Wealth & Money Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

Money is the one goal modern life trains you to chase with confidence: it has a scoreboard, a ladder, a script. Easterbrook’s line works because it punctures the comforting myth that wealth is always desire; often it’s competence. We keep pursuing money past sufficiency not because we’re uniquely greedy, but because money is a problem we’ve learned how to solve. It’s measurable, socially rewarded, and endlessly improvable. Even the anxiety around it feels productive: worry becomes budgeting, budgeting becomes earning, earning becomes identity.

The subtext is less moral scolding than cultural diagnosis. Late capitalism doesn’t just sell things; it sells a method for feeling in control. Money is control you can outsource to routines, jobs, investments, hustle. Happiness, by contrast, refuses to be gamified without turning into something else (status, validation, dopamine). It’s fickle, relational, dependent on health, time, meaning, community - factors the market can imitate but can’t reliably deliver. So we default to the pursuit with clearer instructions.

Easterbrook, writing as a social commentator in an era saturated with self-optimization and conspicuous achievement, is pointing at a behavioral trap: mastery becomes momentum. Once you know how to get richer, not getting richer can feel like failure, even when your needs are met. The quote’s bite is that it reframes “more” as habit, not necessity - and suggests the real skill deficit isn’t earning, but learning what actually satisfies us when the numbers stop mattering.