Autor: Morgan Housel

Traductor: Rex Liu
18th-century economist Adam Smith once wrote that in the Scottish Highlands, a mother giving birth to twenty children might not see more than two survive. Such things are not uncommon.
This is life. And whether you are poor or rich, the outcomes are quite similar. Queen Anne of England had 18 children, yet none survived to adulthood. U.S. President James Garfield died in 1881, partly because at the time, leading doctors did not believe in bacteria. Two weeks before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, his blood pressure soared to 260/150, and his doctors were almost helpless—at that time, even the most basic antihypertensive drugs did not exist.
If you could show these people a modern grocery store, they would be stunned into fainting. They cannot understand that today’s biggest shopping challenge is choosing one of 19 types of jam, or that you can buy papaya in Minnesota in January. But what they would find most unbelievable is the pharmacy deep inside the store—in their eyes, that is pure magic.
So, what would their reaction be?
I don’t think it would be “You’re so impressive.”
More likely, it would be: “You’re so spoiled.”
They would watch us queue at the pharmacy with impatience, then mock us for being ungrateful for those miraculous pills.
They cannot understand that, in the face of such abundant material life, we complain about food prices instead of being amazed by wealth itself.
Ironically, each generation works hard and innovates constantly, just to create a more prosperous world for the next. But when you observe how these descendants interact with their world, your pride may turn into disappointment. Our children do not suffer in the way we did, and they may not even be grateful for it.
This is a universal problem. Wealthy families are always pondering how to support their children without turning them into spoiled brats. Society as a whole has long been disappointed in young people—thinking they are lazier and more entitled than their elders.
I have been thinking about this, especially regarding money and my own children. Here are my thoughts.
A few months ago, I was chatting with a friend. His parents are immigrants who came to the U.S. and struggled to make ends meet with low-wage jobs.
Now, his children are grown. From what I understand, this friend feels guilty—being a well-educated white-collar worker, he doesn’t have to suffer as his parents did. His parents taught him frugality and resilience, but if the children see their father living relatively comfortably, can they learn the same qualities?
He gave an example: as a child, he borrowed all his books from the library; now, his young daughter demands (and gets) $15 Taylor Swift books, filling her room with them.
My answer is: if we could talk to his immigrant parents, I bet they would say—this is exactly our goal.
All their hard work is meant to elevate the family’s status, so that one generation must toil to survive, while the next can enjoy Taylor Swift books. The granddaughter’s current spoiled appearance is not a side effect of wealth, but the very goal itself.
In other words: some parents’ ultimate goal is to work hard enough to give their descendants a—by their ancestors’ standards—spoiled life.
Like wealth, “being spoiled” has no objective definition; everything is relative.
Looking at my own children, I realize that compared to my childhood, they are indeed spoiled.
But didn’t my grandparents say the same about me? They worried about polio, scarlet fever, and a host of problems I had never even thought of.
And their grandparents, too, could say the same about them. Back then, transportation was only by horse, and a poor harvest could mean losing children—such a life has become unimaginable in just one or two generations.
An often overlooked point here is: when one generation’s life becomes relatively wealthier, their life does not objectively become easier; they simply shift their worries to higher-level issues—problems that previous generations considered not urgent enough to worry about.
One generation worries about obtaining food and shelter.
The next doesn’t worry about eating and housing but about safety.
The following worries about health.
After solving health issues, they start worrying about education.
The next, having basic education, begins to worry about work-life balance.
And so on. This is the essence of John Adams’ famous quote, which I paraphrase: “I study war so that my children can have the leisure to study engineering; they study engineering so that their children can have the leisure to study philosophy; and the children of philosophers will have the leisure to study art.”
I hope my children and grandchildren won’t have to worry about cancer like we do. I hope they have access to advanced technology that makes work easier. I hope the petty frictions we face daily disappear for them. I hope their energy is so abundant that it is seen as infinite.
Is this being spoiled? Maybe. But when you describe it this way, you might think of another word—perhaps “fortunate,” or “blessed.”
Or maybe, “beneficiaries of the hard work of those before us, who now have the leisure to solve new problems.”
And that is exactly who we are today.