Wealth & Money Quote by Logan P. Smith

Logan P. Smith lands the knife with the calm precision of someone who’s watched money curdle a room. The line isn’t a populist dunk on wealth so much as an insider’s complaint about its social tax: the true misery of being rich is not the possessions, but the company those possessions obligate. “Wretchedness” is doing deliberate work here. Richness is supposed to be the solved problem, the final upgrade; calling it wretched flips the fantasy and forces the reader to imagine affluence as a kind of confinement.

The subtext is less “wealth corrupts” than “wealth segregates.” Once you’re in that bracket, your daily life is engineered around people who share the same incentives: status maintenance, risk aversion disguised as taste, conversation shaped by property and pedigree. Even leisure becomes competitive. Smith implies that the rich are punished by proximity to their own culture, trapped in a social ecosystem where everything is transactional but performed as refinement.

There’s also a sly class critique: the rich don’t just have more options, they have fewer exits. Living with “rich people” means living with the expectations, marriages, clubs, and unspoken rules that keep the machine running. The line reads like it comes from the early 20th-century Anglo-American world of drawing rooms and inherited fortunes, when wealth was as much a caste as a bank balance. Smith’s wit works because it punctures the glamour without romanticizing poverty; it simply points out that money can buy insulation from hardship, but not from the personalities it tends to produce.