He knew if he worked hard he would be rich one day and that would bring him the happiness he deserved.
He started a business from a meagre start and spent night and day at work. Eventually after years of hard labour and some good fortune he had created an incredibly successful business and had more wealth than he could ever imagine. He had married a beautiful wife, had two lovely young children, lived in a big house and drove a brand new sports car and yet he remained, relatively speaking, miserable.
He was not sure why. “Maybe,” he said to himself, “deep down I am an intrinsically unhappy person and my default setting is pointed to ‘unfulfilled’ and my drive to earn wealth as the compass for happiness was a flawed strategy after all.” His pursuit of wealth had been, to date, exciting and full of event but now he had arrived at the gates of wealth and it was somehow not what he had imagined. The realisation that the man had achieved his ambition and
yet remained miserable created even more disillusionment and that in turn caused
him to become even more miserable.
He craved pleasure even though he knew well that pleasure is often mistaken for happiness. His wealth was intoxicating. It offered the promise of happiness but not the sustainable satisfaction. He needed more immediate pleasurable fixes. Faster cars, a bigger house, more excitement. Sometimes that meant more alcohol, drugs, gambling and other women. None of this made the man happier. In fact the man became even more miserable.
He admitted he measured success in terms of wealth and not interpersonal skills – he was not interested in all that “holistic mumbo jumbo” as he called it. Clothes, holidays, cars and other trappings of wealth were the language he spoke - his currency.
Had he become trapped in his own wealth straight jacket? He had few friends and had felt for a long time unable to relate to others especially those below his social and financial status. If he was honest he had created a rather grandiose and garish lifestyle with little content and connection to others but he certainly did not feel he had to answer to anyone. Perhaps he was a little set in his ways but his wealth had created order and those around him were obedient. There was little need for the man to grow as a person. Business had made a real man of him, so he thought, although emotionally he felt he had changed little from an adolescent. Was he stuck on the adult developmental map? “Absolutely not,” he maintained. He felt he was moving along in his life transitioning nicely from chasing wealth to the pursuit of power.
His wife of 10 years suspected he was cheating at a point in her life when she already despised her husband. She had always maintained the prenuptial contract she signed was an unequal contract.
She felt employed within the marriage and their relationship was in some way transactional. He had reminded her on a number of occasions the money belonged to him and he did not want to hear about her “involuntary servitude” as she described it. He controlled the relationship by controlling the money and she attempted to gain equality in the marriage by trying to spend it.
What of the man’s other family and friends? None of his friends were truly happy for him and his wealth. Moreover they could not wait for bad things to happen to him and watch his demise. He sensed this and became rather introspective when he made new friends. His relationship with his siblings was distorted and grotesque. They were all jealous of his wealth and at the same time desperately hanging on for any crumbs of any future inheritance.
He had not been the greatest father either. He spent little time with his kids when they were young, due to business commitments and it was left to his wife and a number of nannies to bring them up. Perhaps he took it for granted that as a successful businessman it was a given he would be a fantastic parent. Although the children missed the father’s love and input, he had high expectations for the children. They would be entrepreneurs, hard working, obedient and respectful to their father and above all take heed of the success of their father and the lessons he could teach them. In reality, his children had little character and competencies and because they were, after all, brought up by an angry resentful wife who taught the children to have a sense of entitlement and identity based on their vacuous wealth, tiny seeds of destruction had been sown.
The man and his wife were divorced after 20 years of marriage at great financial and emotional cost. The children who had started to receive an allowance from the age of 18 were miserable and complained that their father was no role model. They moaned about how dad had deprived them of their usefulness and ability to become self-made. They resented their inability to achieve their own goals. The father argued it was their own sense of entitlement and lack of ambition that had stifled their progress.
Nevertheless the father decided when the children were approaching the age of 30 that they could both work in the family business. Although he had no intention of the business carrying on over generations, he wanted to see if the children would make a success of it. He did not realise he had inadvertently created a next generation that lacked any engagement and were not prepared to be manipulated. The children did work hard but found his control and constant didactic instruction both crippling and dispiriting.
The father called the children one day after work and told them that he had decided
to sell the family business and paid both children a year’s salary as severance for their loss of jobs. The children never really got over this final humiliation and would spend the rest of their lives in narcissitic misery.
The man became very ill suddenly at the age of 70 and died leaving his entire estate to his much younger third wife. After he died, many spoke about the man’s legacy. Some spoke of his extreme wealth and how brilliant he was in business. Most remember him for the utter mess he left behind.
