This morning I read an article in Fortune about what it called the “upper-middle-class trap”—the strange predicament of people earning the kind of money most Americans would understandably consider rich, yet somehow not feeling rich at all. We’re talking about households making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, people with good homes, good schools, vacations, retirement accounts, and access to comforts unavailable to most of humanity throughout most of human history, describing a life that increasingly feels like they are barely keeping up. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Yes, everything costs more than it did five years ago. Money buys less. Housing is absurd. Education is expensive. I understand all of that. But if you make $300,000 a year and the primary evidence of your hardship is that the house you want costs too much, private school is outrageous, and premium travel isn’t as premium as it used to be, I have difficulty joining the funeral procession. Somewhere in the article, though, my amusement shifted into recognition. The problem wasn’t really money. It was want.
The article describes people caught in a financial arms race, continually spending more to obtain things that increasingly fail to make their lives feel better. The prescribed solution is almost comically simple: stop competing. Buy the smaller house. Use the public school. Fly economy. Ask whether something actually improves your life or whether you want it because everyone around you seems to have it. And suddenly this supposedly modern economic phenomenon began sounding very old. Thousands of years old, actually. Buddhism has been trying to tell us about this particular bug in the human operating system for quite some time. We want. We get. We adjust. Then we want again. The object changes, the income changes, the neighborhood changes, the zeros change, but the process remains wonderfully, terribly efficient.
Want has become one of the ideas I talk about most often with Jettie Jane. She is eight, so our conversations are thankfully less likely to involve Pali terminology or debates about the precise meaning of tanhā. Instead, we talk about what wanting actually feels like. You can be perfectly happy with the toy you have until you see another toy. Nothing happened to yours. It didn’t become uglier. It didn’t stop working. It didn’t betray you in the night. Another object simply entered consciousness and, through some spectacular trick of the mind, what was enough thirty seconds ago becomes insufficient. That is what I want her to notice. Not that wanting something makes her bad. Not that objects are evil. Not that she should become a tiny ascetic living beneath a tree while the other third graders compare Labubus. I want her to see the mechanism. Look what happened. You were happy. Then want appeared. Now the thing you already had feels like less. That observation seems more useful to me than a thousand lectures about gratitude because it gives her something she can actually watch happen inside herself.
I talk about it with her so often because I’m trying to watch the same thing happen inside me. I wear essentially the same outfit every day now. I have mostly stopped buying things for myself. This isn’t because I’ve transcended material existence and become some enlightened Oklahoma monk wandering around in identical clothes. I spent decades collecting things, chasing things, upgrading things, and convincing myself that various external changes might produce some corresponding internal transformation. I still like beautiful objects. I still enjoy experiences. I still have preferences, ambitions, desires, appetites, and an embarrassing number of things in my house that would make an actual Buddhist monk question whether I understood the assignment. The practice isn’t purity. The practice is interruption. When the mind says, You should get that, I’m becoming more interested in the wanting than in the thing. What is this asking for? What do I imagine will change? Is there a real use here, or have I simply become uncomfortable with reality and found a conveniently purchasable escape hatch?
That escape-hatch quality of material want may be the part that troubles me most. A shirt can just be a shirt. A vacation can simply be a vacation. A great meal can be one of the genuine joys of being temporarily embodied as a hungry primate capable of making enchiladas. There is nothing inherently corrupting about any of it. But objects are remarkably easy to turn into emotional technologies. Bored? Buy something. Sad? Go somewhere. Insecure? Upgrade something. Restless? Remodel something. Unsure who you are? Perhaps a different car would know. And the damned thing is that it works—for a minute. The package arrives. The trip begins. The new kitchen shines. Consciousness changes. Relief appears. The brain records the lesson: Ah, reality felt wrong, and consumption changed reality. We should remember this. Then the new object becomes part of the background scenery, the altered state becomes normal, and reality quietly returns through the side door. Fortunately, Amazon delivers tomorrow.
This is where watching people with a lot of money becomes fascinating to me, because wealth doesn’t create want—it simply removes many of the obstacles that normally interrupt it. I have family and friends who make the kind of money discussed in the Fortune article, and watching the gravitational pull of want at that level can be baffling. The nice house becomes the normal house. The normal house reveals the nicer neighborhood. The good vacation establishes the minimum acceptable vacation. The successful person encounters a more successful person. There is always another room in the hotel, another seat closer to the front, another school with a longer waiting list, another kitchen countertop capable of making the previous countertop seem like something peasants chopped onions upon. If you have enough resources to satisfy nearly every material want, you can accidentally spend years teaching yourself that every want deserves satisfaction. Abundance, without awareness, can become a remarkably sophisticated training program in dissatisfaction.
But it would be too easy—and wrong—to turn this into an essay about rich people. Want does not check your tax return before entering the house. The person making $40,000 who believes a $60,000 salary will finally make life feel complete is running the same basic software as the person making $400,000 convinced that $600,000 will finally create breathing room. The objects available to them are different. The consequences of their choices are radically different. Economic inequality is real, poverty is real, and there is an enormous moral difference between wanting a larger house and needing enough money to keep the electricity on. But the internal mechanism of craving is remarkably democratic. It can attach itself to sneakers, handbags, cars, collectibles, vacations, alcohol, food, status, sex, achievement, followers, recognition, productivity, spiritual experiences, political certainty, or a beautifully curated identity built around how little one needs. Not wanting can become a want too. The ego is nothing if not adaptable. Give it Buddhism and it will eventually start comparing meditation cushions.
That distinction matters to me when I talk about this with Jettie. I don’t want to raise a child who is afraid of desire. Desire moves us toward one another. Wanting to learn matters. Wanting to create matters. Wanting to help someone, experience something beautiful, make a friend, understand an idea, or eat ice cream after dinner are not failures of consciousness. Life without desire would not be liberation; it would be anesthesia. What I hope she learns—and what I am still trying to learn—is that a desire can arise without immediately becoming an instruction. I want that does not have to mean I need that, and it certainly does not have to mean I cannot be happy until I have that. There is an extraordinary amount of freedom hiding inside that little gap.
Maybe that is why the Fortune article struck me as both hilarious and strangely sad. Here are people who, by almost any historical or global measure, have achieved extraordinary material abundance, and many of them still feel the sensation of not enough. That doesn’t make them stupid or uniquely shallow. It makes them human. In some ways, wealth simply makes the experiment easier to see. Give the human mind more. Then more. Then more. At what point does it naturally announce that the experiment is complete?
Apparently, it doesn’t.
Want doesn’t want to be satisfied. Want wants to continue. Every satisfaction risks becoming evidence that wanting works, another small reinforcement of the idea that discomfort generated inside us should be resolved by changing something outside us. This may be why contentment has always seemed less like a feeling to me and more like a practice. It isn’t looking around your house and forcing yourself to chant that you’re grateful for your possessions. It is learning to remain with reality for a moment before reaching for the escape hatch. To be bored without immediately demanding entertainment. To be sad without immediately requiring sedation. To see something beautiful without needing to own it. To feel the arrival of want and become curious about it instead of obedient to it.
And that may be the part I most hope Jettie carries forward. Not some rule about owning less. Not suspicion toward money or pleasure or beautiful things. Not even the idea that she should conquer want. I hope she learns to recognize the instant when enough quietly turns into not enough, and to ask whether anything outside her actually changed. I hope she can enjoy what comes without believing it must stay, and desire what comes next without making her happiness wait for its arrival. I hope she learns that sometimes the feeling telling her to escape reality is simply another part of reality asking to be noticed.
I’m still learning it myself.
So I’ll keep wearing the same clothes. Jettie Jane will continue hearing Dadda talk far too often about wanting and enough. I will inevitably want things tomorrow that seem absolutely essential until sometime next week when I can no longer remember what they were. People making $300,000 a year will continue discovering that $300,000 somehow isn’t quite enough, just as people making far less will imagine another number contains the peace they’re looking for.
Maybe the number isn’t where the peace lives. Maybe there is no escape hatch. Maybe reality was the room we were trying to escape from all along. And maybe freedom is discovering we can stay.