Contemporary Wealth

There are some concepts which change over time.  Wealth is an interesting one.  How many people do you know who have plenty of money but who lack wealth of self?  I'm not saying that they aren't good people, or that they need to be something other than who they are, my question is very simple.  Some people have cash, cold hard duckets, which is awesome.  People with money are generally the best friends to have.  Whatever they do is cool, and we often tell them because, ... why not?  People like to know how cool they are, and rich people are not really a whole lot different then people who are not rich.

Wealth of self is really a sense of who you are.  If your internal workings were compared with a fabric, or cloth, than the richness of that fabric could be described in so many ways for so many different kinds of cloth.  Some cloth is lacy and delicate, some cloth is canvassy and hard, some cloths are furry and warm, but each individual cloth isn't necessarily a better kind of cloth than another.

My point is that if everyone was the same kind of cloth, then it would be easy to describe a rich cloth, or a poor cloth, because it would be a simple matter of thread count or of getting a clear picture of the materials that are used to make the cloth.

The concept of contemporary wealth is that people can have money, and not have a richly woven cloth interior.  I've known people living in poverty who had very beautiful sparkly textures, and I've known very wealthy people who lived with a character that was largely dictated by cartoons and popular music and movies.

My belief is that people develop internal wealth by interacting with other people.  People who allow themselves to become isolated, for any reason, have a tendency to become internally poor.  No rule of self is ever absolute.  There are people living in the woods, that don't see people for months at a time, who are very wealthy individuals, spiritually.  There are also people who spend incredible amounts of time interacting, who have almost nothing in their personality that they can claim for their own.

In general though, people who spend a lot of time absorbing, or consuming media, tend to be mentally poor, and people who keep their input in balance with their output tend to have a richer sense of who they are.