A lot of wealthy people, they don't realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good. — Chuck Feeney

A lot of wealthy people, they don't realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good.

Author: Chuck Feeney

Insight: There's something almost innocent about wealth when it first arrives—a kind of numbness where you simply don't see other options. You get used to the logic of accumulation, of building and protecting what you have, and that becomes the only grammar you speak fluently. The idea that money could do something other than secure your position or amplify your comfort starts to feel abstract, almost naive. But here's the thing: this applies well beyond billionaires. Most of us experience smaller versions of this blindness all the time. We have money left over after the month and default to the same patterns—another subscription, another thing, another buffer—without really pausing to ask what else that fifty dollars could actually do. It's not greed exactly. It's more like we've stopped noticing the menu in front of us because we've been ordering the same thing for years. The surprising part isn't that wealthy people don't give more. It's that they're not uniquely trapped by this—they're just experiencing a more visible version of what most of us do. The alternative to spending money on yourself isn't some abstract moral obligation. It's discovering that giving feels different. It changes something in how you relate to having things at all. Once you see it, the old way of thinking starts to feel incomplete.

Source: The New York Times, Sept. 26, 2007