Looking back on that year after graduation – the one in which he had his
crisis of wealth – Roth can offer a very simple diagnosis to explain his
malaise: “I wasn’t working,” he says. “If I’d decided to be a philosophy
professor” – his major in college – “and I was succeeding at it, I think I’d
have been fine. But I wasn’t. I hadn’t figured it out. And that was
unacceptable to me.”
Roth was lucky. He grew up fully comprehending the psychological place of
work, recognising it as something whose value extended far beyond the
ability to pay bills. He just had to figure out what his vocation was. But
the same cannot be said of all children who grow up wealthy or even just
well off. And without the structure of a profession – without the mundane
and daily obligations that come with showing up at your job, doing it well
and getting paid – what remains is often an existential question: what on
earth am I meant to be doing all day? “Malaise is a soft word for it,” says
Luthar. “Anomie, alienation, anguish happens when we’re robbed of that sense
of efficacy.”
Luthar has specialised in studying the interior lives of privileged children.
Her findings are intriguing. In a sample of 314 15-year-olds in a wealthy
suburban community, the rate of “clinically significant anxiety” was 5 to 9%
higher than the US average, and among girls, the rate of “clinically
significant depression” was three times the national norm. Drug use exceeded
that of low-income teenagers she followed in a parallel study. In part, she
says, it’s because so many children of the wealthy are overworked trying to
live up to their parents’ high standards. But it’s also, she adds, because
some wealthy children are underworked, not held to responsibilities and
obligations, and therefore suffering from a certain crisis of utility, of
agency – they’ve never had to do anything for themselves. “These young
people obsess, ‘What can I do if I’m left to my own resources?’” says
Luthar. “‘How much of my success is attributable to all the forms of help I
get, and how much is really me?’” Luthar’s research shows that if you
compare the extracurricular activities of affluent children with those of
children who live in stark poverty, the poor children are far more
civic-minded, donating more of their time to churches, youth groups and
voluntary work. These kinds of altruistic engagements are far more apt to
give them a sense of the world’s largeness and entry into social networks
that extend beyond their household staff.
Other research on rich adults shows they’re far more likely to feel friendless
than poor ones. “Think about it,” says Luthar. “How do any of us know we’re
loved by friends? It’s when they come to us in a time of need. If we don’t
have a time of need because we buy what we need, how are we going to know
who truly loves us?”
“For rich children, it’d be very easy never to take any steps to build an
identity outside of your association with your family’s wealth,” says Jamie
Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and director of the 2003
documentary Born Rich. “That’s where those feelings of entitlement come
from, that’s where you get the snobbery, that’s why those characters seem,
at times, offensive.” Successful wealth cultures generally attach wealth to
virtue. The Rockefellers, for instance, have a long tradition of public
service and hard work in their family tree, producing, four generations
later, a senator (Jay), a well-respected professor of religion (Steven), and
a well-loved doctor (Richard). But watching many of the kids in Born Rich,
one doesn’t get the sense they were raised in homes where virtue was a top
priority. Most memorably, Luke Weil, heir to the Autotote gaming fortune,
described how Brown University couldn’t bring itself to kick him out because
it needed his family’s money – “I attended less than eight academic
commitments” – and added that at boarding school, whenever a classmate
annoyed him, he was able to say, “F*** you, I’m from New York. I can buy
your family; piss off.”
Yet even Weil, easily the film’s most despicable character, said he yearned
one day to be “indispensable” – more or less proving Luthar’s point about
the crisis of purpose in rich kids and their desire to be successful. I
tried to find Weil for this story, curious to see if he’d succeeded at
making himself useful since the film’s release five years ago. I learnt that
he’d tried, working at Bear Stearns and enrolling at Columbia Business
School. I also found that he recently got sprung from a detention centre in
Manhattan after assaulting his girlfriend. “I think some rich kids just say,
‘Screw it. I’m gonna play around, have anger and hostility toward everyone.’
They’re the ones who say, ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’”
Then what, I ask the therapist Harris Stratyner, do the most distressed rich
kids fantasise about when it comes to their family money? That they didn’t
have it? “Rarely,” he says. “They’re not stupid.” What, then? “That they’d
made it themselves.”
Almost everyone who’s ever worked with rich children or their parents
has a making-the-bed story. It’s a chestnut, a cliché almost, a cautionary
tale about the first twinkle of entitled behaviour in a lifetime of
potential cupidity, and it goes something like this: Mum wanders into the
bedroom, notices her child’s bed is still in a rumple and asks the child to
tidy it up. The child, usually about seven and suddenly wise to the hidden
economy of the house, replies: “That’s not my job. She’s paid to do that,”
and points to the housekeeper. Susan Bradley, founder of the Sudden Money Institute,
once ran a forum for wealthy parents at which one of them reported that
their child was paying the housekeeper to make his bed. “And everyone
thought this was hilarious and very enterprising, showing early business
capabilities and that kind of thing,” says Bradley.
George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who has devoted the bulk of his career
to the study of adult resilience and coping, argued that childhood capacity
for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the
capacity to love. He based his conclusion on a famous longitudinal study of
456 young men who, starting in the 1940s, were followed from the age of
about 14. All came from blue-collar and welfare families, and none, at least
at the time of their selection, had juvenile records. The subjects were
assigned ratings for their ability to work as teenagers – in school, at
home, in jobs, in extracurricular pursuits – and they were reinterviewed at
several intervals after that, at ages 25, 31, 47. The outcomes were pretty
stark. Those who demonstrated the greatest capacity for work as 14-year-olds
were five times more likely to be paid well for their work at 47 than those
who scored lowest, and 16 times less likely to have experienced unemployment
– and intelligence, Vaillant was careful to note, did little to mediate the
latter outcomes. They were also twice as likely to have warm relations with
a wide variety of people and almost twice as likely to still be enjoying
their first marriages. But perhaps the most striking datum was what Vaillant
wryly called a “value-free definition of health”: those who had the poorest
ratings were six times as likely, at age 47, to be dead.
How do you drum a work ethic into those who don’t have to work? Most advisers
to wealthy families have a simple answer to this: you make sure the kids do
have to work. You give them chores. You insist on summer jobs. You restrain
their spending with allowances. And above all, you keep the children’s
trusts out of their hands until they’re at least 35, unless they need health
insurance, more education, a deposit for a house, or seed money for a
business idea.
“It’s simple: either your parents are comfortable paying for everything in
your twenties and letting you coast financially through that period or
they’re not,” says Holly Peterson, the daughter of the Blackstone Group
co-founder Pete Peterson, whose estimated net worth is $2.5 billion. She has
worked in TV and print journalism since graduating from college, and
recently published The Manny, a satire of wealthy women on the Upper East
Side.
“Are your parents buying your apartment and giving you a clothing budget?” she
continues. “My father didn’t. I couldn’t not work. When I was at ABC News
making $32,000 a year as a researcher, my father was giving me $600 a month
– the difference between a studio walk-up and a place with a doorman. He
didn’t like those townhouses with the double doors that girls were getting
attacked in. In my twenties – when we argued a fair amount about money – I’d
point out that, in the last 30 seconds, he had just earned in interest the
amount I was asking for. And he’d say, ‘I know you don’t understand this
now, but the greatest gift I can give you is your independence.’ And 20
years later, I hate to admit this, but he was right.” She adds that these
limits led to awkward misconceptions about her means: “I had a lot more
money than most everyone I worked with, because I had help on my apartment
and the ability to go to his beautiful home in Long Island or Florida on the
weekend. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’ll pick up the bill because I have tons
of his money in my current account.’ People always thought I had more money
than I did, which always made me feel a bit uncomfortable.”
