How does extreme wealth affect family life? Do the children of the super-rich develop better or worse? A researcher reports.
How do billionaires see life? What would your everyday life look like if you suddenly found a billion euros in your bank account instead of 10,000? A rough thought experiment illustrates the approximate dimensions.
A visit to the local ice cream maker, which previously cost five euros, would now only be worth a hundred thousandth of the price after one’s own wealth had increased a hundred thousand times. For one cent you could buy at least 200 particularly elegant, or at least expensive, ice cream scoops.
Weekend shopping for the entire family worth 200 euros? 500 weekends – almost ten years – finally filled the euro. Likewise, the home loan of 400,000 euros, which was planned to be paid off in 30 years, shrank to four euros.
Wealth researcher Thomas Druyen has investigated what this distortion of living conditions does to families and especially to children.
After interviews with hundreds of billionaires, he discovered that extreme wealth could harm children. The abundance robs them of their “existential greed for life” and “obsession with wanting to achieve something”.
“I observe in many people that the willingness to fight and to absolutely want to implement something is missing,” Druyen tells the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung,” “just like the ability to self-criticize.”
It is often precisely “this toughness, this discipline, this obsession” to which the parents’ generation attributes their prosperity.
In this respect, extreme amounts of money are “the biggest challenge for the character”. What others “have to fight for all their lives and […] never achieve” is given to the children of the super-rich as a birthright, so to speak.
Depending on their “mindset,” however, the children dealt with this experience very differently, says Druyen.
Some saw their privileged family environment as a challenge to outdo their previous generation. Others lose their bearings or suffer a “mental breakdown” under parental pressure. Very rarely did children decide to completely reject their parents’ money and donate it to those in need.
Ultimately, the super-rich and normal earners are “in a hamster wheel” – everyone wants to keep or increase their money. The recipe for success in raising children hardly differs for both groups.
“Love is almost the whole secret,” says Druyen. The next generation must feel secure enough to be able to take sensible risks. If an appropriate culture of trust and error is established, there could be a “coexistence between old and young”.
In this case, the heirs help their previous generation to “escape from old evaluation patterns” – for example through the use of new technologies and social media – while the elders guide their successors.
Just recently, a 25-year-old tutor for Dubai’s super-rich published his experiences. After a family gave him a $20,000 tip, he decided that the super-rich there lived in a different world.
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