Who Wants to be Rich?

There's an assumption in society that we all want to be rich. The media is saturated with it.

But recently I've started to notice how many people claim not to be interested in lots of money – even those for whom you'd assume being rich and famous is their goal. One of Australia's best selling authors even told me he never wanted anything more than to earn $40,000 a year and to be able to write.

That got me thinking; might there be a huge number of people for whom while money is a necessity, they wouldn't want to be drowning in it? Might those people even be in the majority?

Most of us are smart enough to know money comes with a price. Casual studies have been made into the lives of people who've won huge lotteries, and in most cases it hasn't only made life no better for the winners, it's made it worse.

Then there's the transaction you take part of as a rich person, no matter what your field. We all know from everyday life nobody just gives you the money to be rich. The market is a profit-driven machine, and business is about making more money than you spend. If someone gives you as much money as Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton or the CEO of Halliburton makes, they expect you to make them a whole lot back.

Celebrities are amply remunerated for their services as high-profile salespeople for media properties, but look at their lives; hounded by paparazzi, hiding away from the public gaze any time they want to relax, their private lives and relationships dissected in the gossip press. Many of us would shudder at the thought.

It's different but little better for the million dollar CEOs and business leaders of the world, who have a level of enslavement to work the likes of which us mortals can't grasp. Think your Blackberry, mobile and email go off at any hour of the day or night, making you feel like you can never get away from work?

Imagine being a company director – sure they have the private golf club memberships and the Mercedes in the garage at Vaucluse, but every minute could bring a change in the share price that could prompt a mass shareholder call for blood. Maybe Lachlan Murdoch did the only sensible thing when he realised that and bowed out of the Murdoch empire in 2006.

By contrast, it appears most of us want nothing more than to make an honest living and have a few laughs in life. Why then do we have this loud assumption, one that might be at odds with the aspirations of the majority?

Ask yourself this question; where do we get most of our information about the world? From the media, obviously – everything from a daggy oldies radio station to YouTube. And that's a narrow field. How so?

People who work in the media are artists. They work in areas where skills in artistic creativity must be bought to bear. Even TV presenters are performers, only a step away from actors.

A large part of being an artist is to dream of being renowned for your craft – artists all want to be rich and famous. So that constant goal of wanting to be rich is part of their lives, a constant shroud of chasing money, success and acclaim. They simply don't know any other way.

That inner life of the artist ends up as the background hum of the media soundtrack. They have little empathy for or even knowledge of the dreams of the people on the streets – nurses, plasterers, housewives, accountants and bartenders – who don't live under that overcast sky of failure and poverty threatening to rain down on them every minute.

So that thirst for money we get pervades society. It comes from a very narrow but extremely influential collection of viewpoints, and we all end up enthralled by it.

So stories about the death of spiritual life and the rise of materialism might be overrated. They might be the media simply turning its gaze on itself