“It’s like the more money we come across
The more problems we see.”
—The Notorious B.I.G., Mo Money Mo Problems
The first half of my life was spent in poverty. Most of our problems revolved around money (or lack thereof): paying rent, keeping the electricity on, stretching groceries to last one more week. When everyone around you is also struggling to make ends meet, you don’t think of yourself as poor—it’s simply the only world you know.
This all changed in middle school, when I met kids whose families owned nice homes, drove reliable cars, spent weekends at the lake, and took vacations. I envied their absence of struggle and the ease of their lives, and I grew increasingly insecure about my own circumstances. That insecurity became a powerful motivator, and I spent the next ten years singularly focused on escaping poverty.
Thirty years later, I have achieved my goal of financial independence, but my journey led me to another realization: problems do not disappear with wealth—but we do get better ones. Morgan Housel captured this idea in his wonderful 2025 essay, Minimum Levels of Stress. He writes, “As the world improves, our threshold for complaining drops. In the absence of big problems, people shift their worries to smaller ones. In the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.”
I, too, have my share of trivial complaints. However, when I catch myself grumbling about some minor inconvenience, I pause and ask a simple question: How many people on Earth would trade their set of problems for mine? I don’t know the exact number, but it’s likely in the billions.
Setting aside death, illness, and a handful of truly life-altering challenges, most of us have very few real problems. What we have instead are nuisances, inconveniences, and preferences masquerading as burdens—and that is a remarkably fortunate place to be. Many of us could use a bit “mo perspective.”