What is trying to be expressed by "highest form of wealth" is usually about agency.
The problem with agency, unlike what 'power' connotes you to believe; you can't just have and store it for later. Like others rightly point out in this thread, there are many avenues in life you want to be agentic but cannot solve with anything you possess, but only through becoming a required thing through transformation; examples are health, skillfulness, being understood in a relationship, an equanimous existence etc. Even then, you're to an extent up to the whims of misfortune and fortune, or if you're not allergic to that word; to fate. There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality; which connects to the original meaning of fate.
But that's not even the only problem with agency; most of the time you don't even know when you have it and also when you don't have it. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapy; you either misattribute blame where it doesn't belong or fail to hold people/yourself accountable when you should; or you miss what and how you could solve a problem but instead invest your energy and emotions in an avenue that just won't work.
Which means agency, capability of doing things that get you towards your real goals, whether you've realized them or not, is deeply tied to wisdom; knowing in which manner you're deceiving yourself be it through buying things instead of being things, or getting out of being confused about whose agency exactly lies where and where is the way out of an agentic entrapment.
Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom.
This comment has summed up what it has taken me decades to arrive at ("the path to enlightenment"). Thank you for posting it, and I hope others can learn from and use it to grow with less struggle than those who learned through more tumultuous and higher cost paths.
You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family.
Most are fine with sacrificing agency in order to provide for their families and their needs in a modern society, and honestly that is a noble sacrifice.
Just as in ancient times, the agency of material wealth requires the exploitation of toil.
Life is not something one can "power over", it is something we participate in.
I say this because a good chunk of the interesting problems in life are not constraints that we can power over with willful motion, nor predict or prepare for. In fact it is so common to see people who are stuck in their attempts of willful assertion over things they can't change but can't also see that fact. Others are lost in expending majority of their resources in preparation for eventualities that probably will never come but are still scary for them. Those are examples to modes of loss of agency due to misapplication of power.
In contrast to power, agency also necessitates finessing your way through obstacles and uncertainties when appropriate, in addition to having influence over your environment and conditions.
A mini version of this can be found in an analogy of boxing; punching can't be the only thing in your repertoire, you also need footwork, evasion, blocking. It requires synchrony with your opponent, you constantly adapting to it and influencing it. You can't "power" your way to victory, you have to do all of those things in appropriate configuration to get a chance at it, and even then you might not win.
> You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family.
There are two potential problems with this.
Firstly, rationally speaking one would has to sacrifice time for the exact amount of wealth they will require for these goals, and not a dime more, because overworking would just be another way of losing your agency. Not only this equilibrium point is hard to predict, most people are already stuck in wanting the more of it than calculating an approximation of the enough of it.
The second problem is, material wealth is by far not the only input to raising a happy, good family. What kind of a person you need to become to be a good enough parent, is a much more difficult proposition than how much money you need to have to send them to what college. This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things. And this inevitably causes losses in agency; as evidenced with many families that had it "all" and still came apart.
“This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things.”
The most thought-provoking thing I’ve read in a while. Admittedly it’s a restatement of a fairly common idea (creating a material want from some other want or need) but I’ve never seen it phrased like this.
In particular, it reminded me of times I’ve bought books about some shiny new tech and only read a few pages. In hindsight, maybe it was mostly about the kind of dev I’d like to become.
> Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom.
For you, apparently, that resonates.
The author contextualises his thoughts quite differently, and says something different. It may seem trivial, but to appreciate the difference, consider the first two words of this sentence from the author.
> To me, the highest form of wealth is controlling your time.
This tries to reduce it to a scheduling problem, but reduces too much.
Let's take a much simpler game than life, like chess. If the chess coach said "the most important thing is controlling your time", how sufficient would that sound as a winning strategy?
Sure, time control could be important, but it doesn't really guide anyone on how to thing about the strategy and tactics. In fact, time might not even be an issue before you lose the game.
Or on the flip side, if you had infinite time, you still couldn't exhaust all the combinations of movements to decide the best move.
Cultivating wisdom means working on honing our "meta-heuristic" machinery, the heuristic that binds all our heuristics together, so that we are adaptively more likely to find and process the relevant information to achieve our goals in life. It has to dynamically assess the relevance of every other constraint of the game and cannot reduce the solution to a hardcoded normativity like "just control time" "just have more freedom" "just have more money".
> This tries to reduce it to a scheduling problem, but reduces too much.
I didn't read his remarks as scheduling. More like being in control of your time is being able to choose what you do, not be told what to do by someone else, or do things to please or satisfy someone else. It is a reverence for independence, which I imagine comes with or arises from wisdom, skills and wherewithal. Or luck. Whatever. What he values is freedom as much as agency.
You mention goals twice as guiding force. It’s something that I read often, but what seems to mean different things to different people. Can you elaborate on what your goals are?
"There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality" - I have always been a supporter of the 'living forever' argument and research - your comment here has made me appreciate that they really and truly are working on the one goal that matters.
The usual way to true agency in the current society is lots of money, so that problems don't need to reach you, ie have people for it, don't care what it costs to fix something etc.
Doesn't buy you individual health or invulnerability (on average it kind of does, or at least improves vs some demographics(.
The highest form of wealth is health. Working eyes, working ears, working arms, legs that move when you want them and where you want them. An uninterrupted night of sleep because you aren't in pain. Count your blessings every morning.
As someone with kids I don't feel this fits at all. I feel much wealthier having kids now but I have nowhere near the autonomy I did before kids (I was single until my mid-30s).
I don't feel I have much choice at all on what to do on a given day—or any single day of the year for that matter.
I don't see why you would find this confusing, do you think you are at the height of wealth? If you could just not on any given day, would you not feel wealthier?
I never said I was confused, or that I was at the height of wealth. I said I went from having near unlimited agency (working remote for a high paying job that didn't take up much of my time and nothing at all to take care of at home) to having almost none and I feel far wealthier. I am sure any of my friends and family would say that I'm wealthier now with a family as well.
If you could keep the kids and everything you had, but also have even more freedom to do whatever you want (for yourself or your family - more vacations and play time, more opportunities for education and life experiences) wouldn't you feel even wealthier?
If you had less freedom (stuck working long hours, can't choose a family doctor you trust, etc), wouldn't you feel less wealthy?
Importantly, you don't have to act on the freedom to know that you have it.
The problem with the formulation "I can do whatever I want today." is that it specifies a timeframe that isn't always the right one.
Sometimes, people want to (or need to) make choices about what they want to do for the next 10 years. Having children is a choice like that (except that it's for even longer).
Making such a choice undeniably restricts your ability to revise your choices on a daily basis, but can also represent movement towards a longer term goal that might (or might not) ultimately bring even more happiness.
I'd propose that joy can trump health and autonomy. Some people have neither health or full autonomy, but they find joy in whatever situation they are in. As such, joy can also be resilient.
I'm young so I'm still fairly healthy but I do have some minor issues(that aren't solvable in an easy way) and the thought of my health continuing to decline over time terrifies me. To make matters worse, nobody around me seems to care. All those issues are solvable, if we had more knowledge and better tools. I'm not sure how I can contribute, but I am sure that this is the most important problem that affects everyone and something I want to dedicate my life to.
this is true, if u told bill gates he can go back to being 20 but would have to give up all his wealth, he would probably take the deal. Nothing beats having your youth and health.
Relationships are often about time you spend together with someone, and allowing you control over your time (first item) has a beneficial effect on relationship-building.
If you think about relationships being about giving and receiving, then what more valuable resource can you give someone than your time?
Sure, wealth can help with relationships, but how can you write an article about the highest forms of wealth and not even mention them? It betrays a particular view of the world and a particular set of values. And while it’s not out and said, I think this article is interested in achieving a satisfying life, for which I think relationships are more important than finance.
This too is covered, both explicitly and implicitly, in the article. The concept that more money can make you less happy is explicitly covered, and the concept that if you want to do something and can't you aren't wealthy is covered. Obviously, there are many people for whom what they want to do today is play with their kids/grandkids/friends.
I think the issue many are running into with this article is that autonomy is a complicated subject and it covers whatever you're thinking isn't covered here.
how so? if you dont have money you must allocate lots of time to kid after work. if you are wealthy, 1st thing you might not work all and 2nd thing you might have nanny or two, who take care of heavy lifting.
"doing whatever you want" does not equal to "stuff that satisfies for very short periods of time (i.e. not only drugs, games and tv)"
You might be able to make extended arguments about how the points in the article relate to relationships, or influence them, but suggesting the topic is entirely covered by this limited advice is absurd. Also, I’m not simply looking for it to be covered but for it to be appropriately centered, which it’s not.
> "Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
If you are in a good relationship, you can’t do whatever you want any day. The goal of the article is fundamentally incompatible with the sacrifices required for a good relationship with another human being.
That’s not how it works. Sometimes you wake up one day and decide you want to go to the natural history museum but your SO wants to go to the MOMA to show you a new piece.
Someone doesn’t get what they want in that scenario and a compromise has to be made.
obvious why, because the author has a somewhat juvenile view of thinking of 'independence' as the primary thing to be after in life. (and in this peace identifies 'real wealth' as the means to achieve that).
"Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Note that this doesn't apply to one particular set of people, individuals with families or real obligations and people who depend on them.
How is that autonomy? I have to wake up at 6am every single morning and make milk and change diapers. I have to take a crap with the door open. I have to think a day in advance if I can take a shower.
If I'm not doing one of those things I'm working, fixing something around the house, cooking, or running an errand. What I don't have is the privilege to do anything aside from what must be done.
Don't get me wrong, I love having a family but that's kind of my point: autonomy isn't worth a damn to me.
>How is that autonomy? I have to wake up at 6am every single morning and make milk and change diapers. I have to take a crap with the door open. I have to think a day in advance if I can take a shower.
That's still autonomy, since getting into that was your decision to make. Nobody put a pistol on your head to start a family and have kids (hopefully). That's something you chose, with the restrictions that come with it. You could might as well not have started a family, and thus not having to do that.
(Not to mention that if you had more money you could delegate most of those, including making milk and changing diapers, to some helpers, and only keep the "quality" time).
Now, imagine to still "lov[ing] having a family", but being so poor you couldn't afford to start one (or nobody would marry you, because you're, say, homeless). Or having to work double shifts just to make ends meet, and only being able to be minimally present for your kids, despite wanting to be there more. That's lack of autonomy.
> That's still autonomy, since getting into that was your decision to make
You do have to understand Covid changed a lot of the calculus around kids for a lot of parents. Everything has been affected: the amount of help and support you can get, the activities you can do with them.
That's a fair point, it was a decision I made so autonomy still applies by your definition. I think I disagree with the article's definition of highest form of wealth though:
> Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Even if I had no professional obligations, I still wouldn't have autonomy. Young children, like software projects, take up all available time. They restrict you in where you can go, for how long, with whom, and what you can do.
Sure you could hire help and free up more time. And that's a choice many people make. But it wouldn't sit right with me to have someone else teach my children to read, or build robots, or ride a bike if I really have the free time to do it myself.
>Even if I had no professional obligations, I still wouldn't have autonomy. Young children, like software projects, take up all available time.
As long as time is limited and we can't replicate ourselves to be in more than one place, some lack of autonomy is expected. But nobody talked about total autonomy here. The post, and I, mean the casual autonomy to not to be forced to do something you didn't chose at any point.
Young children you can chose to have or not (and take the time hit that goes with it).
Whereas if you have no money and need food and rent and so on, not working is not a choice.
Autonomy is not about having all free time all the time. It's about chosing how you want to spend your time (if that - like having kids - comes with restrictions, those are still your choice, since you opted to that).
Lack of autonomy is when you can't opt out - like when you don't want to have kids but your parents force you to an arranged marriage, or when you want to have kids but can't because you can't afford it, or when you want to spend time with your kids/family but need to work, and so on.
Autonomy as a concept doesn’t get you very far if you’re seeking fulfillment or meaning. Sure, it’s an important component of fulfillment, but you don’t even need complete autonomy to be happy. You can be happy with compelled marriage or accidental childbirth. This article, and I think you, are too focused on autonomy and material conditions.
I took the author’s perspective to be within the context of wealth-building, i.e. the world of work/professional focus/etc. Within this context I thought his point was well-made: it isn’t that agency is more important than all other things, but rather that having agency, while one goes about building wealth, is of paramount importance.
Trying to come up with some static perfect state in which I would be happiest has been an incredibly slippery problem for me. Even agency itself can become exhausting as anyone who has worked for themselves and gone back to the (temporary) relief of a manager assigning a fixed set of tasks will come to realize. Even if I had endless wealth and time which would solve 90% of my problems I would still have to struggle to find new meaningful challenges. This is not to despair of ever finding happiness just to remind myself its (for me, I don’t want to project my phsychology on the whole world) more a process and to enjoy the present with the knowledge that “this too shall pass”.
Reading this, there seems to be an assumption that your perceived purpose is to achieve happiness.
There is a school of thought that one’s purpose is not to do anything but live.
Where life contains both periods of happiness and despair. That both are important, though there are an infinite set of emotional positions to experience and that all of them are valuable, even if some are unsettling or uncomfortable.
I used to have preconceptions of not just achieving happiness as a purpose but which things specifically I needed to accomplish to be happy.
Several years ago a friend introduced me to philosophy offered by the mystic Sadguru.
Some of his work has had great influence on me. You may appreciate some of what he has to say: https://youtu.be/vQ7ZvPghdy8
Odd resident for the HN front page, but if you could take just 5 authors with you, then Morgan Housel might be one is them. Well, unless you have already achieved the sorts of fuck you money he talks about in this article. I would still appreciate his wisdom though. It's Sunday, maybe you have some time, just open up a Google search and marathon read everything this person writes.
"Don't waste money on toys or bling"
"Do some research"
"Buy and hold"
That's basically it.
None of these will make you really rich. What makes you really rich is monopolising a market, overcharging and/or enforcing unfair terms, and farming the work/time/money/attention of others on an industrial scale.
I kind of assumed from the title, since everyone's talking about Mr Bezos now, that that's the implicit context for this piece. And that the article therefore doesn't even need to explicitly mention it.
I'm thinking about retiring early. I have a reasonable nest-egg, and I realize that I worked too hard for the first half of my life. What if I minimize what I do for the later half. Is it wrong to sit on a couch and enjoy the presence of my wife while watching shitty TV? Is it really that bad? Play computer games with my friends?
It feels so easy to be distracted with things and goals when the real meat of life is being present with people. I'm thinking about painting what I feel. Hang out with wife, spend a few hours on fitness, a few hours doing art, and maybe dicking around on the computer. No deadlines. No meaning. No hustle.
Absolutely not. You should do what you enjoy.
I was facing a similar problem, where I started playing games again after few years of grinding and it was hard for my mind to accept that I can “slack-off” and do something else than work.
Took me a whole month of not working and just enjoying stuff to rewire my brain to that healthy relationship you describe. I don’t believe retiring early is necessary, but this lifestyle definitely requires a on-your-own-time job.
It's strange. On one level, I've reached a degree of mastery with computing and leadership, so should I use this knowledge?
Or... what if I just started painting. I answered the question of what I would paint. I'd focus and paint dragons versus solo man in every day tasks. In some form, a form of solo therapy dealing with the internal hero journey that I have been on with my career.
The key mistake that I feel I have made is focusing on goals... the slaying of the dragon. But, what happens when you slay the dragon? find a bigger dragon? Keep going?
I'm doing the same thing. Except that I understand that I was able to do so because I'm considerably more resourceful than average.
I personally think that gives me the responsibility to at least improve the lives of a couple of people. Especially because it's relatively easy for me, compared to how hard most people have it on planet earth.
But if you just got the money from your parents or something, even that reasoning doesn't apply to you. Most people really don't add much more to history than hanging out and making sure their DNA is passed on to another generation. Nothing wrong with being one of them.
You might end up depressed due to boredom and lack of purpose, but that's easily fixable with antidepressants.
You can do that (and millions do) and be literally broke or worse (in debt).
Tons of people by a $5 coffee or a $50 steak that they can't really afford (because they have credit card debt, because that way they don't save anything for retirement or an emergency, and so on).
Yup, just basically living from hand to mouth, with the illusion that you're really well off. That is a dangerous mindset. You may be doing OK - but far from truly wealthy.
Joe Rogan said in his earlier podcasts said that the greatest thing money ever did for him was never having to worry about bills. Spent $2000 at a bar buying drinks but didn't know the prices? Oh well. Porsche needs another repair? Sure when will it be done by?
I'm definitely not "rich" in the sense that I'd shrug paying those things off, but if I had to, I could pay it in cash tomorrow no problem. And frankly, I have to agree with his statement. It didn't buy me happiness, but it has bought me peace of mind. I never had to worry once about how I'm going to pay for stuff simply because I just worked and saved my money. I lived a very simple life and never felt a compulsive need to buy expensive and fancy things just because I had the money to do so. I've known way to many people who did that and were always dirt poor. Most of the time they couldn't even afford to fix essential things like a car to get them to their job.
I have gone through frugal periods and embarrassingly not-frugal periods in my life. In the former, I could always afford to pay for what I needed, and that knowledge felt great.
The allure of ultra-wealth for me is not the prospect of a mansion, yacht, or household staff, but the knowledge that I could acquire those things if I wanted them.
I can't imagine ever owning a gaudy estate, of course. But what if I didn't have to care about house/land prices, and I could just buy or build whatever I thought was best for my family? What if I could go to a fancy organic grocery store and know that I could afford literally any grocery bill? What if I could cover my friend's $10k vet bill? What if I could sponsor research into homelessness prevention and addiction recovery? What if I could donate Linux computers and tech support services to local schools? What if I could start my own PAC to fund political candidates I believed in[^]? And so on.
[^]: consider that maybe nobody ought to have this power...
Joe Rogan isn't a great person to take any lessons from. At heart he's a comedian, which must be the most unconventional path you can take to anywhere in the US. Comedians live on the road telling jokes. I wonder how much he really had to deal with bills.
Let me clear up some ignorance since a lot of HN has most likely not listened to enough early Joe Rogan podcasts.
>Joe Rogan isn't a great person to take any lessons from
If a republican says abortion wrong, should we discount their statement because they're republican? It's one thing to just listen to people and believe everything they say. It's another to comprehend when someone is just bullshitting and when someone is speaking from life experience. Joe in the early podcast was far less on the Ivory tower as he is today.
>At heart he's a comedian
Firstly, every single person who brings up his history prior to his mainstream success was he never did drugs, wired out of his mind to do better, and was very high strung. Universally all his friends on the podcast say this. It wasn't until he became a full on stoner that changed.
Also, he said his big breaks were from News Radio and then Fear Factor. Both of which were his steady income's well before he became a famous comedian. He was active as a comedian but he barely had any significant success at it until around Fear Factor. He even acknowledges that he got lucky. So he's not some moron that thinks he was entitled it. He said his whole life would've been different had he not gotten a job on news radio.
>I wonder how much he really had to deal with bills.
None in the context of my statement. All his money paying for his porsche, place to live, and lifestyle were from News Radio and Fear Factor. That's how he got famous and he has since been able to continue that success. His comedy didn't take off outside of Boston until well in his 30's.
You took my comment out of context. I'll take fault for not explaining myself.
Morgan Housel writes for the wide audience of people who might need info about how to handle finances. The target persona is probably someone who has high paying job. Joe Rogan went a path which is probably as far opposite of this you can get. I love the list though. MMA commentator with a company which has only recently been hitting it big. Among the earliest comedian podcasters, which was probably a long grind meant to get more bookings rather than make money directly and then the Fear Factor thing. Just seems like Joe Rogan doesn't really fit as the sort of person you would take something away from while also reading Morgan Housel.
> That's how he got famous
I'm a fan and I love stand-up comedy. The thing that's so cool about stand-up is that even when comics turn mega-stars, they still turn up unannounced at hole-in-the-wall clubs. When I call him a comedian, it's because once a comedian, always a comedian. And I say that with the greatest love.
Wait, you're calling my comment "strange" and then you come back with something like "comedian is a job?" Maybe you misunderstood me because you don't know what a comedian is. It's not a job. You tell jokes in front of people for one-off fees. I would take a WAG and say that 90% of comedians don't cover their living expenses from the craft.
If you're serious about comedy today, you're probably going to live on the road. If you aren't on the road, it's because you don't have the means or the bookings (or you're in a pandemic.) People on the road don't have much bills. The people at the top might, but if you're a young comedian, maybe you're living out of your car. Your bills come from the people controlling the pump you're getting your gas from.
Comedian must be the strangest existence. You sort of get into that mindset by not taking anything seriously, certainly not bills. Then at some point he got into Fear Factor and I imagine that bills were just a question of how large he wanted to live, not worrying about his electric getting cut off. Then he landed the Spotify gig and became a member of a super exclusive club of people who have signed a 100+ million dollar contract. When this dude says he doesn't have to worry about paying bills, he's on a way different level than most people posting here.
> You tell jokes in front of people for one-off fees.
You literally just described a job. A huge portion of the US society makes money from doing things for one-off fees.
A sole proprietor house painter paints houses for one-off fees.
A car driver drives people around for one-off fees.
A motivational speaker talks to a group for one-off fees.
You likely have a stricter definition than the rest of society of what a job is, but you should update it so people know wtf you’re talking about. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/job
> People on the road don't have much bills. The people at the top might, but if you're a young comedian, maybe you're living out of your car. Your bills come from the people controlling the pump you're getting your gas from.
Your grasp on the expenses living on the road is very tenuous. Credit card bills for food/gas/(shelter|gym shower), monthly bills for phone/car insurance/tax payments/car payment/medical expenses, etc. You still very much have to manage finances like anyone else.
> You sort of get into that mindset by not taking anything seriously, certainly not bills.
No, that’s absolutely not how comedy works. Good comedians aren’t just people who don’t give a fuck. You think it’s just people spitting off the cuff but it requires persistence, preparation, and practice. People good at comedy take their craft very seriously.
You’re just describing a deadbeat, which has nothing to do with comedians.
Sure, "job" covers too much area to be useful in this case. "Bob did a good job cleaning the car" is much different than "Bob quit is job today." I have a business which provides services. That service isn't a job, but my specific role as the sole operator of the business might be a job.
Stand-up comedy is more of a craft than a job anyways. Most comedians never get out of the open-mic stage of the craft, and you don't get paid for those.
> Your grasp on the expenses living on the road is very tenuous. Credit card bills
We're assuming many of these people can even get credit cards. We're not talking about SV developers or people working on Wall Street. We're talking about people who put in a significant effort which they don't get paid for and then taking that act on the road for money which barely pays the gas and food to get them from one place to the next. A small number might be able get headliner gigs, which gets you to the point of viable as a living.
> No, that’s absolutely not how comedy works. Good comedians aren’t just people who don’t give a fuck.
What you quoted of mine was about how you get into the stand-up comedian mindset. I know how it works, you grind out stage time at open mics as you develop and fine-tune an act which you can take on the road. To get started on that path, takes a special sort of person. Doug Stanhope, the "comedian's comedian" said something which resonated with me. I'll see if I can find the exact quote, but he said he and his family took nothing seriously as they were growing up. Everything was a joke.
That doesn't mean that stand-up comedians can't make plans.
Wealth is when you feel free in your head. When feel comfortable with your doings. And when you are surrounded by good people.
I know how it is to have a very good income. It makes life very pleasant the first years, but you get used to it. And money can and to some degree in my case destroy a lot of things. For example exchanging a family for a new girl. Partying with the richest and forgetting your old friends.
The trick is to stay conversative and don't fall for the cool VIP life.
Desiring money beyond what you need to be happy is just an accounting hobby.
This did hit home, and hard.
However, buffer and lots of it, is the only preparation one can do for Black Swan events. I don't think keeping money that is sufficient to keep you happy is a healthy strategy in the long term.
Additionally, we need to bear in mind that we (humans) no longer live in our ancestral environment which we evolved for, and happiness as we experience it, is more often than not out-of-place.
Maybe feeling confident that you can handle such an event is what you need to feel happy.
But it's good to reassess once in a while, too. Maybe it's not worth all the other difficulty to hedge against this or that particular risk. Maybe you thought you needed it to be happy but you don't, etc.
The difference between having money to fly first class, and having a staff that manages for private plane, helicopters and yachts to avoid traffic or lines at airports etc, is an example of how wealth isolates people from inconvenience.
The problem with agency, unlike what 'power' connotes you to believe; you can't just have and store it for later. Like others rightly point out in this thread, there are many avenues in life you want to be agentic but cannot solve with anything you possess, but only through becoming a required thing through transformation; examples are health, skillfulness, being understood in a relationship, an equanimous existence etc. Even then, you're to an extent up to the whims of misfortune and fortune, or if you're not allergic to that word; to fate. There is at least one thing you can't be agentic about with any wealth, and that is your fatality; which connects to the original meaning of fate.
But that's not even the only problem with agency; most of the time you don't even know when you have it and also when you don't have it. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapy; you either misattribute blame where it doesn't belong or fail to hold people/yourself accountable when you should; or you miss what and how you could solve a problem but instead invest your energy and emotions in an avenue that just won't work.
Which means agency, capability of doing things that get you towards your real goals, whether you've realized them or not, is deeply tied to wisdom; knowing in which manner you're deceiving yourself be it through buying things instead of being things, or getting out of being confused about whose agency exactly lies where and where is the way out of an agentic entrapment.
Which ultimately means, there is one and one only form of wealth, that thing you constantly need to aspire to build, and that is wisdom.