What Do People With Enough Money Worry About?

“She’s worth $140 million.” My old friend and I were talking as she drove back to the city from New Jersey.

She was talking about the wife of a client she’d been working with out there. That would be the client who purchased a collapsing 18th-century farmhouse and then spent the past fifteen years rebuilding it. This is the client who has subsequently bought and planted some twenty full-grown trees to surround his showcase 18th-century farmhouse (pro-tip: the trees can be had for a mere thousand or so each; it's the transporting on giant flatbed trucks and the planting that's going to cost you).

Keep in mind here that it's the wife who's worth $140,000,000. The client? I'd say more.

To be clear right up front, I’ve never lived in abject poverty and I’ve never gone hungry. Somehow, the rent has always gotten paid and whenever the gas or electricity or phone got cut off for non-payment in the bad old days, money was scrounged up from somewhere to get them turned back on. Eventually.

But it feels like I’ve spent my entire life with that kind of poverty, that go-to-bed-hungry level of being poor, nipping at my heels.

Both of my parents came of age during the Great Depression. Their scars became ours. No light was left on after anyone left the room. Four girls? Two baths. While we lived most of our lives in homes that my parents owned, the specter of being destitute was regularly invited to sit and keep dinner-time conversation muted.

As an adult, I’ve always managed to sleep indoors and keep food on the table even if it was from a local charity. For years, my only marketable skill was cleaning so I cleaned. My one foray into factory work ended less than two days after I was the one to slow down every line they put me on. My one foray into waiting tables ended with me clocking out after less than three hours in tears. Eventually, I left the backbreaking work of cleaning behind for the soul-sucking work of retail.

That convinced me to get into college. At the age of 40.

The college thing has worked out for the most part. I’ve kept fairly well-paying jobs that have allowed me to sit at desks and work on computers. Ok, yes, for a year or so there I worked as a professional dominatrix at a really classy establishment, The Downtown Dungeon, out by the Westside Highway. But mostly I’ve fallen into work as an editorial assistant on peer-reviewed journals (my experience as a pro domme has come in surprisingly handy when dealing with recalcitrant reviewers).

Just over a year ago, I managed to land a little part-time job as - ready? - an editorial assistant on a peer-reviewed publication.

Once more, keeping about three steps ahead of dire straits. I started that new job two years to the day after the end of my last job. Thanks to our friend, the Virus, I had nearly two years of help from the taxpayers of This Great Country (you know who you are and I thank you), but that ended and the gods came through. Again.

While I sent out approximately 12,549 resumes during my two years of being unemployed, really hoping for another “real” job — you know, full-time with benefits and hopefully a dedicated workspace — that didn't pan out.

So I put in 20 hours a week on the job and continue to cobble together my other modest income streams.

And when my friend told me about this woman who is worth more millions of dollars than I can fathom, I wondered: What wakes her at 3 am? Something does, I’m certain of that. We homo sapiens are blessed/cursed with these gigantic brains and if there’s nothing for them to compute — at, say, 3 am — they will gnaw on themselves. Mine does. I know yours does, as well.

Hers does, too, but I’d really like to know what it gnaws on.

What do people worry about when they never ever again — if they ever did — have to worry about paying the rent or keeping the interest on the student loan from erasing the gains made over the past 15 years?

As a writer of fiction, I can easily put myself behind the eyes of a fabulously wealthy person who can’t sleep. After all, the more stuff you have the more stuff you stand to lose. What if those investments go south and we have to sell that place in the Hamptons? What if we can’t get the youngest into Reade Street Prep? That new PA is not working out but it’s too late to hire anyone else before the end of the school year when the best ones go home to Switzerland. Was it a mistake to buy that second yacht? I don’t know about this new tax firm. Remember what they told the Andersons and look what happened to them!

I get it that no one rides for free and that there are always worries that hound even the wealthiest and most privileged.

But I’m a little tired of scraping by and feeling like I could breathe again because I got a part-time job. A temporary part-time job at that. One that is through an agency. One that is at the very least a W2 job and not some crummy 1099 contract gig that will clobber me silly at tax time (you got to look for the bright side).

Just for a year or so, I’d like to worry about getting a reliable tax attorney who won’t shaft me. I’d like to worry about choosing the right shade of mauve for the new wing of the summer place. I’d like to worry about which private jet sends exactly the desired message to my peers.

And in return, I’d be happy to give some worried trustafarian a break and let them worry about how to get by on $1600 a month in Manhattan.

Seems like a fair deal to me.

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