Crying without turning it into content. Crying without apologising. Crying without posting a lesson learned. Crying without asking the algorithm to witness and validate the fact that you are, indeed, having a human reaction.

And maybe this is the real status symbol now: not being owned by your own reactions, not needing every feeling to be witnessed, not needing every desire to be justified, not needing to turn your inner life into proof of anything.

Emotional wealth, when it arrives, rarely feels like an upgrade; more often it registers as a subtraction, the loss of the shield you mistook for strength, the decline of certainties that once organised your choices, the mute thawing of a numbness that had been doing important defensive work.

Emotional wealth requires learning a language most of us were actively discouraged from speaking. A language of sensation, timing, resonance. One that cannot be rushed without being distorted. One that punishes dishonesty quickly and rewards patience slowly.

What we have now is something thinner and far more obedient. Desire has been rerouted toward outcomes instead of encounters, toward validation instead of intimacy, toward visibility instead of attention.

emotional wealth is erotic. Not in the narrow, pornographic sense, but in the ancient one... the ability to feel alive in your own skin, attuned to beauty, receptive to intensity, awake to desire without outsourcing it to fantasy or conquest.