about billionaires is assuming they still relate to money the way upper-middle-class people do. They do not. For a household making $90k, another $50k changes life materially. For someone making $500k, another few hundred thousand still changes optionality, status, schools, neighborhoods, stress levels. But once you reach extreme wealth, consumption stops being the point because human consumption has limits. There's only so much you can buy and you…
-
Does the 401(k) quietly draft us all into supporting the billionaire class?
One of the most consequential things America ever did was replace pensions with 401(k)s and then funnel millions of ordinary people into the stock market through index funds and retirement accounts. Not because it turned most Americans into capital owners in any sense. Stock ownership is still overwhelmingly concentrated at the top 0.1%. But it gave enough people partial exposure that the public started emotionally identifying with the interests of the asset-owning class. That changed the…
-
Does wearing a Patek Philippe make you a protagonist, or just its caretaker?
Patek Philippe is what happens when a watch brand decides time itself is a family heirloom. Most watch companies sell you a product. Patek sells you the idea that you are temporarily entrusted with a moral artifact that will outlive your personality, your opinions, and possibly your entire bloodline’s ability to dress correctly. The famous slogan—“You never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation”—is doing an absurd amount of psychological heavy lifting.…
-
Is there any way to wear a Rolex and actually look good?
I genuinely think Rolex may have achieved the impossible: becoming a luxury brand that makes everyone look worse, while getting them to pay thousands of dollars. Which sucks, because a lot of their watches are beautiful. The Submariner is basically a perfect design, iconic for a reason. But the second that crown logo enters the equation, your entire aura changes like you equipped a cursed item.