Affluenza

Analyzing a single issue of a Sunday supplement magazine, Joseph Mulligan reflects on the disease of “affluenza,” its epidemic and its impact on those who immerse themselves in service to the poor.
Excerpt from the middle of the article…

Christian commitment to build a more just society and to serve the needy, as well as a genuine holistic education, should preserve us from a middle-age regression to infantile narcissism.

This issue is tackled head-on in “The Disease You’d Love to Have,” an article about affluenza or sudden-wealth syndrome, which is described as “a dysfunctional or unhealthy relationship with money or wealth or the pursuit of it.” According to one pioneer in this new school of therapy, “in terms of sudden-wealth syndrome, it is when suddenly our clients wake up one morning and they realize they don’t have to work again, and after the excitement wears off they’re thrust into an early identity crisis. They don’t know what to do with their lives anymore.”

A colleague added: “They feel that somehow they don’t deserve their wealth, because it’s inherited or because it’s new money that came to them too easily.”

Another therapist, a millionaire who founded the Affluenza Project in Milwaukee, thinks that affluenza is “at the base of many of the other isms: alcoholism, shopaholics, gambling addictions. The making of the money is the score card by which they judge their success or failure. And wealth creates its own host of problems—from an inability to delay gratification to a false sense of entitlement to a loss of future motivation.”

http://www.loyno.edu/twomey/blueprint/blueprint-April2001.htm