Imagine someone who started a small company years ago because they enjoyed the work and liked making their own decisions. Over time, the business became successful. It may now be worth enough to make its owner one of the wealthiest people in the area, on paper at least. Yet they drive the same car, see the same friends and would rather spend Sunday in the garden than at an event where everyone discusses their latest investment.
Eventually, someone says, "You could afford something completely different now." It is probably meant kindly. But there is an interesting expectation behind it. As though taste ought to change with a bank balance. As though wealth came with an appropriate way of life that you should now acquire to match.
I am interested in what happens when someone becomes wealthy without ever planning to live as "a rich person". There is no contradiction in that. Possessions can grow without personal wishes keeping pace. Things may become more complicated if the people around you see it differently.
Wealth has one history, your plans another
Substantial wealth can arrive by different routes. A business may increase in value over many years. A stake in a family firm may suddenly be worth far more. Someone may inherit assets they neither earned nor expected. Or an idea pursued mainly because it was interesting may become a commercial success.
These routes differ. Someone still running a company may own a valuable stake without being free to spend its entire value. An inheritance may come with memories, family commitments or complicated ownership arrangements. The market value of a property is not a monthly payment into your account. Even in economic terms, treating every valuable asset as unlimited spending money would be absurd.
Its value tells us even less about the life its owner originally wanted. Someone starting a business may want creative control, to develop a good product or to earn a living in a particular occupation. Substantial wealth can then be a consequence of successful work without ever having been its purpose.
This is a plausible description of different lives, not a single study's established category of "people who accidentally became rich". There is plenty of research on what people pursue and how affluent people talk about themselves. Far less clearly established is how many very wealthy people experience their position as an unintended result of their choices. Any precise prevalence would be invented.
Money sometimes arrives with somebody else's script
Once wealth becomes known, people develop ideas about how its owner could or should live. They could travel more, buy a bigger property, entertain more generously or finally enjoy a degree of exclusivity. Others may even expect a different attitude towards money. Sensible thrift can suddenly be seen as an odd personal quirk.
Research can observe how people infer characteristics from economic position. In a study published in 2025, Ángel del Fresno-Díaz and colleagues examined how people in Spain perceive groups along differences in wealth. Qualitative interviews with 90 people were followed by two further studies with 251 and 190 participants. On average, wealthier groups were assigned more negative traits, while less wealthy groups were more often assigned positive ones.
The study cannot tell us how all Europeans view individual millionaires. It examines perceptions in a particular social and cultural setting. It does show how quickly a category of wealth can become a supposed description of character. An attribution is not knowledge of a person.
Imagine someone wealthy who continues buying second-hand furniture because they like the things they find. They may occasionally be told to live in a way that "befits their status". If they then buy something expensive, the same surroundings might accuse them of excessive luxury. Their acquaintances do not even have to be particularly contradictory. Society sometimes manages that collectively.
Keeping an existing lifestyle may require more explanation than someone expected. Changing it invites judgement, too. The problem then lies less in a particular purchase than in the assumption that strangers can read your tastes from your wealth.
Being affluent and still feeling ordinary
Sociologist Rachel Sherman has studied affluent people's sense of self closely. For a study published in 2018, she conducted in-depth interviews with 50 wealthy New Yorkers. Many described their spending as sensible, family-oriented and normal. They explicitly distanced themselves from conspicuous luxury and waste. Sherman also interprets these accounts as attempts to justify their privileged position morally.
The finding matters partly because it prevents an easy romantic story. People who play down their wealth are not necessarily especially modest. Describing an expensive daily life as "completely normal" may reflect a genuine underestimate of one's position. Restraint can be sincerely intended while also creating distance from an uncomfortable image of wealth.
The interviews do not reveal a single attitude shared by all affluent people. They concern a small, deliberately selected group in New York. Nevertheless, there is an important thought here: being able to afford a completely different life does not mean wanting it. Nor does it mean you should too readily describe your present life as normal for everyone.
The reasonable middle ground, to me, is acknowledging both things. You can be content with your lifestyle without denying the considerable opportunities your wealth gives you compared with others. Choosing to live modestly does not remove financial privilege. Neither fact cancels out the other.
Personal goals do not always fit the label
Motivation psychology offers a helpful approach. In their 2000 account of self-determination theory, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan distinguish different reasons for acting. Autonomy, competence and relatedness play important roles. Whether people pursue something from their own motivation or mainly feel bound by external expectations can make a difference to well-being.
Across three longitudinal datasets in 1999, Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot examined how well personal goals matched people's interests and values. Goals that better fitted personal convictions were associated with more persistent effort and greater gains in well-being when achieved. The researchers describe this as goal self-concordance.
These studies were not specifically conducted with people worth millions. They should not become a scientifically guaranteed guide to affluent living. The basic thought is useful all the same. A goal can impress society while meaning little to an individual. An outwardly unremarkable activity can fit exactly what somebody values.
In 1996 research involving adults and students, Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan found that a stronger emphasis on extrinsic goals, such as financial success, recognition and appearance, relative to goals such as relationships or growth, was associated with less favourable well-being measures. These are relationships between variables, not inevitable consequences of becoming rich.
That leads me to a more useful question than searching for the correct millionaire lifestyle: what would have mattered to this person if they had never become rich? They may find that wealth has made some of those things easier. They may also discover that their interests really have changed. Both are allowed. What matters is whether the change is theirs.
A simple life is not a duty to be modest
Research even has a name for deliberately consuming less than you could afford: voluntary simplicity. It covers different ways of limiting consumption while giving more weight to other parts of life.
A systematic review by Joshua Hook and colleagues, published in a 2023 journal issue, examined 23 empirical studies of voluntary simplicity and well-being. Overall, the authors found a positive association. They discussed possible roles for self-determination and control over consumption desires, while emphasising methodological limitations and differences between the groups studied.
A further literature review by Raquel Rebouças and Ana Maria Soares in 2021 shows how inconsistently voluntary simplicity is defined and studied. That alone makes it misleading to conclude that rich people should generally become more minimalist to feel better. Some people forgo things by conviction, others by necessity. That is a considerable difference. Most studies do not involve representative samples of multimillionaires, either.
Everyday life also calls for a clear-eyed view. Someone who enjoys an old house, a simple car or a familiar routine is entitled to keep them. Someone who later treats themselves to a lovely journey, a larger home or an expensive passion has not automatically betrayed their values. Voluntary simplicity makes a poor competition over who can most convincingly do without.
A person who could afford almost anything but does not want much of it need neither be praised nor pitied. Perhaps they are content. That would be a sufficient explanation.
The freedom to disappoint expectations
Some people want their wealth to be as unobtrusive as possible in daily life. Others are responsible for a business, foundation or family without confusing that role with their entire personality. Others discover interests that previously lacked time or money. These lives can be very different.
We should not forget that substantial wealth requires real decisions. Ownership may involve duties towards employees, relatives or contractual partners. Wanting a simple private life does not make those commitments disappear. An intentionally inconspicuous routine does not erase social differences, either. You can free yourself from certain expectations without defining yourself out of your ownership's actual consequences.
That makes the freedom to set your own priorities particularly valuable. You can continue running a business you love even when you no longer need to work. You can prefer an ordinary holiday although a private jet might theoretically be affordable. You can put money into projects that matter to you, or simply spend a while planning nothing new.
Suddenly rich: why a windfall can be overwhelming separately explores the initial effects of an unexpected jump in wealth. Here, the focus is on the years afterwards: the practical possibility of owning a great deal without constantly performing the associated role. When money becomes part of who you are also examines how far wealth enters our descriptions of ourselves.
Giving wealth away can likewise have very different motives. Why people give wealth away explores them. The idea behind Tired of Wealth makes an unusually direct offer to people who voluntarily want to give something away. Wealth you never set out to acquire creates no obligation to accept that offer, of course. Nobody has to give money away to prove they genuinely want a simple life.
Perhaps one of wealth's most pleasant features is the possibility of no longer having to justify your lifestyle. Rich people are allowed to like their money. They can like luxury, restraint or both at different times. Someone who has had a financially successful career without ever dreaming of a rich person's life does not need to invent that dream retrospectively.
A bank balance can change a life. The role it gets in that life is another question. Its owner is perfectly entitled to decide.
Sources
Del Fresno-Díaz, Ángel, Efraín García-Sánchez, Elena Padial-Rojas, Guillermo B. Willis and Soledad de Lemus (2025). “Lay representations of social class: A mixed methods approach to wealth-based group perceptions and stereotypes”. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64(3), e70003. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.70003
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
Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan (2000). “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior”. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), pp. 227 to 268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Sheldon, Kennon M., and Andrew J. Elliot (1999). “Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), pp. 482 to 497. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.482
Kasser, Tim, and Richard M. Ryan (1996). “Further Examining the American Dream: Differential Correlates of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3), pp. 280 to 287. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167296223006
Hook, Joshua N., Adam pp. Hodge, Hansong Zhang, Daryl R. Van Tongeren and Don E. Davis (2023). “Minimalism, voluntary simplicity, and well-being: A systematic review of the empirical literature”. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 18(1), pp. 130 to 141. First published online in 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1991450
Rebouças, Raquel, and Ana Maria Soares (2021). “Voluntary simplicity: A literature review and research agenda”. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 45(3), pp. 303 to 319. First published online in 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12621