There’s something unsettling about The Unhappy Inheritors:
McDonough, 47, speaks excitedly and discursively. With the zeal of a reformer, he relishes telling his cautionary inheritor’s tale.‘So first of all,’ he said, ‘there’s this closet called the Green Closet. It’s one of the last taboos. This culture tells you, if you have more money, you’ll be happier. But rich people are in this unique position to say: ‘You know what? More stuff doesn’t mean more happiness.’ But as a rich person, you absolutely cannot tell anybody that there’s anything wrong with your life because, first, everybody knows you should be really happy, and, second, they say, ‘I should have your problems!’ Then there’s the shame component. With inherited wealth, there’s this little logic chain: I have a lot of money, I should be really happy, but I’m not happy, so I must be really bad.’
In 1986, John L. Levy, a sort of freelance philosopher, wrote a monograph called ‘Coping With Inherited Wealth.’ It was one of the earlier works in what has become the crowded literature of ‘affluenza.’ Levy laid out the traits common to many children of wealth: low self-esteem and self-discipline, difficulty using power, boredom and alienation and guilt and suspiciousness.