My spirits were higher than ever. Rhodes Scholars all receive monthly stipends (i.e., seed money), so I didn’t have to stress about finances while studying. I took that, along with the extra money I made tutoring and coaching basketball to pay for my travels across Europe. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had enough for once. In graduate school, that small stipend meant I could focus on studying, implementing development projects, and getting to know some of the smartest people on the planet instead of cooking curly fries and working at the cleaners. I continued to run my non-profit organization and spent a significant amount of time working in Western Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. My non-profit worked with partners to drill boreholes, build irrigation systems for dry season farming, build social enterprises, assess poverty alleviation programs, and more. I began doing rigorous academic research to add to my poverty-fighting toolkit. I read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Amartya Sen, Jared Diamond, Milton Friedman, and others to gain a deeper understanding of global economics. I was twenty-two years old and living the dream. I was doing purposeful work I loved, I was seeing the world, I had brilliant friends to learn from, and I finally didn’t have to worry about money. Life felt as close to perfect as I’d ever hoped it would be.
I’d made it. Then, as often happens in life when you think you have everything figured out, my worldview started to crack. I had long since moved on from believing poor people deserved to be poor. Now, I thought poverty was a lack of basic infrastructure and education. If we could spread western technical know-how to the poorest communities in the world, then we’d be able to end poverty once and for all. But as I gained a deeper understanding of financial systems and economics, I began to question that logic and doubted the general impact of my work. I’d decided potable water and improved sanitation were foundational infrastructures needed to lift people out of poverty because of the importance of healthcare to a person’s well-being. I’d read UN development reports that confirmed my beliefs. Not having access to clean water is one of the largest causes of death worldwide, especially for children. You see high infant mortality rates in areas where people have to drink dirty water. Kids pick up parasites that live in the water they drink, which causes diarrhea and dehydration—and ultimately death. Once a community had access to clean water, was it off to the races from there? Not quite. If the community couldn’t afford to solve its water problems on its own, it was unlikely to be able to solve its remaining hardships without further financial assistance. Even the water and sanitation solutions didn’t typically last because the communities couldn’t afford the upkeep. I started to notice broken water pumps and solar panels in village after village. The development world is obsessed with giving people things, with no means of maintaining these expensive pieces of equipment. I started to think perhaps I wasn’t digging deep enough. While implementing one of our clean water, hygiene, and sanitation projects in rural Ghana, I asked people what they thought their community needed most. “We need money.” “We want jobs!”
CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 53 “If I had money, I could buy sachet water.” Sachet water is water that has been sealed in polyethylene plastic bags. It is popular in Ghana because it is convenient, easily accessible, and cheap. “If I had money, I could double my crop yields.” “If I had money, I could send my kids to primary school.” The answers were varied but always like this. Those households were so poor, everyone was making major trade-offs, and they knew it. If you decided to stop paying your child’s school fees so you could afford to eat, that didn’t mean you doubted the importance of a good education. It meant that poverty made you make an unimaginably difficult choice. Therefore, everyone knew how they’d spend extra money in highly impactful ways because there were so many gut-wrenching sacrifices they’d been forced to make for survival. I felt pretty stupid. I was well indoctrinated in the global aid and development world, but these people’s responses had stripped things down to one simple truth: they knew how to fix their poverty, they just didn’t have the resources to do it. Technical assistance and equipment are without a doubt helpful, but what those communities needed most was access to money and resources to implement those improvements. Although I’d grown up poor myself, I’d forgotten that poor people are more than capable of identifying and solving the major issues in their lives. They want cash to enable them to effectively solve those problems just like everyone else, though they’ll take boreholes if that’s all that’s up for grabs. With money, villages could drill and maintain their own boreholes if that’s what they wanted most, but it would be their choice. As I went around the village, everyone had different ideas about what they’d do with their money, including buying hand soap and clean water storage tanks for their homes. Unlike me, everyone I spoke with knew a lack of access to resources was the root cause of poverty, nothing more. Yes, clean water was important. But it’s not like there was no clean water in Ghana. The poor just couldn’t afford it. That hasn’t always been true, but in today’s world, you can get most essential goods if you have the money to pay for them.
The simple answer to eradicating poverty worldwide was staring me right in the face, but my ego wouldn’t let me see it. “No, I’m doing the right thing.” If what people needed most were resources, then all we needed to do was share more and the world would be fine. Redistributing resources is simple. There’s no room for me or anyone else to be a savior. But the cognitive dissonance was too much at the time, so I rejected that and pressed on with my efforts to teach people how to stop being poor. I was stubborn, but the seeds of doubt had been firmly planted in my mind. My plan had been to finish up my studies at Oxford, then head to medical school back in the US. But I’d begun to accept that a lack of healthcare, clean water, and education were symptoms of poverty, not the cause. If I wanted to help poor people, I needed to help them get paid. I contacted the University of Pennsylvania, where I’d been accepted to attend medical school, and asked for another year of deferral, which they graciously granted me. I decided to spend that year learning more about business and money. I set my sights on management consulting, which is known as the brains of capitalism in the business world. I put in the work, got a little lucky, and leveraged my newfound privilege and networks to land a job at the top management consulting firm in the world. It was time to start learning the truth about economics from the inside. I felt secure in my path and grounded in my identity. I spent most of my time in the poorest parts of the world, sleeping on dirt floors and living on a tight budget. I practically never thought about money because I had plenty to eat, always had a place to sleep, and was living a life in service to others. I never questioned why I was doing what I was doing or spent much time wondering why I was working for free because I had my basics covered. I hesitate to say that I was ‘happy,’ because a life of purpose and fulfillment is naturally one with all kinds of emotions, but I cared deeply about my work and the people it affected. In a given week, I would feel joy, sadness, disgust, love, disappointment,
CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 55 determination, and pain. I was growing as a human being and using my full talents to attempt to create a better world. I was complete. Then I moved to New York City. Shifting my focus from solving technical economic and public health problems to thinking about money re-opened old, deep wounds. If the key to being able to help others was solving the hardest puzzles, then I felt great about my chances of adding value to the world. I could problem-solve with the best of them. If the key to changing the world for the better was access to money and power, what hope did I have of accomplishing anything? Years of rubbing elbows with the wealthiest kids in the world didn’t suddenly make me rich. I was broke and powerless, grappling with the fact that, to achieve my one real goal in life, helping those who have the least, I’d have to face all of my insecurities around money head-on. In addition, while doing development work, I mostly surrounded myself with people that genuinely cared about other people. Not everyone in the development space is that way, especially in larger institutions that pay well, but you can easily find people pouring their souls into their work for no reason other than wanting to see a better world. Many of those people came from family wealthy (one of the reasons they could work for so little pay without stress), but rarely did people doing on the ground work ever flaunt or base their egos solely around their money. We got our sense of self-worth from the impact of our work (this comes with its own set of problems, the most prominent being the messiah complex many of us develop), not our money or things. But working in a high- paying job in New York, social life was all about money again. I thought I was grounded enough to handle it this time. I wasn’t. I worked and learned plenty, but my priorities shifted away from helping others towards proving my own self-worth again. I was now twenty-four, living in Manhattan, and making more money than most doctors. Everyone around me had money and were dead set on making much, much more. I wish I could say it didn’t affect me, but it did. A lot. Since college, I’d done everything in my power to ensure I didn’t attach my sense of identity to money. It was the only way I could feel good about
myself being completely broke while constantly surrounded by students whose parents were regulars on the Forbes list. But suddenly, there I was, earning a top ten percent income at the ripe old age of twenty-four. The partners at the firm where I worked made more money than most professional athletes. Instead of being a source of embarrassment, my financial status overnight became yet another source of exceptionalism to further inflate my ego. I’d never felt the power of money. I’d been an athlete, a scholar, a do-gooder, but the status associated with those were drops in a bucket compared to the tidal wave force of money. I could afford expensive clothes and shoes that signaled I was somebody. Wearing the right things and being in the right rooms, everyone assumes you have money and treats you accordingly well. I quickly became enamored with those shortcuts to what felt like love and acceptance. I learned there were shoes that cost four times as much as Air Jordan’s, and I bought myself a pair, telling myself I needed them to fit in at work. But it wasn’t just about work. My social life had changed too. With the extra income, I started going to clubs and parties every weekend. Jay-Z has a line, “If you grew up with holes in your zapatos, you’d celebrate the minute you was having dough.”2 I was becoming someone I never thought I’d be, and I was having a blast doing it. It was fun for a while to do the things that I had always dreamed of being able to do. Ironically, that’s when my happiness started to slide. The first few times I partied with celebrities and girls that never would’ve spoken to me a few years before, I was ecstatic. At a few hundred thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t wealthy by any means, but I was on the right path to riches and well entrenched in the scene. I saw my favorite rappers in the clubs, spent weeks in the Hamptons, partied on yachts, and regularly ate at the best restaurants in the world. Before moving to New York, I drank liquor socially—like most college kids—but I’d only smoked weed three or four times at most. When you’re poor, being caught with even a small amount of weed on 2 “99 Problems”, 2003
CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 57 you can mean a sentence of years in prison. I wanted nothing to do with that, so I’d always stayed far away from drugs. Most people I knew growing up did, too. A little-known fact is that drug use steadily increases with income. Most people associate drug use with the poor, but the reality is, drugs are like any other desired product: the more money you have, the more you can buy. Pablo Escobar didn’t get rich selling cocaine to poor people. It’s the rich who buy and love drugs. I was seeing drugs everywhere. No one was the least bit concerned about going to jail. Most people in my new social circle had been doing drugs since high school—some since middle school. They didn’t think anything of it. In fact, it seemed normal to them. They failed to see the hypocrisy when I tried to explain how those very same drugs were used to explain why poor people were poor and deserved to be incarcerated. It was different there because those people were functional. I saw plenty of people develop habits, but their lives usually didn’t completely fall apart because they had money, support, and most importantly, they weren’t criminalized when their problem was discovered. Apparently, drugs are only a problem when you can’t afford them or when you can’t afford rehab. Everywhere I went, there was what seemed like endless supplies of wealth, drugs, beautiful people, sex, jet skis, fashion, DJs, celebrities, and socialites. I never got deep into drugs, but I tried a little bit of everything. I knew enough about them and alcohol to know moderation is key. Of all the temptations, I was most intrigued by the girls. I went from being a relatively shy kid to arrogant and empty seemingly overnight. Being in the scenes, I knew I didn’t really belong. That wasn’t who I was at my core but the positive feedback was too difficult to resist. There’s nothing like the transition from being treated like you’re poor to being treated like you’re rich. Like anything else, once the newness wears off, it got old. In those wealth-driven environments, there was little pretending what people were after. Everyone gravitated towards the biggest spender.
Conversations didn’t matter, how you treated people don’t matter. Vibe, energy, connection, loyalty—none of those things were important. The currencies were, in order of importance: wealth, fame, connections, and beauty. People weren’t trying to express themselves as much as fit an image and move closer to the top. Instead of being fun for its own sake, partying became mainly about status. In an environment based on that kind of competition, practically no one was really having any fun. It was all posturing and pretending, especially once Instagram became a thing. Chasing wealth is no different than chasing after a drug high. The rush of those first few events and purchases wears off, and over time, you need bigger parties and bigger spending to feel that same thrill. While I was making plenty of money, I started noticing that relative to my classmates and colleagues, I was still poor. As a kid, I remember searching online to learn how much money physicians made. I saw some specialists were making over $500,000 a year, and my mind was blown. I figured it would be almost impossible to spend that much money. I share the absurdities above so you can see that once you cross a certain threshold, spending money has very little to do with practicality and everything thing to do with status. Our desire for things is limited, but our desire for status doesn’t stop. Companies targeting wealthy people know this, and prey upon their insecurities. It’s hard for most poor people to imagine what being rich is like because they envision having lots of money yet liking and valuing what currently matters to them. Of all the concepts I learned about in neuroscience, adaptation is the most important to understand when it comes to wealth and greed. You make money so you can go to fancy places and feel good about yourself. When you get to those fancy places, you see everyone there has money too—some of them have much more money than you—so you feel less good about yourself. You work to make even more money, and once you’re finally one of the wealthiest people in the room, you start feeling good again. Then you get bored with being in that room because, of
CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 59 course, you’re always the wealthiest person there so you don’t even think about it. Since you’re not getting joy from the status anymore, you start looking up and realize there are even fancier, more expensive places, so you excitedly head there (if you can get the invite). Then you are sad once again because you see that everyone here is an even greater level of rich. Having $10 million doesn’t feel all that great when everyone else in the room is worth at least nine figures. I’ve always been fortunate in my ability to learn from watching others. I carefully watched my siblings growing up to learn what to do and what to avoid. And in that new environment of wealth, I carefully dissected the lives of everyone around me. I focused on the people who were seemingly on top: the trust fund heirs, managing partners, star athletes, pop stars, etc. I got a front-row seat to a look into the future we all were dreamily chasing after and saw nothing but smoke and mirrors. Once the novelty wears off, wealth and fame are toxic. Money is extremely isolating. If you have lots of money and are surrounded by people that don’t, they’ll ask you for your money. The only way to build wealth is to not give away your money. To adjust to this problem, wealthy people become calloused and tell themselves that sharing is a bad thing. If you’re generous with your wealth, you won’t have it for long (many people see giving away wealth as a bad thing. I don’t). So almost universally, wealth results in fearful hoarding and greed. You only spend money in ways that will generate more money. Gifts become a form of manipulation since everything and everyone becomes something for sale. When you have money, those without it will do whatever you tell them to do. That isn’t a relationship; it’s control. So the more wealth you have, the more you have to push people away out of fear that they’re coming for your money. And, for the select few allowed in your circle, you’re training them to pretend to be exactly what you want them to be—meaning that no one is themselves or genuine. They want what you have to give so badly, there’s no hope that any meaningful number of people around you will tell you the hard truths. You’ll be surrounded by people, yet utterly alone.
For people like me who grew up poor, wealth was even more isolating. One path was to cut everyone from your past out of your life. When you come from poverty, typically all your friends and family remain impoverished. They’ll have very real needs and always come to you for help. None of them can afford to socialize with you, so you’ll need to pay their way every time. They don’t have power, money, or status to offer in return, and since this is what you value now more than anything, you’ll no longer see those people as valuable. Because they always want something from you, and seemingly have nothing to give, you’ll walk away from your friends and family, surrounding yourself instead with people who also have wealth and status. It isn’t until you’ve made this transition that you’ll realize that without thinking, you’ve lost your culture and can never go back. The other path is to stay close to your old crew. You’ll have to put everyone on payroll so they can afford to stay with you. You’ll have pieces of your past culture to bring along with you into the new world of wealth. However, the nature of these relationships changes drastically. The power dynamic is lopsided, and you’ll have little tolerance for anyone not doing as you say (given how much you feel you’re doing for everyone). Your friends and family become more of an entourage, and you’ll drift into loneliness. The rat race is all-consuming and universally plays out as described. There’s no way around it. When you get your sense of self-worth from money, you’ll be fearful that everyone wants something from you— because they do. All your relationships will be pecuniary in nature, removing any semblance of genuine love and affection from your life. Your sense of happiness will fluctuate with the ticker prices for your assets. And, of course, you’ll have lots of people worship you, feel powerful and accomplished, and experience everything money can buy. You’ll see the world as one big game, a relentless competition where it’s kill or be killed, everyone out for themselves. You’ll joylessly climb a mountain for the rest of your life and never reach the peak. It’s a trap.
CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 61 Being extremely wealthy is toxic to your mental health, as is being extremely poor. Love and a sense of belonging to a community are, without question, the most essential components to a fulfilling human life. Extreme wealth, even more so perhaps than extreme poverty, makes being open and loving almost impossible. After a few years of seeing all of this, I had enough data to know being wealthy was incredibly overrated. I don’t expect everyone to understand that and absolutely don’t seek any sympathy. I’m not sure if in our materialistic society full of non-stop marketing there’s even anything I could say to explain why seeking wealth is a fool’s errand. I had to go through those experiences myself to learn that far more important than having wealth is knowing when you have enough. I pushed aside a life of fulfillment and purpose for one of superficiality and vacuous consumption. It took that journey to learn chasing money is a losing game no matter who you are.