Money buys convenience and comfort, but it does not buy friendship, belonging, love, virtue, or purpose. The latter have usually been seen as more essential to

Money buys convenience and comfort, but it does not buy friendship, belonging, love, virtue, or purpose. The latter have usually been seen as more essential to the good life. You can look at the wealthy and get a sense of this. A lot of the artistic output of the 1920s was from rich people who had realized this: "Catcher in the Rye" is about a rich kid who finds life meaningless, and "The Great Gatsby" kills himself when he can't get love. (I think a lot of the current malaise comes from the rich people ["elites"] of that era discovering their meaningless existence--hence Postmodernism, and the rest of us buying into their assessment.) Trust-fund kids are known to go off the rails. The English upper class had a purposelessness (see Dorothy Sayers' main character of her mysteries, a the guy that Jeeves' serves; both again from the same period). In our own day, Elon Musk seems like a guy who is running around like mad, subconsciously covering the emptiness inside. Or our own culture, which is the wealthiest in the history of the world, yet we have rampant ADHD, depression, anxiety, and widespread drug abuse (I see more marijuana dispenseries than liquor stores--we cannot even relax without drugs).