Wealth & Money Quote by Shelley Berman

Berman’s line lands because it refuses the fantasy that modern life has upgraded the human condition. Strip away the gadgets, the politics-of-the-week, the self-help vocabulary, and you’re left with the same durable anxieties: who will love me, will I have enough, am I safe, do I matter, will my body betray me. Calling them “old problems” is the joke’s quiet dagger. Old, as in ancient, as in boringly persistent, as in the stuff we keep pretending we’ve outgrown.

The paired verbs “plague us or please us” do a lot of work. They frame these forces as neither purely tragic nor purely uplifting, but as a rotating cast that can flip roles without warning. Money can be security or shame. Status can be validation or a trap. Health can be taken for granted until it becomes the only story. The line’s rhythm is conversational, almost resigned, which is where the comedy lives: a shrug that doubles as an indictment of our recurring delusions.

Context matters: Berman emerged in a mid-century America selling postwar prosperity and domestic stability as a kind of permanent solution. His observational style punctured that sales pitch by pointing out that the anxiety never left; it just learned new manners. Even now, in an era of optimization culture and algorithmic reassurance, the bit holds. We keep inventing new labels for our feelings, but the feelings keep cashing the same checks.