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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It sounds like she is just not being a very good friend right now. If she were to talk all about her rich person problems but also express interest in you and offer you support, then you'd overlook the rich person stuff, right? That's the vibe I'm getting.

I'm wealthier than my friends too, but I generally (try to) eschew rich person stuff just for its own sake (with the exception of owning a second home). Our kids go to public schools, I try to be anti-consumption and use things until they wear out, etc. I'm sure I do trigger envy when I talk about our vacations or second home, but there's enough common ground from staying in our regular neighborhood, joining the cheap neighborhood pool, keeping our kids in public, etc., that I think that makes it easier to maintain friendships.

It kind of sounds like your friend thinks she *has* to do this stuff just because she's rich, and it's making her unhappy. But that's neither here nor there when it comes to whether this friendship is worth maintaining. For your part, you just need to decide if this friendship is serving you any more, or if it's irreparably one-sided now. If you want to give it another chance, I'd probably spell it out . . . "Hey, I really need a friend right now. Do you have the bandwidth to listen to all my 'stuff'?"[/quote]

Exactly. Most people don't have a lot of money. When someone does get a lot of money, it reveals their true character. Some people have greedy, materialistic, ugly character.

If someone falls into moemy and doesn't use it to help people, and just complains about inconvenient all these darn luxuries are, why waste your time on this person? [/quote]

We have money. I’m not sure why money would make some greedy or materialistic. If anything, I think my friends with less money are more materialistic. People with money just don’t care about material items. We are generous to our friends and family. I would say most people with money are kind and generous, not the other way around. Money solves a lot of problems. [/quote]

I'm 16:51 and I disagree. Money makes it easier to forget what is important and lose yourself. It's not impossible, of course. But it tests our resolve, you know? And our sense of what constitutes wealth changes. I remember when we made 1/4 of what we make now, and I thought that was wealthy. And somehow your expenses just grow to match your income, even when you make conscious decisions not to upgrade your own or do private or join a country club, etc.

Money doesn't make people greedy or materialistic; it facilitates and augments those characteristics which already exist in a person. And in a status and consumption obsessed society, of course they exist in us to some degree.

I'm honestly curious what you mean by saying most people with money are kind and generous. How does that show itself?  Like, they give their housekeepers a nice bonus?[/quote]

Our friends with money are more generous with friends and family because they can. They are generally more confident and happy. While I don’t think money buys happiness. It can solve a lot of problems. When I look at my friends with or without money, the richer ones seem more content. Look at the pp calling rich people greedy, materialistic and with ugly character. I don’t think a rich person would say that about a poor person.

I’m not a materialistic person. I wasn’t before we had money and now that we do. We are usually the dress down family. I don’t think we look or act like we have money.[/quote]

"Generous with friends and family" is pretty vague. Paying for people to go out to dinner with you or vacation with you is really just self-interest . . . you're getting the experience you want because they couldn't pay their share. So I'm still not sure how we are qualifying this as generosity. I'll share something because this is an anonymous forum: I met a single dad experiencing homelessness and have let him live in an apartment I own for the last 7 years. He's paid maybe a couple of months rent in all that time. This is what I think generosity means . . . doing something hard (at this point his never-to-be-paid debt to us in the six figures, and we still field his calls about broken appliances and loud neighbors at times) to benefit another human just because they exist. If it's just, hey, I'm getting an AirBNB at the beach, everybody come stay for a few days! then that's just a party that some people paid more for than others. Generosity is making a material difference in someone else's standard of living, not giving $50 to a GoFundMe.

As for contentment, the only difference, according to research, is between not having enough and having enough. Once you have enough for a quality standard of living, any additional income doesn't really impact your overall happiness at all. And that number is, like, comfortably middle class, not in the 1%. And of course, many ills can haunt you (look up the "lottery effect") when your economic status changes drastically. I view increased wealth as something that means I need to lash myself to the mast to ignore the siren call of materialism, status signalling, etc.[/quote]

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