Wealth & Money Quote by Ann Landers

Ann Landers takes the comforting myth of arrival and guts it with a four-part punchline: everyone is sure the next rung on the ladder will finally quiet the static in their head. The sentence is built like folk wisdom, but it’s really a scalpel. Each clause moves us through a familiar set of American desires - money, happiness, romance, stability - and then reveals them as perpetually deferred. The last turn, “and the married wish to be dead,” is deliberately outrageous, not because Landers literally thinks matrimony is a death wish, but because hyperbole is the only honest language for private disappointment that polite society won’t allow you to say out loud.

Her intent is both comic and corrective. As an advice columnist, Landers lived in the mailbag of other people’s fantasies: letters from women trapped in suffocating domestic scripts, men confused by emotional rules they were never taught, readers convinced their unhappiness was a personal failure rather than a predictable side effect of keeping up appearances. The subtext is envy as a form of social glue: we look sideways at other lives to explain our own dissatisfaction, imagining that someone else has the secret. Landers flips that reflex into a shared indictment: no one has it.

Context matters: mid-to-late 20th-century prosperity sold marriage and consumption as endpoints. Landers smuggles a bleak truth through humor - the endpoints aren’t endpoints, and the performance of contentment can feel like its own kind of coffin.