Wealth can enter a conversation without anybody mentioning a number. All it takes is an introduction: "the investor", "the heiress", "the successful entrepreneur". The description may be accurate. It may even tell us something important. Yet it can reveal remarkably little about the person we are actually meeting.
When money plays a larger role in life, it sometimes finds its way into the way we describe ourselves. We think of ourselves as owners, wealthy people, business partners or someone financially responsible for others. These roles can bring pride, pleasure and confidence. They can also bring expectations we never asked for.
What interests me is a fairly ordinary question: how much space does money take up in the answer to "Who am I?" And who decides whether that space is appropriate? The answer cannot be found in wealth alone, or in the badge on the car outside.
A person has more than one role
Our self-image draws on different affiliations, qualities, activities and relationships. Someone can be a mother, a founder, an enthusiastic cook and a dependable friend. Some roles come to the fore; others remain in the background until a situation makes them relevant. Our idea of ourselves is not a neatly labelled drawer. It is more like a collection of descriptions that need not always fit comfortably together.
A study by Matthew Easterbrook, Toon Kuppens and Antony Manstead, published in 2020, shows how much space social and economic position can occupy. The researchers analysed two large British population surveys of 16,966 and 44,903 people. Respondents had rated the importance of different characteristics to their sense of self. Income, education and occupation played a notably prominent role. On average, people in higher social positions placed greater weight on such status-related characteristics.
The result is interesting, but needs a qualification. The study examined associations between socioeconomic position and self-concept. It does not show what happens when someone suddenly becomes a millionaire, or establish a particular personality among wealthy people. Income, education, occupation and wealth are also far from interchangeable.
Nevertheless, it helps us avoid a common mistake. Economic characteristics can matter to identity without someone being superficial or obsessed with money. Someone who has built a company may find a large part of their identity in being an entrepreneur. Someone managing wealth intended to support relatives over the long term may primarily see themselves as responsible for others. Another person may answer a question about themselves by talking first about family and interests, despite being in an entirely different financial league.
The more useful question, then, seems less whether money belongs in our identity than what meaning it has there.
When possessions tell a story about us
In his 1988 essay "Possessions and the Extended Self", consumer researcher Russell Belk described how people can experience objects and possessions as part of an extended identity. Things evoke relationships, achievements and periods of life. They can show which groups we belong to, or wish to belong to. Their value is not always exhausted by a market price or a practical function.
This applies to surprisingly ordinary objects. An old table may mean more to someone than an entire property because of the memories attached to it. A workshop may form part of its owner's sense of self even if individual machines could be replaced. Greater wealth expands the possible forms of ownership. The underlying psychological idea remains the same: people can weave what they own into the story of who they are.
Another theoretical approach comes from L. J. Shrum and his co-authors in 2013. They consider materialistic orientation, among other things, as a pursuit of identity through symbolic consumption. This is an explanatory model, not a claim that every purchase is an attempt at self-aggrandisement.
Some purchases simply serve a purpose. Others express taste. Others represent achievements someone has worked towards for years. The same property might be experienced as a home, an investment, a piece of family history or a status symbol. Several meanings often overlap.
It would be convenient to dismiss all expensive possessions as vanity. It would be equally convenient to declare every major purchase an expression of a distinctive personality. Price alone tells us remarkably little about the motive.
The role other people assign us
Wealth can be visible even when its owner says nothing about it. Occupation, neighbourhood, invitations, publicly known business interests and sometimes a family name give people clues. They build an impression of the sort of person somebody might be.
We have to respond to such assumptions somehow. We can accept, correct or ignore them, or try to play them down. Even someone who explicitly avoids calling themselves rich may have to contend with others placing them in that category.
A 2018 qualitative study by sociologist Rachel Sherman illustrates how layered this can be. Sherman conducted in-depth interviews with 50 affluent people in New York. Many described their undeniably expensive lifestyles as normal, sensible and family-oriented. They verbally distanced themselves from conspicuous luxury and excess. Their accounts also involved questions of how to justify a privileged position morally.
This is not a representative portrait of all rich people. The interviews come from a particular social and geographical setting. But they reveal something easily lost in stereotypes: refusing to define yourself through wealth can itself become part of your self-image.
Saying "I have stayed completely normal" already identifies a quality you value. The statement may be entirely sincere. It may also protect you from an image you would rather not be associated with. Those possibilities need not exclude each other.
There is another side to this. If others mainly see someone as wealthy, that person may feel obliged to demonstrate modesty at all times. Or success. Or generosity. Expectations emerge without anyone ever agreeing how a rich person ought to behave.
The neighbouring article Am I still the same person since becoming wealthy? explores how self-image changes over time when wealth arrives. Here, the focus is on the roles that coexist in our present sense of self.
Visible status and the art of keeping it quiet
Status symbols can resemble a foreign language. To someone unfamiliar with them, they are just a car, a watch or a piece of clothing. Someone who understands their significance may read a message in them. Not everyone wants the whole world to understand that message.
Consumer researchers Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward examined subtle signals in four studies published in 2010. In certain product categories, people with greater familiarity and cultural knowledge preferred less obvious markers, allowing them to distinguish themselves from the wider public. The effect was particularly apparent where products were relevant to identity and visible to others.
Research into consumption signals does not, of course, measure the personalities of multimillionaires. It does help explain why restraint need not mean that status is irrelevant. Sometimes the message is precisely that only insiders will understand it.
Sometimes there really is no message at all. An expensive object may be bought because someone likes it, finds it reliable or thinks it comfortable. Reading every detail of a lifestyle as a secret status code is just as hasty as inferring bad character from every visible luxury label.
What matters is the meaning someone gives a possession. If an object forms part of their self-description, they may be annoyed when others fail to recognise its value. Someone whose enjoyment does not depend on an audience has nothing to explain. Both people may own exactly the same thing.
When financial success carries your self-worth
One distinction between wealth and identity matters particularly: self-worth. You can be proud of financial achievements without making your value as a human being depend on them. You can also own substantial wealth and feel personally called into question by every business disappointment.
In 2017, psychologists Lora Park, Deborah Ward and Kristin Naragon-Gainey studied a concept with the somewhat cumbersome name Financial Contingency of Self-Worth. It describes the extent to which people make their self-worth depend on being financially successful. Across several studies, they developed a measure and examined its relationships with experiences and behaviour.
Participants whose self-worth depended more strongly on financial success reported, among other things, more financial comparisons, stress and anxiety, and a lower sense of autonomy. In experimental situations, people with this orientation responded differently to a financial threat than to a threat in another area of achievement. The studies also suggested that reflecting on a personal strength could soften that response.
I find that last finding particularly interesting. Remembering qualities outside financial achievement appears to mean that a financial problem no longer says quite as much about the whole person. This is not a general prescription for therapy. The research mainly involved psychological study samples, including students, and cannot simply be applied to very wealthy entrepreneurs or heirs.
Everyday language easily blurs an important distinction. One person may value financial security because they are responsible for others. Another pursues ambitious business goals because developing a company gives them pleasure. Neither necessarily measures their self-worth by their bank balance. Financial goals and financially contingent self-worth are different things.
The wider research also calls for care. In a 2014 meta-analysis, Helga Dittmar and colleagues examined 259 independent samples. A stronger materialistic orientation was associated, on average, with lower personal well-being. The relationship depended on how materialism and well-being were measured. Above all, a statistical association does not establish money or possessions as the cause of psychological distress.
I would certainly not derive a diagnosis of wealthy people from this. The more interesting boundary is personal: when is a financial setback an annoying event, and when does it feel like a verdict on your worth?
Not every study is about wealth
The literature on money and identity looks extensive at first glance. Read closely, however, and much of it examines something other than the lives of particularly wealthy people. A branding experiment explains status communication. A population survey about income describes aspects of self-concept. A study with students tests whether financial achievement is linked to self-worth.
These are useful pieces of the picture. Combining them into a fixed psychological type called "the rich person" would involve some enormous leaps. Researchers also measure income, social class and wealth in different ways. Wealth may be tied up in a company, inherited, built over decades or only recently accessible. Any of this may influence daily life and the meaning of possessions, without the studies cited here establishing one uniform response.
The interviews with genuinely affluent people used here are particularly vivid, but they cannot establish general prevalence either. They tell us how certain people talk about themselves and their money. They do not tell us how many millionaires think this way overall.
With a subject so readily reduced to armchair psychology, that limitation matters to me. Scientific concepts are not a shortcut for explaining a stranger's personality from their wealth.
How much room should money have?
Perhaps a reasonable relationship with your financial role means neither having to hide it nor making it your defining characteristic. Someone who owns a great deal is entitled to acknowledge that fact. They can enjoy success, take responsibility seriously and make decisions connected with their wealth. Relationships, convictions, abilities and interests can remain important in their own right.
That sounds simple but can be demanding in practice. When much of your time goes into managing holdings, making business decisions or discussing capital, these activities inevitably occupy your thoughts. Other interests do not automatically become unimportant. Sometimes they just need more room than your diary leaves them.
One useful exercise is to pay close attention to how you describe yourself. How do you introduce yourself when nobody knows your financial circumstances? What do you talk about when a business role is not required? Which qualities would your friends mention without referring to your wealth? There is no prescribed direction for the answers. Nor is the point to perform an especially modest version of yourself.
You can be proud of having built wealth and still be a terrible joke-teller, a good listener or a passionate gardener. Your wealth takes nothing away from those qualities. It may occasionally draw attention away from them.
If you feel little affinity with a wealthy identity at all, Being rich without wanting to be takes a different angle: how wealth and personal values can fit together in the first place.
For me, this also touches on the unusual premise of Tired of Wealth. You can regard wealth as an important part of your life story and still freely decide what to do with it. Keep it, use it, build more or give some away. Such a decision need not be a declaration of character, and nobody owes it to another person.
It would already be useful if the description "wealthy" found its proper place. It tells us something about a person's economic possibilities. Whether it also tells us anything about their values, relationships or self-worth cannot be read from that alone. Anyone who has a great deal of money is entitled to decide how large a chapter it gets in their own account of their life.
Sources
Belk, Russell W. (1988). “Possessions and the Extended Self”. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), pp. 139 to 168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154
Berger, Jonah, and Morgan Ward (2010). “Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption”. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(4), pp. 555 to 569. https://doi.org/10.1086/655445
Dittmar, Helga, Rod Bond, Megan Hurst and Tim Kasser (2014). “The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(5), pp. 879 to 924. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037409
Easterbrook, Matthew J., Toon Kuppens and Antony pp. R. Manstead (2020). “Socioeconomic status and the structure of the self-concept”. British Journal of Social Psychology, 59(1), pp. 66 to 86. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12334
Park, Lora E., Deborah E. Ward and Kristin Naragon-Gainey (2017). “It's All About the Money (For Some): Consequences of Financially Contingent Self-Worth”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(5), pp. 601 to 622. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216689080
Sherman, Rachel (2018). “‘A very expensive ordinary life’: consumption, symbolic boundaries and moral legitimacy among New York elites”. Socio-Economic Review, 16(2), pp. 411 to 433. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwy011
Shrum, L. J., Nancy Wong, Farrah Arif, Sunaina K. Chugani, Alexander Gunz, Tina M. Lowrey, Agnes Nairn, Mario Pandelaere, Spencer M. Ross, Ayalla Ruvio, Kristin Scott and Jill Sundie (2013). “Reconceptualizing materialism as identity goal pursuits: Functions, processes, and consequences”. Journal of Business Research, 66(8), pp. 1179 to 1185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2012.08.010