Imagine someone returning, after several years, to the place where they grew up. Money once meant wondering whether there would be enough to last the month. Today, this person barely has to think when paying for something. Every corner is familiar; they recognise faces and know how people talk to one another. Yet a perfectly ordinary conversation may suddenly feel unfamiliar.
Perhaps something really has changed. Perhaps the visitor sees their old surroundings differently now. Someone at the table might be treating them more cautiously because their wealth has become known. Or nothing unusual happens at all, and everyone is delighted to see each other. Financial success does not automatically require a chapter on estrangement.
What interests me about these transitions is a question no bank balance can answer: when circumstances become radically different, what remains of the person you used to be? Financial advancement brings more choice. You can have experiences once out of reach and abandon habits that used to seem necessary. Your life history does not disappear with the next bank transfer, though.
The past does not move out
We like to divide life into clear periods. Before success, things were one way; afterwards, they are different. As a broad description, that may be accurate. The dividing line is less tidy when it comes to a person's sense of self.
In their 2013 overview of narrative identity, psychologists Dan McAdams and Kate McLean describe how people develop an ongoing story about themselves from memories and imagined futures. This story connects different stages of life and gives them some coherence. It remains open to change because we can reassess experiences later and discover different meanings in them.
This helps explain an apparent contradiction. Someone may make different decisions today and still feel like the same person. Another may change very little outwardly yet experience their life as a profound break with the past.
When money becomes part of who you are looks at present-day self-image. Here, I am interested in what comes with us from earlier stages of life.
Continuity sometimes appears in unremarkable details. Someone who once had to shop carefully may still compare prices despite substantial wealth. Another person happily drops that habit because it was once forced upon them. Neither thrift nor abandoning it proves loyalty or disloyalty to your roots. What matters more is what the habit means to the person who has it.
Moving up means more than a bigger bank balance
I need to acknowledge a limitation in the research straight away. Many of the most illuminating studies on background and identity concern upward mobility through education and work. They follow people entering different social environments without necessarily becoming rich. Applying their findings directly to a business sale worth millions would skip a rather important step.
Nevertheless, these studies describe processes that can also accompany financial advancement: different expectations, unfamiliar social conventions and questions about how much of your previous life belongs in your new one.
In a paper published in 2016, Sam Friedman examined the life histories of 39 upwardly mobile people. His interviews explored, among other things, the pull between earlier class affiliations and later circumstances. For some participants, the emotional transition was harder to present neatly than the familiar success story might suggest.
Friedman uses the sociological concept of habitus clivé, or divided habitus. Put simply, assumptions absorbed from an earlier environment can come into tension with the demands of a new one. That sounds very academic. In everyday life, it might be as simple as whether somebody feels as naturally at ease at a formal business dinner as at a meal with old acquaintances.
Thirty-nine interviews cannot establish how common these conflicts are, or provide a rule for millionaires. The value of this research lies in describing transitions more closely than a survey with a single question about satisfaction could.
Two worlds, both familiar and sometimes strange
Another paper by Friedman takes us into the small signals of social belonging. In a 2012 study of cultural preferences, he combined a British survey of comedy tastes with 24 in-depth interviews. Among upwardly mobile participants, he found a striking pattern: childhood tastes persisted while further cultural preferences were acquired in later surroundings.
That broadens a person's options. For several interviewees, however, it was more complicated. They understood the cultural expectations of their new environment but did not always feel secure within it. They also knew their earlier tastes might receive little recognition there. Friedman used the pointed expression "cultural homelessness".
Nobody should infer a character profile from someone's taste in comedy. The study concerns a narrow area of British culture, not the psychology of wealth. But it offers a useful picture of a transition that is usually presented far too smoothly. New experiences do not erase old preferences. Becoming familiar with two worlds does not automatically mean having to choose between them.
Someone may now regularly eat in restaurants where explaining the menu takes longer than eating the meal. They can still enjoy a simple burger. That is neither a failure nor proof of exceptional down-to-earthness. It is simply part of a life in which experiences accumulate.
What remains of where we came from?
Your background is not a list of rules for how to behave. It consists of people, places and experiences, some of which remain important while others fade. I find it particularly interesting that it can reach beyond your own childhood.
For a study published in 2021, sociologists Sam Friedman, Dave O’Brien and Ian McDonald analysed interviews with 175 people in elite occupations. Among them were 36 people who, by the project's criteria, came from middle-class backgrounds, yet described themselves as working-class or as having moved upwards over several generations. Their grandparents' and other relatives' living conditions often featured more prominently in these accounts than their immediate childhood circumstances.
The researchers also identify an uncomfortable aspect of these stories. Emphasising a family history of upward struggle from humble beginnings can obscure real advantages in a person's own life. This does not make memories of earlier generations unimportant or insincere. It shows how carefully people assemble a story about themselves from the episodes available.
That also matters when someone says, "The money has not changed me." Perhaps that is true in important respects. Perhaps they mean their values, while their behaviour has indeed changed. Perhaps it is an image they would like to have of themselves. I would neither automatically believe nor automatically question it. What seems more interesting is what they base the claim on.
Loyalty does not require standing still
Moving up financially can make people feel they have to choose between where they belonged before and where they belong now. Using new opportunities may bring a fear of undervaluing old ties. Holding on to familiar things may prompt others to ask why you bothered earning the money if you are not going to do anything with it. A remarkably convenient situation for people who enjoy passing unsolicited judgement on other people's lives.
Loyalty to your roots does not require a permanent re-enactment of your earlier circumstances. You can remember what financial insecurity felt like without voluntarily recreating it. You can appreciate the people who shaped you while making decisions they would have made differently.
In a qualitative study published in 2022, sociologist Louise Folkes examined accounts from a British working-class community. Based on 13 interviews with members of nine families, the study highlighted attachment to place, family ties and local continuity as valuable ideas of a successful life in their own right. Getting on was by no means described solely as an individual process of moving away and upwards.
The research does not tell us how millionaires view their backgrounds. It does remind us that success can be judged from different perspectives. Leaving familiar surroundings may be a goal for one person. Another may value being able to stay without the financial pressures they once faced.
Relationships that endure do not have to remain unchanged to be genuine, either. People learn, acquire different responsibilities and develop different interests. When friends start treating you differently examines specific shifts in friendships. Here, the central question is whether someone still wants to give earlier relationships a place in their life story.
Sometimes the difference only emerges in conversation
How much someone says about their background also depends on whom they are speaking to. For a qualitative study published in 2019, psychologists Anna Kallschmidt and Asia Eaton interviewed 20 white men who had moved from economically less advantaged backgrounds into higher occupational positions. Participants described different reasons for concealing or disclosing their origins at work. These included concern about being judged, a wish for privacy, and a desire to help others or create closeness.
It would be an exaggeration to infer a general culture of concealment among successful people. This was a small, highly specific group. Something else is interesting: our past can carry different significance in different situations. In one conversation it goes without saying; in another we would rather keep it to ourselves.
Not every change has to do with money. People grow older, develop new views and have new experiences. If you think differently at forty than you did at twenty-five, you should also regard the intervening fifteen years as suspects before blaming your wealth alone.
That sounds obvious, but success stories often overlook it. Once somebody becomes rich, every new hobby suddenly serves as proof of money's influence. They might have become interested in it without moving up financially. The money might finally let them pursue an old interest. They might simply have become more curious.
Change can feel good, too
There is a reason many people want to improve their financial position. More resources create room to act. Burdensome constraints can disappear, and earlier insecurity need not govern the rest of a life. Sometimes this even changes relationships for the better: less pressure can leave someone with more patience, time and freedom.
A 2017 research review by Mesmin Destin and Régine Debrosse describes how upward mobility can touch a person's sense of self and create uncertainty about social position. That points to possible difficulties, not inevitable suffering. Another review, by Edith Chen and colleagues in 2022, discusses the complicated combination of economic success, more favourable psychological outcomes and possible physical costs along some pathways of upward mobility. It cannot predict an individual's course of illness either.
What matters to me is the openness of these findings. Moving up can bring relief while also requiring adjustment. You need neither diminish your pleasure in it nor regard every difficulty as an unavoidable price. Feeling no inner conflict does not mean you are repressing something. Perhaps your existing values and new opportunities simply fit well together.
Which changes really belong to me?
Looking back, you might assess yourself through particular qualities: am I still generous, cautious, curious, reliable? Those questions are understandable, but qualities reveal themselves across many situations. A new purchase or different leisure activities are hardly enough to judge an entire character.
Decisions seem more revealing to me. Which convictions from earlier life still matter? Which have I revised for good reasons? Have I changed how I treat people, and if so, why? Are there habits that serve me well now even though they originally arose from scarcity? Which do I maintain only because I do not want to disappoint anyone?
These are not questions from a scientifically validated test. They are prompts to look more closely at your life story. The answers may contradict one another. Nobody owes their past complete consistency.
The source of wealth also changes that story. A business built over decades, a large inheritance and an unexpected windfall differ considerably in the decisions and experiences that precede them. Earned or inherited: does the source of wealth matter? explores those differences more closely. The point here is that there is no single typical biography of becoming rich.
The same person, with more possibilities?
Being wealthy today does not oblige you to preserve the person you used to be. Perhaps that person was more fearful, less fair or less free in some respects than they wanted to be. It would be strange to retain those qualities out of loyalty to the past. Earlier experiences can remain valuable precisely because they no longer determine everyday life.
I would therefore resist answering the title with a quick yes or no. People change anyway. Financial advancement can accelerate that process, reveal different sides of someone or change surprisingly little about their fundamental beliefs. Research suggests a variety of experiences and is particularly limited when we specifically mean people with very large fortunes.
The idea behind Tired of Wealth is itself an unusual question about the place money occupies in our lives. It cannot answer anyone's personal question of identity for them. No philosophical aptitude test for millionaires is required, either.
Perhaps it is enough to be able to say: I am different from who I was ten years ago. I know where I come from and which changes I welcome. And I do not have to disparage my earlier self to be happy with who I am today.
Sources
McAdams, Dan P., and Kate C. McLean (2013). “Narrative Identity”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), pp. 233 to 238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622
Friedman, Sam (2016, first published online 2015). “Habitus clivé and the emotional imprint of social mobility”. The Sociological Review, 64(1), pp. 129 to 147. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12280
Friedman, Sam (2012). “Cultural omnivores or culturally homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the upwardly mobile”. Poetics, 40(5), pp. 467 to 489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2012.07.001
Friedman, Sam, Dave O’Brien and Ian McDonald (2021). “Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self”. Sociology, 55(4), pp. 716 to 733. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520982225
Folkes, Louise (2022, first published online 2021). “Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility”. Sociological Research Online, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780420985127
Kallschmidt, Anna M., and Asia A. Eaton (2019). “Are lower social class origins stigmatized at work? A qualitative study of social class concealment and disclosure among White men employees who experienced upward mobility”. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 113, pp. 115 to 128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2018.08.010
Destin, Mesmin, and Régine Debrosse (2017). “Upward social mobility and identity”. Current Opinion in Psychology, 18, pp. 99 to 104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.08.006
Chen, Edith, Gene H. Brody and Gregory E. Miller (2022). “What Are the Health Consequences of Upward Mobility?”. Annual Review of Psychology, 73, pp. 599 to 628. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-033020-122814