Rich People Are Different

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that line in 1926, one year after Gatsby made him famous. Ernest Hemingway supposedly replied, "Yes, they have more money." The exchange—likely apocryphal—misses the point entirely.

Fitzgerald wasn't making an observation about bank accounts. He was diagnosing a disease.

I know because I've caught it. You have too, probably. It's the sickness that makes us treat wealth like a personality trait, that transforms net worth into moral worth, that convinces us the rich possess some secret knowledge we lack.

Watch yourself around money. Really watch. Notice how your voice changes when you meet someone wealthy. How you lean in slightly when they speak. How their opinions carry extra weight, as if dollars were votes in the democracy of truth.

The rich feel it too. They know you're listening differently. Some hate it—the way money distorts every interaction, makes them wonder if anyone sees them or just their portfolio. Others feed on it. They mistake your deference for their brilliance.

Neither response changes the fundamental fact: we've agreed to pretend that wealth is wisdom. And that pretense is killing us both.

Tom and Daisy Buchanan float through Gatsby like visitors from another planet.

Not because they're wealthy—Fitzgerald knew plenty of wealthy people, and most of them were recognizably human. Tom and Daisy are different because their money has severed them from consequence. They live in a world where actions don't stick, where damage can always be paid for, where "I'm sorry" comes with a check attached.

Daisy kills a woman with her car and keeps driving. Tom destroys a marriage and walks away whistling. They move through life like children in a playroom, smashing toys and expecting someone else to clean up.

Nick Carraway watches them with the fascination of a naturalist studying an invasive species:

That word—careless. Not cruel. Not evil. Careless. They don't set out to hurt people. They just stop worrying about whether they do.

This is what money can buy that we never talk about: the luxury of not paying attention. When your mistakes can always be fixed, when your failures can always be cushioned, when your cruelty can always be compensated—you stop developing the muscles that keep the rest of us human. Empathy. Consequence. Fear.

The Buchanans aren't monsters. They're people who've been relieved of the burden of being careful. And that makes them more dangerous than monsters, because monsters know what they are.

Adam Smith saw this coming.

We remember Smith for *The Wealth of Nations*, the book that launched a thousand business schools and convinced us that greed is good. But seventeen years earlier, he wrote something else. Something that might save us from the mess his later work helped create.

*The Theory of Moral Sentiments* is Smith's other book, the one MBAs don't read. In it, he asks a simple question: Why do we worship the rich?

Not admire. Worship. Smith uses the word deliberately. He's describing a religious impulse, the way we genuflect before wealth as if it were divinity itself.

His answer cuts deep:

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful... is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

The father of capitalism warning us about capitalism. The man who invented the invisible hand telling us it's picking our pocket.

Smith understood something we've forgotten: that wealth and virtue have no natural connection. That money is morally neutral—a tool that amplifies whatever was already there. Give a generous person money, they become more generous. Give a selfish person money, they become more selfish.

But we've decided to read the equation backward. We see wealth and assume virtue. We mistake the effect for the cause.

This is the rich person's secret: they know they're not different. They know their money doesn't make them smarter, kinder, or more deserving. They know their success often came down to luck, timing, or circumstances beyond their control.

What they don't know is how to tell you that without losing the advantages your worship provides.

Sarah inherited eight figures when her grandfather died.

She was twenty-six, working as a teacher in Portland, living in a studio apartment with a radiator that clanged like a ghost in chains. The money arrived like weather—sudden, overwhelming, impossible to prepare for.

People started treating me differently," she told me over coffee in a café where the barista recognized her from the newspaper article about her donation to the local food bank. "Not because I'd changed. Because they'd changed. I was the same person who couldn't afford to fix her car's air conditioning the week before.

She learned to navigate the new world carefully. Never mention the money unless directly asked. Always offer to pay, but don't insist. Tip well but not so well that it becomes a story. Date people who don't know about the inheritance. Stay friends with people who do, but watch how they watch you when the check comes.

The hardest part isn't having money," she said. "It's watching what it does to other people's faces when they look at you. You can see them doing math. You can see them wondering what you're worth. And after a while, you start doing the same math about yourself.

Sarah didn't become careless like the Buchanans. Her money was too new, her memory of not having it too fresh. But she understood the temptation. When you can solve most problems with a wire transfer, you stop developing other solutions. When you can insulate yourself from discomfort, you forget why discomfort exists.

The money didn't make her different. It just gave her the option of becoming different. That option, she said, is the most dangerous thing wealth provides.

We need rich people to be different.

If they're just people with more money, then our whole mythology collapses. The American dream depends on the idea that wealth is a reward for virtue, that the rich deserve what they have because they're somehow better than the rest of us.

But if they're just people—if they're as flawed, as uncertain, as human as we are—then what does that say about the system that elevates them? What does that say about the inequality we've decided to tolerate?

Easier to believe they're different. Easier to assume they know something we don't. Easier to worship than to question.

The rich understand this. They know you need them to be superhuman, so they perform superhuman. They speak in certainties even when they're guessing. They project confidence even when they're terrified. They wear their wealth like armor, protecting not their bodies but their humanity—hiding the fact that they're as lost as everyone else, just with better cushions for the fall.

This performance exhausts them. But they can't stop, because stopping would mean admitting what we all secretly know: that wealth is largely arbitrary, that success is mostly luck, that the difference between them and us is smaller than we pretend.

The moment we admit that—the moment we see the rich as human—we have to start asking human questions. Like why some humans have so much while others have so little. Like whether a system that creates such extremes is worth defending.

Like whether we're worshipping the right gods.

The green light at the end of Gatsby keeps blinking.

Ninety-nine years after Fitzgerald published the novel, we're still rowing toward it. Still believing that enough money will transform us into different people. Still convinced that wealth is the solution to the problem of being human.

But the Buchanans had all the money they could spend, and they were still careless. Sarah inherited millions, and she was still lonely. The rich people you know—really know—are still anxious about something, still worried about security, still wondering if they're enough.

Money doesn't change you. It reveals you. It removes constraints and shows you who you are when nothing is stopping you.

The rich are different from us in only one way that matters: they've discovered that having everything doesn't fix anything. The rest of us are still learning that lesson, still believing that our number—whatever it is—will be different.

It won't be. And maybe that's the most liberating knowledge money can't buy.

The light keeps blinking. But you don't have to keep rowing toward it.