It’s lonely at the top, so sayeth the therapists to the one percent.
In a piece that reads more like absurdist satire than real-life reporting, the Guardian’s Jana Kasperkevic interviewed Clay Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker who now fills the valiant role of therapist to the one percent. Cockrell says that society’s wealthy elite, who, on average make $14 million per year, says that life “has gotten worse for the wealthy,” in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult. As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated.”
Another champion of the one percent, Traeger-Muney, specializes in working with inheritors and thinks that people should talk about the rich the way they talk about Jewish people and black people.
“Sometimes I am shocked by things that people say. If you substitute in the word Jewish or black, you would never say something like that. You’d never say – spoiled rotten or you would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealth holders.”
And it’s not just minorities! People who own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth are also like gay people, too, she says.
Often, I use an analogy with my clients that coming out to people about their wealth is similar to coming out of the closet as gay. There’s a feeling of being exposed and dealing with judgment.”
Luckily, the rich don’t have to worry about problems like poverty, job instability, higher rates of pollution and health problems, and lack of access to healthy food, quality education and economic mobility, so they have a lot more time to figure out how to solve their own problems.
If you’re not in close proximity to sharp objects, you can read the entire masterpiece here.