F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that the rich are different from you and me. He wasn't just talking about the size of their bank accounts or the fact that they buy butter-soft leather seats for cars that cost more than your first house. He meant something deeper. Something psychological. Hemingway supposedly shot back with a sarcastic, "Yes, they have more money," but history suggests Fitzgerald was onto something far more unsettling.
Money changes people. Not just their zip codes, but the way their neurons fire.
If you’ve ever sat in a dive bar and wondered why a billionaire would spend $200,000 on a watch that tells the same time as your phone, you’re looking at the surface. The real difference isn't the watch. It’s the internal software. When you have an infinite safety net, the world stops looking like a series of obstacles and starts looking like a menu. This shift in perspective—from "how do I survive?" to "how do I optimize?"—creates a fundamental rift in the human experience.
The Empathy Gap is a Real Scientific Metric
Psychologists at UC Berkeley, specifically Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, spent years looking at how wealth impacts social behavior. They found something jarring. In one study, they monitored a busy intersection. People driving expensive luxury cars were three times less likely to stop for pedestrians at a crosswalk than those in beat-up sedans. They were also more likely to cut off other drivers.
It’s not necessarily that being rich makes you a "bad person." It’s that wealth provides a buffer. If you’re struggling, you need other people. You need your neighbor to help you watch the kids, or your coworker to give you a lift when your car breaks down. Interdependence is a survival strategy for the rest of us. But when you’re wealthy, you can just buy your way out of inconvenience. You hire a nanny. You call an Uber Black. You don't need to read other people’s emotions because their cooperation isn't vital to your daily survival.
This leads to what researchers call "decreased social signaling." Basically, the rich are different from you and me because they stop paying attention to the subtle cues of others. They don't have to.
The Monopoly Experiment
Piff ran a famous experiment using a rigged game of Monopoly. One player was given twice as much money, moved twice as fast, and got more cash for passing "Go." Within minutes, the "rich" players started acting differently. They moved their pieces more loudly, banging them against the board. They ate more pretzels from a bowl on the table. They spoke more aggressively.
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Crucially, when asked why they won, they didn't talk about the rigged rules. They talked about their own strategy. They convinced themselves they deserved it. This "meritocratic bias" is a hallmark of high-net-worth psychology. It’s the belief that success is entirely a result of personal effort, ignoring the massive role of luck, timing, or structural advantages.
Risk vs. Ruin: A Different Relationship with Gravity
For most people, a $5,000 mistake is a catastrophe. It’s a missed mortgage payment or a drained savings account. For the ultra-wealthy, that same amount is a rounding error. This changes how they perceive risk.
Think about it this way. If you’re playing poker with your rent money, you play scared. You play tight. If you’re playing with "house money" that you don't actually need, you take massive swings. This is why the rich are different from you and me in the world of business. They can afford to fail repeatedly until they hit a home run.
- Asymmetric Risk: Wealthy individuals often look for bets where the downside is fixed (and affordable) but the upside is infinite.
- Time Horizons: While a middle-class family has to think about the next 30 days, a family with generational wealth thinks about the next 30 years.
- The "No" Factor: Money buys the ability to say no to things that don't serve your long-term goals. Most people don't have that luxury.
When you aren't terrified of the floor falling out from under you, you walk differently. You negotiate differently. You walk into a room assuming you belong there, and strangely, the world usually agrees.
The Loneliness of the High-Wall Estate
There is a dark side to this. It’s called "Wealth Isolation."
When you get rich, your social circle shrinks. You stop hanging out in public spaces. You move into gated communities. You fly private. Suddenly, you’re surrounded only by people who want something from you or people who are exactly like you. This creates an echo chamber.
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Social scientists have noted that wealth can lead to a sense of entitlement, but it also leads to a profound sense of "existential dread." If you can have anything, nothing feels special. The hedonic treadmill—the process of getting used to a certain level of luxury—speeds up. The first time you stay at a 5-star hotel, it’s magic. The hundredth time, you’re annoyed that the water pressure in the shower isn't perfect.
The rich are different from you and me because their "baseline" for joy is shifted. They require higher and higher stakes just to feel a flicker of excitement. This is why you see billionaires doing "survival" treks in the desert or racing rockets into space. When the everyday world becomes mundane, you have to manufacture struggle to feel alive.
The Burden of Preservation
Maintaining wealth is surprisingly stressful. It’s not the "I can’t pay my bills" stress, but it’s a constant anxiety about loss and "relative deprivation."
Relative deprivation is the idea that you don't compare yourself to the average person; you compare yourself to the person slightly above you. A man with $10 million feels "poor" if all his friends have $100 million. This leads to a perpetual state of keeping up with the Joneses, even when the Joneses own a professional sports team.
It’s About the Cognitive Load
One of the biggest differences is "cognitive bandwidth."
Being poor is exhausting. It requires a massive amount of mental energy to calculate every purchase, juggle bills, and manage the logistics of a life without a safety net. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir wrote about this in their book Scarcity. They found that the mental strain of poverty is equivalent to losing 13 IQ points.
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The rich are different because they have "delegated" their cognitive load. They have assistants for their calendars, accountants for their taxes, and cleaners for their homes. This frees up their brains to focus on high-level decision-making or creative pursuits. It’s a compounding advantage. While one person is spent after a 2-hour bus commute and a shift at a grocery store, the other is fresh and ready to brainstorm a new venture.
Breaking Down the "Rich" Archetypes
Not all wealth is created equal. The way people act depends heavily on how they got the money.
- The Inheritors: Often struggle with "imposter syndrome" or a lack of purpose. They were born on third base and sometimes spend their lives trying to prove they hit a triple. They are often more fearful of losing money because they don't know if they have the skills to make it back.
- The New Money (Strivers): These folks are often the most aggressive and ostentatious. They have something to prove. They are the ones buying the loudest cars and the biggest logos. They are often "high-beta" personalities—high energy, high risk.
- The Stealth Wealth: This is the "Millionaire Next Door" crowd. They drive Toyotas but have $5 million in Vanguard funds. Their psychology is rooted in security and frugality, often to a fault. They don't feel different from you, even though their balance sheet says they are.
How to Apply These Insights to Your Own Life
Understanding that the rich are different from you and me isn't about resentment. It’s about recognizing the psychological levers that wealth pulls so you can mimic the beneficial ones while avoiding the traps.
Protect Your Bandwidth
Stop wasting mental energy on low-value decisions. Automate your savings. Meal prep. Use "decision fatigue" to your advantage by making the right choices early in the day when your willpower is high. You don't need a billion dollars to stop letting small stresses eat your brain.
Practice "Purposeful Struggle"
If you do find yourself climbing the economic ladder, watch out for the empathy gap. Force yourself to stay in "uncomfortable" situations. Volunteer. Use public transit occasionally. Don't let your "safety net" turn into a "isolation chamber."
Understand the Power of "No"
The biggest advantage of wealth is the ability to walk away from a bad deal or a toxic boss. Start building a "Freedom Fund." Even having three months of expenses tucked away changes your body language in a meeting. You start acting a little more like the "rich" person in the Monopoly game—confident, assertive, and willing to take a calculated risk.
Watch the Meritocracy Trap
Remind yourself that success is a mix of hard work and luck. This keeps you humble if you win and prevents you from spiraling if you lose. The rich who stay grounded are those who realize they aren't uniquely brilliant—they’re just playing a game where they happened to get a good hand.
The divide between the "haves" and "have-nots" isn't just a line on a graph. It’s a difference in how people perceive the very nature of reality. Money provides a different lens, turning a world of threats into a world of opportunities. But as anyone who has ever reached the top of that mountain will tell you, the view is only worth it if you haven't lost your humanity along the way.