Therapy for billionaires

As my grandfather’s billions taught, wealth can be a poison. The rich must reckon with its costs to recover their humanity

The author, aged six months, with her mother at Cape Ann in Massachusetts, 1984. All photos supplied by the author

is a writer and researcher in pursuit of misfit subcultures. She is the US director of the Royal Society of Arts, and the co-author of The Misfit Economy (2015). Her writing has appeared in Wired, The Guardian and Vice, among others.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

I cannot remember a time when I was not conscious of wealth. At the age of seven, attending a private Quaker school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was embarrassed when wealthier friends from the Boston suburbs came over to my house, which was small, compared with theirs. Later, living in Arlington, Virginia, and at a public school, I felt the opposite: sheepish about a house that was grander than some of my friends’ homes. House size was one of the earliest metrics by which I clocked wealth.

Wealth was always something I quietly wrestled with. My father grew up in a poor farming family, but my mother came from money: her father was an early billionaire. Though I was raised materially as middle class, my own identity has had influxes from both extremes of the class circumstances into which my parents were born – inheriting a confidence and adventurousness, even feelings of invincibility, that come with privilege; while also tapping into the thriftiness, stoic resilience and determination that come from bootstrapping.

My grandfather, who never questioned his standing, pursued wealth with singular dedication. My early memories of him are anchored in his country estate in Millbrook, Connecticut; I caught salamanders by the pool; visited the kennels where he kept hunting dogs; caviar was regularly served with dinner. Though he’s now in his 90s, his shadow looms large – as a patriarch who scandalised his WASPy beach club in Southampton with his European Speedos, competed in every endeavour (even beating my brother and me at backgammon as children), and whom others craned to impress, though he lived very privately.

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A postwar Greek immigrant from a prominent shipping family in Athens, my grandfather arrived in the United States aged six, and came of age during the Greek shipping boom fuelled by the maritime handover of naval ships. Decommissioned ships purchased cheaply and repurposed to service newly expanded trade routes meant that Greeks dominated postwar shipping on the back of cheap bank loans guaranteed by the Greek government. As the only son in a family of daughters, my Papou was the chosen one to carry on his father’s industrial legacy. In his early 20s, he experienced this birthright as a heavy weight, and rebelled. He dropped out of Princeton, wanting to pursue the bohemian dream and write novels, until my grandmother became pregnant with my mother and put an end to his literary aspirations. Dutifully, he stepped into the role of provider and shipping tycoon.

The author’s mother with her parents on her first day of kindergarten, Park Avenue, New York City, 1963

Upon his father’s death, my grandfather inherited a majority share of his father’s wealth and company. His sisters – veterans now of many legal appeals – maintain that rather than provide for his mother (who was still living), and for them, as detailed by his father’s will, he sidelined the women of the family, investing in his own business and art collection.

It’s not uncommon for the children and grandchildren of the super-rich to abandon their feathered nests

His own daughters, once grown, likewise received scant support compared with what they believed they were due (though he did provide them each with a down payment for a house and a buffer for retirement). My mother and her sisters skated through life with a Park Avenue mentality that was at odds with their more financially improvised circumstances. They favoured part-time work that afforded them time and flexibility, throwing themselves into the juicier aspects of living – travel, romance, motherhood, intellectual and mystical pursuits. They approached life with zest and dynamism – with meraki (as we say in Greek, ‘to do something with love and soul’), compensating for a world in which the luxuries that they had grown up with were removed.

Given my own peephole onto the higher echelons of society, I became an observer of its eccentricities and many of its unenviable characteristics. The world of wealth was the ultimate insider subculture. I associated it with a frigid soulless quality that felt culturally void. As I’ve learned, it is not uncommon for the children and grandchildren of the super-rich to abandon their feathered nests and turn away from money and power. My ease with disowning class privilege largely came from my father. He grew up on less than $1 a day in a poor farming community in King City, Missouri. His county was one of the last to get electricity in the whole country. My dad was a walking Horatio Alger story, getting a scholarship to Harvard and charting his own course.

The author’s father (far right) with his four big sisters and cousins in King City, Missouri, 1954

The author’s mother as a baby with her British nanny in Central Park, New York City, 1959

My parents’ radically different class perspectives informed their approach to just about everything – my mom relying on an attitude of abundance, exceptionalism and, at times, entitlement; my father more cautious, frugal and risk averse – hardworking but given to bouts of shame in spaces not ‘meant for him’. A family friend once described the difference between my mother and father in watching them peel a pear. My father, meticulous, ensured no fruit was left on the peel. My mother was more slapdash. The observation stuck with me. I was constantly working to navigate between their worlds.

The author’s mother, photographed for a feature on society’s most eligible bachelorettes in Town & Country Magazine, December 1981

Beyond my mother being a first-generation American and Park Avenue exile, my father’s ascension to the middle class likewise saw him enter a world far flung from the one he’d grown up in. In the region of Empire Prairie, Missouri, child labour and chores were part of survival. He slept with a hot iron in the dead of winter because, as the fifth child of seven, he didn’t have a room, but slept on the porch, exposed to the elements. His identity could not have diverged more from that of my grandfather, who resided in the glamorous Carlyle Hotel in New York for much of his later life, with a concierge, a cook and staff, yet both men were anchored in the idea of being ‘self-made’, a shared value that generated a degree of mutual respect between them.

My father was welcomed into my mother’s family. In fact, cross-class marriages were quite common in Greek society – especially when aristocratic daughters were paired with aspiring entrepreneurial merchant sons. There was a certain distrust of aristocratic sons, spoiled by luxuries of their upbringing: would they have the drive to achieve and provide?

I slept in a tiny bedroom without a proper door, but then I’d jet off to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival

Both my parents were terrible with money. Neither had learned about saving for retirement from their families. My father’s dad, a small farmer, was killed in a tractor accident when my father was 14, leaving no pension or savings. After it emerged that he had never paid taxes, his family faced crippling debts. My mother’s ‘loaves and fishes’ approach to her finances, meanwhile, left everything to chance inheritance. Both were outsiders in their own way.

The author’s mother trying out the farming life in King City, Missouri, summer 1982

The outsider identity was romantic to me. The extremes of lower- or upper-class psychology resonated with greater pulses of vitality and authenticity. When I was in my 20s, I swung between extreme frugality and lavish reward. In college, I hardly ever went out to eat. I slept in a tiny bedroom without a proper door for $320 a month, but then I’d jet off to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. I incarnated a Protestant work ethic by day; privileged hedonism by night.

Older and more tempered now, I’ve converted to the virtues of the middle class in a way that would horrify my younger self. I discovered a gift for navigating mainstream American culture like neither of my........

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