So... you’ve made a bunch of choices about what to do and for how much many and then how to spend the huge amount of money that you subsequently get to decide how to spend, and mathematically speaking you cannot spend all of that money on all of those things and simultaneously buy a $100 pair of pants.

That can easily be true, but it’s so ludicrously far from what normal people mean when they say that they “can’t afford McDonald’s for breakfast” that I think it drives the point home pretty well.

You aren’t poor because you already spent your allowance.

The fact that people in the upper echelons of the global upper echelons of financial resources don’t “feel rich” because we have to make “financial decisions” only when we’ve already spent all of the rest of our money is exactly the problem.

This isn’t, like, an upper-class character flaw. There’s some kind of normal human scale insensitivity that makes it really hard to understand how much a dollar is worth to someone else.

But it seems like if you do the math, you should acknowledge that you genuinely are one of the people getting paid off by the pyramid scheme. If you still feel constrained in your options, it’s because everyone at every level feels that way, because the whole system is lubricated from top to bottom by a pervasive sense of personal insufficiency. And actual poverty is still a lot worse.