Here's what Aristotle thought it meant to be truly wealthy

I’ve since found guidance to reframe how I think about money from Ramit Sethi, an entrepreneur who helps people with personal finances. He asks a great question: “What is your rich life?” The purpose of this question is to stop you from looking at money as an accountant and looking at it as something that might help you live your ideal life. Over t

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

Contemplating one’s place in the universe was seen as one of the most worthwhile things to do and at minimum, more important than the “money-making life,” which Aristotle described as “something quite contrary to nature…for it is merely useful as a means to something else.”

Working from intuitive ‘common sense’, Aristotle thus built on Plato’s ethics to form a longer list of cardinal virtues: justice, courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence and wisdom. So happiness is now to be found in virtuous activity of the soul carried out in accordance with reason. The best sort of virtuo

Wealth is a means to an end: economic security. Put another way, wealth is the absence of economic anxiety. Freed of the pressure to earn, we can choose how we live.

Rousseau’s argument hung on a thesis about wealth: that wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as