Does financial success come at a social price?

How prosperity can weaken the bonds that give life meaning

“Living in Surrey was a mistake—the most boring time of my life.” That was how a friend recently summed up his years in one of England’s most idyllic counties.

It jars with the postcard image Surrey is known for: quiet streets, manicured gardens, a sense of tranquil order. On screen, it looks like the perfect setting for an ideal life. Yet beneath the neat lawns and polite nods, his experience was one of hollowness. Conversations with neighbours felt rehearsed, social exchanges emotionally vacant. What appeared to be community was, in his words, “a polite facade.”

Wealth and withering bonds

His story may echo a wider trend. American psychologist Patricia Greenfield has shown, across four decades of research, that rising wealth often correlates with weakened social bonds.

“We become more individualistic, less family and community oriented” Greenfield noted in an interview featured by NPR.

The reason is simple. In lower socioeconomic settings, connection isn’t optional—it’s survival. When resources are scarce, people rely on one another for help, security, and endurance. But as wealth expands, so does self-sufficiency. Autonomy replaces interdependence, freedom replaces reliance, and the incentive to maintain close social ties fades.

The paradox is clear: the more we can provide for ourselves, the less we seem to need each other.

Echo chambers of affluence

I’ve felt this happening myself. My career began in a small town, splitting shifts between a pub and a supermarket. The internet boom carried me into developing websites, London, and eventually overseas. The pursuit of better work and financial security succeeded in many ways, but it came with a social toll.

Deep friendships from my hometown were replaced by transient professional ties. Conversations that once wandered widely were reduced to talk of stock tips, restaurants, and status. Work dinners often felt like performances, occasions where I played a part rather than feeling connected. If I had to choose, I’d leave behind the staged glamour of fine dining for a park bench, a bag of crisps, and a friend who knows me.

Affluence doesn’t just improve meals; it filters life. Queues disappear, tasks are delegated, economy gives way to first class, campsites to private villas, public beaches to velvet-roped shores. Leisure follows the same pattern: stadium seating becomes private boxes, community gyms become home gyms, and the ultimate indulgence becomes swimming solitary laps in a private pool.

Gated communities, private schools, and elite clubs all serve to filter social contact, ensuring that only those of similar status gain entry. This filtering, though comforting, becomes isolating. The world shrinks into a curated enclave of sameness, where the diversity of the human condition is replaced. Within such spaces, the soul is not enriched but dulled, deprived of friction and contrast.

Invitations to events and social gatherings are extended out of strategic interest instead of genuine regard. Here you mingle with fake companions who masquerade their affection.

Smiles from personal trainers, assistants, and therapists are transactional and out of obligation instead of an expression of warmth. One no longer meets people; one hires them. Even personal relationships can lack organic trust when subjected to legal frameworks; pre-nups, contracts and NDAs.

Loneliness, in such contexts, is not the absence of people, but the absence of sincerity.

Descending the ladder

Recently, I joined a no-frills council-owned leisure centre. At times, it can be best described as dysfunctional; the queues are long, the lockers broken, and the roof leaks. By contrast, when I lived in London, I was a member of a luxury gym in Canary Wharf that felt more like a five-star hotel than a place to exercise, with beautiful staff that looked as though they had been handpicked by a fashion agency.

Automated gates meant there was never a queue, and the changing rooms were lined with carpets so plush you felt guilty treading on them in outdoor shoes. The facilities sprawled across several floors, offering everything you could imagine.

But the cheaper gym wins where it matters. Each morning, I’m greeted by a receptionist who has worked there for decades, welcoming everyone with warmth that no automated gate could match.

Striking up conversations with fellow members comes naturally, especially in the sauna, where there’s almost always a discussion in progress and you can choose to join in or simply listen. By contrast, the sauna at my London gym felt more like a silent retreat. An unspoken rule seemed to demand that you keep your eyes fixed on the floor and your thoughts to yourself. That silence echoed the wider social norm in many London apartment blocks and lifts, where even long-time neighbours often avoid eye contact. Attempt to break it, and you risk being written off as eccentric or worse, the local crackpot.

In Canary Wharf, the demographic skewed almost entirely toward finance professionals. At my current gym, I’ve spoken with café owners, doctors, gardeners, delivery drivers, police officers, builders, and teachers. Conversations have ranged from insights into the NHS from a nurse to an unexpectedly detailed exchange with a gardener about cultivating magic mushrooms. These moments, which are unfiltered, surprising, and human, give the place a charm no luxury facility has ever matched.

It’s not just gyms where this contrast shows up. Some of my fondest travel memories come from no-frills guesthouses in places like Senegal and Sri Lanka, where dinners were eaten communally and conversations with strangers quickly turned into friendships. Luxury hotels, by comparison, delivered everything they promised with immaculate decor, world-class service, flawless food, but left little to remember. The stays were pleasant, but clinical; I came away with no lasting stories, no friendships, not even a conversation worth recalling.

In the end, authenticity leaves a deeper imprint than luxury ever can.

Reduced serendipity

As wealth increases, it strips away an increasing number of life’s small frictions. Technology has the same aim; apps and gadgets eliminate queues, chores, and delays in the name of efficiency. After all, time has become our most prized currency.

On paper, this should make us happier. Fewer chores, fewer inconveniences, fewer things we don’t like doing. But, as with many aspects of life, the obvious logic is often misleading.

Chores, waiting in line and requests for help may feel like inefficiencies to be eliminated, yet they are also points of contact with other people. When we strip them away in pursuit of productivity, we do save time, but it comes at the expense of reduced serendipity and connection. And in the process, as Patricia Greenfield and others have observed, we become more atomised, more individualistic, and less human.

Take something as banal as a trip to the local tip. Recently, I was about to dump an old trunk into a skip when a stranger stopped me and insisted it was worth keeping. I took his advice and carried it home. The exchange was fleeting, but oddly uplifting. Human encounters, however minor, tend to be.

We get a similar lift in traffic when a driver flashes their lights to let us out of a junction or when we do the same and receive a grateful wave. These gestures don’t change the course of our lives, but they feed something subtle inside us. The same happens in a corner shop when you exchange a joke with the cashier, or when a barista remembers your order without asking.

It’s easy to overlook these small moments, but they accumulate into the invisible glue of social life. They only happen when we’re entangled in the mess of ordinary living, the very mess that wealth and technology increasingly work to smooth away.

I suspect this helps explain why so many expats eventually grow restless in their adopted “paradises.” The culture gap, or the language barrier, reduces casual contact, and life shrinks to interactions with a narrow, curated slice of people. It’s the social equivalent of moving into a gated community: safe, clean, controlled but ultimately starved of the variety and vitality that make us feel alive.

The Paradox of Progress

Newton’s third law tells us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The same holds true for human progress. Each step toward wealth and convenience carries a hidden counterweight. Our biology, still tuned for scarcity, drives us to hoard and accumulate, even though the world we inhabit no longer demands it. In chasing more, we risk neglecting what our ancestors had in abundance: bonds, shared purpose, and community.

They were materially poor but socially rich. We are materially rich but, too often, socially poor.

Perhaps, then, the true task of the modern age is not accumulation but balance. Too much weight in one direction, and something essential collapses.

A life that dazzles from the outside but feels hollow within is not success. It is imbalance. And balance, once survival is secured, may be the highest form of wealth we can hope to achieve.