Daily Inspiration Quote by Abigail Van Buren

Van Buren’s line lands like a joke you laugh at and then immediately feel in your molars. It borrows the swagger of the American hustle myth - flip your assets, price your story, cash out - only to reveal the one market that never clears: the marketplace of lived pain. The wit is in the mismatch between what experience costs (time, regret, humiliation, grief, opportunity) and what anyone else is willing to pay for it once you’ve survived it. If there’s a get-rich-quick scheme here, it’s that life keeps billing you in a currency you can’t refund.

The subtext is classic advice-column realism, delivered with a journalist’s ear for a punchline. Dear Abby wasn’t selling therapy; she was selling perspective to readers who felt alone inside their mess. This sentence comforts by reframing loss as value, but it also refuses the sentimental idea that suffering automatically yields profit or wisdom. The “millionaires” tag is deliberately cartoonish, a satire of the notion that hardship should be redeemable, that trauma should come with a receipt and a resale price.

Context matters: Van Buren wrote to a mass audience in an era when personal problems were often privatized, moralized, or minimized. Her genius was to acknowledge the hidden economy of ordinary lives - the quiet costs people pay to learn what no one can teach them for free. The line endures because it flatters no one: it grants dignity to experience while admitting it’s an expensive education with no buyback program.