Unwealth: Why “Wealthy” Is a Meaningless Idea

If wealth were an absolute measure, two people with identical balance sheets would yield matching internal states. They never do. Wealth is not like height or temperature; it is closer to pressure, a force created by the relationship between two things rather than the magnitude of one. A balance sheet can grow larger while wealth, in the lived sense, shrinks. Another can remain modest while the experience of equanimity expands.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb captures this with a single move: shifting the measure from the absolute (“what you have”) to the relative (“what you have relative to what you want”). He calls this unwealth.

Wealth, when treated as an absolute, becomes a strangely dimensionless idea — useful for accounting and almost useless for understanding a life. A single number cannot absorb the variables that give a financial life its real shape, and it certainly cannot capture the heterogeneity of the human beings living inside those numbers. Yet the traditional definition proceeds as if those differences don’t exist, as though people were interchangeable units with identical tolerances, expectations, and philosophies of risk. But nothing about human experience is standard. Individuals diverge in knowledge, preference, and history; in the values that guide their choices; and in the narratives through which they interpret uncertainty.

Two balance sheets may be indistinguishable on paper, yet the internal experience they generate can diverge entirely. One individual carries ambitions, fears, and inherited scripts that make the structure feel fragile; another holds the same numbers with a sense of proportion and adequacy. The totals match; the lived reality does not. This is the flaw in the absolute measure. It flattens psychological and structural asymmetry into a single, context-free figure.

The first advantage of unwealth is conceptual. Traditional wealth suffers from an infinite regress. If the measure is simply “more,” then desire has no terminus. A variable without boundary conditions cannot converge. Unwealth imposes one. A gap is finite and, crucially, closable. It transforms financial planning from an unbounded chase into something more like a problem in applied mathematics: define the distance between two points, then determine the most efficient path to align them.

It also acknowledges what any physicist or systems thinker would recognize instantly: stability is a function of state. Change the load on a structure, and its integrity changes even if its dimensions don’t. Wealth, taken as an absolute measure instead of a relative one, ignores the changing state of the person who holds it — their obligations, risks, time horizons, and tolerances. Unwealth adjusts with these shifts.

Its geometry is richer as well. Wealth is a scalar; it tells you the magnitude but nothing about direction or composition. Yet real financial lives behave as multi-dimensional vectors, shaped by time, variance, liquidity, redundancy, correlation, and the irregular cadence of human goals. To measure all of this with a single scalar is a category error. Unwealth incorporates these dimensions because the gap is inevitably defined by them: shorten the time horizon and the gap shifts; reduce leverage, and it shifts again; redesign the pattern of spending or earning, and it changes once more. It is not a larger number of the same type; it is a different type of number.

Most important for practical decision-making, unwealth turns the entire exercise from accumulation to optimization. A total number can only suggest one action: more. But a gap invites optionality. One can close it by increasing resources, yes, but also by smoothing volatility, extending timelines, reducing fragility, renegotiating obligations, or refining goals whose shape was inherited rather than chosen. A system can be modified in many dimensions to bring its two reference points, wants and resources, into proportion.

Taleb is right: “wealthy” is a meaningless designation, a false absolute applied to a condition that only exists in relation to a person’s needs and aims. To call someone wealthy is to make a claim with no content. To understand their unwealth is to understand their reality.