While I believe spiritual practice will benefit anyone, this book assumes that readers have access to a basic level of privilege, in that they are able to sustain themselves with a roof over their heads, food, and clothing.

we think we are—in other words, how we live inside the whale.

I began to feel a terrible tension between having too much money and not having enough, at the same time recognizing that none of the money was really mine to begin with. While my parents never said so outright, I could feel the strings.

George Bailey Sr. is a kind, loving man who founds the Bailey Building and Loan, the kind of banking establishment that demands a sense of community to be successful. It was designed, first and foremost, to make home ownership available to the “common man” by leveraging the savings of the community to help one

A 2015 study found that children raised in wealthy families turned out wealthy, whether they were biological children or adopted. Although this study didn’t try to pinpoint exactly what in the environment was creating this trend, they found it was not related entirely to wealth being passed on from one generation to the other.

Money was part of the mess too. Isn’t it always? I still had a little money left in my investments, but it was definitely waning. I was anxious about money but mostly in denial. I would oscillate between feeling rich and feeling impoverished. It was haunting me, but I had absolutely no idea how to speak of it or with whom I could discuss it.

He and his colleagues found that as a person’s level of wealth increases, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, while feelings of entitlement and an ideology of self-interest increase.

“Get up and deal with your money.”

During the recession of 2007–09, for example, the average wealth of the top 1 percent dropped by 16 percent; meanwhile the wealth of the bottom 99 percent dropped 47 percent. The statistics go on and on and are startling.9