Why Some Lives Feel Rich and Others Only Look It
How to stop chasing the symbols of wealth and start living the substance
Hi,
We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. Wishing you all a great 2026!
In this edition:
Why our lives run on symbols — and what happens when we choose the wrong ones
Omaha wealth vs Miami wealth
How to define a life that feels rich, not just looks rich
Almost overnight, your life changes beyond your wildest imagination, as if you’re hurled 100 years into the future.
You have more food than you’ve ever seen. There’s medicine to cure just about anything. Strange but durable clothing that really keeps you comfortable in all weather conditions. Not to mention all kinds of machinery and aircraft and technology that defy the laws of physics as you know them.
And then, just as swiftly as this wonderful, magical, unimaginable stuff appears, it’s packed up and whisked away into the skies.
How would you react? Simply shrug and return to your old ways of living? Or would you try to figure out some way to bring all that futuristic wealth back?
Maybe if you did the right things at the right time in the right order, the good times would kick back on, as if unlocking some cosmic riddle.
That’s what some people did try.
During WWII, the United States military moved through the South Pacific, carving airfields out of the jungle on remote islands. They brought “cargo” — essentially unimaginable wealth in the form of canned food, clothes, medicine and machinery.
When the war thankfully ended, the military left and the cargo stopped coming. In an attempt to bring the planes back, some indigenous groups made their own mock runways, built wooden air traffic control towers, wore bamboo “headphones” with antennae made of grass and lit fires to mimic landing lights.
They did everything right in terms of appearance, but the planes, of course, never returned. They had the symbol of a working airfield, but they didn’t have the integrity of the system that made the planes fly.
This is what the physicist Richard Feynman famously called in a commencement speech “Cargo Cult Science.”
And while it’s easy to feel superior to the islanders, modern life is full of our own bamboo machinery — all the small, clever ways we try to summon the cargo of success, happiness, love, purpose.
Research consistently shows people consider goods as a symbol of someone’s wealth, reputation and social status.
The islanders wanted cargo planes, so they built straw airplanes. Some people want to feel successful, so they sign a 72-month lease on a luxury SUV.
Is it really that different?
Why we can’t help thinking in symbols
It’s how the human brain works. Once our brains find patterns, we turn them into symbols. A symbol is just a shortcut for something bigger and more complex. Symbols give us language, art, culture, religion, identity.
As the philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote:
“It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being.”
Symbolic thinking lets us compress huge emotional realities into manageable containers. While it might cause us to tie a couple of sticks together in hopes of conjuring an Amazon delivery drone, it’s also why we lose our breath under the tall archways of a cathedral, get goosebumps from the roar of a crowd or go misty-eyed at the first blurred ultrasound of a child’s pea-sized heart.
Symbolism most of all resides in art. Just think back to your school days of English, you’ll likely recall learning about symbolism. If you had to read The Great Gatsby, then you know all about deciphering that damn green light.
Van Gogh paints a chair — loneliness, absence, longing. A haiku mentions one falling leaf — the entire idea of impermanence. This is the artistic form of what cognitive scientists call conceptual metaphor theory: the abstract is understood through the concrete.
So, we naturally create symbols in our own lives — your wedding ring, a marathon medal, a family recipe. They become the bridge between what we feel and what we can express.
After all, life is storytelling. Intentionally or not, we’re always defining characters, props, settings, themes. Just like artists, we choose the symbols we live by.
Each day is a blank page stacked onto the one before it. Events, people, habits, objects — they’re all narrative choices. But none of it means anything if the symbols don’t represent something real.
As Aldous Huxley wrote:
“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”
It’s why wealth should be subjective, personally defined. If you aren’t paying attention, culture can hand you symbols that mean nothing — status objects that look like wealth but represent none of the things wealth is supposed to give us.
Take it from Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic and literary master of symbolism, who, when a dinner guest described the bread given at communion as a “wonderful symbol,” famously retorted:
“Well, if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it!”
Exactly.
Omaha wealth vs. Miami wealth
I remember fondly one of the first times my dad took me hunting. We were after partridge, inching along the backroads through the thick forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. My aunt sat in the backseat of the truck behind us, acting as another spotter and keeping our spirits up whenever a shotgun pellet zigged while the bird zagged.
When we finally spotted one, everything went still. We eased the truck to a stop and opened the doors quietly. Then stepped out onto the cold earth and lined up the shot.
At the time, it was just hunting. Only now do I realize the symbols rich in meaning in that moment. The act of hunting on a literal level represents survival and self-sustainability. That my father teaching me represents a legacy. That my aunt joining us represents the tight bonds of family. That we are doing it intently and patiently represents discipline and craft. And on some grander level, the hunt represents what the whole human race endured: starvation, struggle, ingenuity, perseverance. There is so much more here than shooting birds.
I suppose the trick of it all is understanding what the things that come into your life mean — and what things you want to nurture in your life that represent who you really want to be.
Recently, two pieces of writing made me think about life as a story composed of symbols.
The first was Warren Buffett’s final shareholder letter, written in his typical folksy fashion. What stood out to me was the numerous references to the city of Omaha and the people who lived there during his time from boyhood to billionaire CEO.
Buffett mentions many people he grew up with and who became close friends — the likes of partner Charlie Munger and Don Keough, president of Coca-Cola — giving a nod to a community that raised him. In reflection of his life, much of it was not about him but rather a city and its people and the virtues they shared.
He writes: “Can it be that there is some magic ingredient in Omaha’s water? Looking back I feel that both Berkshire and I did better because of our base in Omaha than if I had resided anywhere else. The center of the United States was a very good place to be born, to raise a family, and to build a business. Through dumb luck, I drew a ridiculously long straw at birth.”
And then on the final page he ends with what I feel is his final declaration of how he defines success:
Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless.
Buffett is known for investing skill, but also for more homey symbols, as a fan of McDonald’s and Coke.
Compare that to a Wall Street Journal piece published the same week on the “ultrarich” (of which Buffett surely is a member) paying huge sums of money for extreme privacy. Private jets. Private rooms at top restaurants. Private entrances to hotels. Private garages and elevators. Exclusive clubs and schools. The epicenter of it all is not the plains of America but the beaches of Miami.
If you saw a man in Omaha at a McDonald’s drive-thru and a man in Miami disappearing into a private car elevator, who would you assume is wealthier?
Two forms of wealth with very different symbolic vocabularies.
I’m not saying one is right or wrong.
Only that symbols are personal. And you can choose them. Choosing the wrong ones — that is, mistaking symbol for substance — can be the difference between living the life you want and chasing one you don’t actually care about.
The philosopher Alan Watts believed that people tend to fall for certain illusions in life that lead to unhappiness and unfulfillment, writing:
All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.
He believed one of the most persistent symbol-as-reality illusions is the misguided way we think about and pursue money:
Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion.
Watts taught that chasing money without meaning — or in hopes that it will be the path toward meaning — is a guaranteed trap. That chase leaves people waiting for some “future happiness,” like planes loaded with cargo, that never arrives.
In other words, money can help nurture virtues, and it can be a product of exercising those virtues, but it (like any symbol) can’t be the thing itself. Which is why there needs to be deep thought about what the symbols in our lives are — what things truly represent what you consider to be wealth or purpose or well-being.
It brings to mind Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s, and his image of success:
“Success is when your children want to be with you when they’re adults… How many people have all that [stuff] and their kids don’t come home for the holidays?”
You can accumulate all the accoutrements that culturally scream success while finding yourself sitting alone atop a tower, waiting for the boxes of happiness, love, joy, purpose to descend from the sky.
So, if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.
A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips
Sure, it may not be the healthiest thing to think of your life as a main character in a novel or movie, but it may make it easier to find out what you’re wasting time and money on and where your true values lie.
So, here are a few artistic principles you can borrow from fiction to craft a life that means something:
Choose symbols that reflect your real values. If you value curiosity: keep books around you. If you value relationships: schedule gatherings. If you value health: let your groceries become a symbol.
Reconnect symbols to their meaning. A home is not a status symbol; it’s security, family, belonging. And money is not a trophy; it’s freedom of time.
Practice symbolic awareness. What is this object or habit actually representing for me?
Create personal iconography. A morning ritual, a particular mug, a playlist, a walk at sunset — these can become anchors for identity.
Lastly, reject symbols that demand more than they give. Any item that demands debt, anxiety or comparison is not a healthy symbol. It’s more like a tether.
Ultimately, the idea of symbolism in life is an invitation to explore, to go on an adventure, to create. It’s an invitation to not be afraid, to try new things. The beauty of it all is that there is a whole world to explore, to make our own, to define what it all means — whether in the flat plains of Omaha or the towers overlooking the golden sand of Miami, or even on the backroads of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula hunting birds.
The short story writer Sherwood Anderson, writing to his son about painting and the meaning of art and life, said:
Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn’t matter so much.
It’s what you feel about it, what it means to you.
A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.
Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings.
Create your own story with your own symbols that feel true — that don’t just make you seem wealthy in the eyes of culture but make you actually feel wealthy. Because again, if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.
And if that doesn’t convince you, just remember: even Prince couldn’t keep living as a symbol.
If he couldn’t pull it off, what chance do the rest of us have?
Notes to my future self:
Symbols aren’t the thing — don’t mistake appearance for meaning.
Choose the symbols that reflect your values, not the ones culture hands you.
Wealth is what gives life meaning, not how life looks — if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.
Until next time,
J.S.
Brilliant framing around cargo cult thinking and how we conflate symbols with actual value. That Watts quote about needing the outbaord motor instead of just gold coins cuts straight to the practical vs performative distinction most people miss. I've watched friends lease luxury cars while stressing about rent, which is basically the same as building bamboo headsets and expecting planes to land. The Omaha vs Miami contrasts really lands too becuase it shows wealth can express itself through community ties and simple rituals just as legitimately as through private elevators.