BONUS | Are You Measuring Wealth Wrong? (with Sahil Bloom)
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How do the Stoics redefine what it means to be rich?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Obviously, there are multiple definitions of what it means to be rich. Seneca talks about how, you know, poverty isn't just having too little. It's also the desire, the need, the quenchless thirst for more. There's very poor rich people. And the Stoics, when they talk about wealth, they have obviously a more expansive definition than just how much is in your bank account, how much land do you have, how powerful or important you are. Cy Hill Bloom wrote this book called The Five Types of Wealth. And what he says in the book is that we have different forms of wealth.
And so in today's episode, Sahil and I talk about our definitions of wealth, about success, what we can learn from the Stoics about these very things, and much more. You can follow him on Instagram and on Twitter at Sahil Bloom. I was very excited to have Sahil on the podcast. I've read his writing for a long time. If you want to check out the Daily Stoic Wealth Challenge, I will link to that in today's show notes, or you can join Daily Stoic Life where you get it and our other challenges for free. So I think when people think wealthy, their first thought is money. But it strikes me that that's almost the least important or certainly the least meaningful form of wealth. Because I would say I've met some very poor rich people.
I think we all have. We don't have to look far to find examples of the Pyrrhic victory, if you will. The idea of the victory that comes at such a steep cost, it might as well have been a defeat. The battle won, but the war lost. We all know or have heard stories of that billionaire or centimillionaire who... Yeah. Sure. Yeah. We tell every young person, we indoctrinate them into this idea that that is what a wealthy life looks like, that you go and make a lot of money. And we ignore the fact that there are these clear deficiencies in these other areas. And my call to action around all of this is to ask yourself if that is what winning the game looks like in the traditional definition. Is that actually a game that you care to win?
Yeah, because I think obviously money is a means to an end. And if you could get the end without money, that's probably a good way to do it. And if you get the money, but it doesn't actually allow you or facilitate the end that you have envisioned as what you want your life to be, again, you went about it the wrong way.
Yeah.
Yeah, the way that I've always thought about this is it's sort of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs question where, yes, money buys happiness in the early days. It very directly allows you to take care of basic needs, food, shelter, take care of the people around you, even the early days of affording basic pleasures. Sure. vacations, those basic things, they clearly do buy happiness. And the science actually proves that out. The early part, there is a very clear direct correlation. The challenge is what happens after that. And for most people, we get patterned into this understanding of that linear relationship where an incremental unit of money equals an incremental unit of happiness. And then we're convinced that that is going to exist in perpetuity.
Yeah. And it doesn't. And you learn that at some point, either the hard way or you learn it by understanding it internally so that you avoid the hard way.
What are Sahil Bloom’s five types of wealth and why do they matter?
Yeah. Yeah. It's like having a great life without any money is probably not possible. But just because you have a lot of money doesn't mean you're going to have a great life.
That's a good way of articulating it. Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.
Well, it's definitely not everything. And if it's the only thing I would venture to guess, it's a shitty life. Do you know what I mean? Like one of the things I've been struck by on some of the really wealthy people I meet, it's not just that they're poor in the sense that they're missing out on happiness or family or, you know, something, some kind of meaning or.
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