Declassifying Wealth

Most conversations about “wealth” treat it like a number — income, assets, equity, runway. But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that wealth is not financial. It’s architectural. It shapes identity, culture, and belonging long before it ever becomes a balance sheet.

What I mean by architectural became clear through experience, not theory.

I grew up adjacent to wealth and adjacent to poverty — close enough to understand both, but fully inside neither.

I grew up with no inheritable wealth, yet I was welcomed into mansions.

I earned my way to Columbia, entered tech without legacy connections, married into wealth without ever being fully accepted by it.

I learned early that when you live in proximity to power, people don’t quite know what to do with you. You’re familiar but not “theirs.”

They debate:

Do we marry her in? Mentor her? Claim her?

You become someone who knows the rules but refuses to perform them.

My mother lived this duality before I did.

She grew up wealthy, lost it abruptly, and rebuilt proximity by working for high-status families. She blended in because she knew the choreography — the etiquette, the posture, the world. They treated her like family until the moment they didn’t have to.

When she passed away, the closeness evaporated instantly.

That was the first time I understood a fundamental rule of class:

If belonging depends on being useful, it’s not belonging.

I saw this everywhere — in elite Indian social circles, in tech, in startup ecosystems, in my marriage, in my early career. Every class performs stability. Very few actually have it.

Wealthy families mask dysfunction with status.

Working-class families mask pain with resilience.

Middle-class families mask insecurity with aspiration.

The “class system” isn’t economic — it’s psychological.

For a long time, I unconsciously chased the world my mother lost — not out of vanity, but out of grief.

Elite education, high-status rooms, high-functioning partners, professional pedigree, marriage — each one felt like a doorway into continuity, a way to rebuild something that felt “whole.”

But then life collapsed — publicly, violently, with a speed that forced clarity.

I left my marriage with only a financial bridge — and watched it get washed away by legal fees, custody battles, and the very class cruelty I once thought I could outrun.

If you leave, you must get nothing, and you must struggle.

That was the rule. But I had already struggled.

I’ve worked since I was 15.

I held two jobs in college while training as an athlete.

I paid off my loans.

My mother only ever sent me money a handful of times — $100 here or there when I was down to my last dollar.

I’ve never had money simply given to me. Ever.

Being near wealth but never insulated by it sharpens your perception.

You begin to see the architecture behind the image — who has real sovereignty and who just has ornamentation.

The founder identity fascinated me for a while.

Founders have the swagger of wealth without the money itself — the performance of grit, sleeplessness, vision. A mythology of self-made-ness. But so much of it is chaos disguised as destiny.

Then there’s the passive investor identity — travel, leisure, “freedom.”

But that world is its own kind of emptiness.

Then motherhood — the identity women are told should be all-consuming.

But flooding your child with your need for identity isn’t parenting — it’s enmeshment.

The patriarchal fantasy of the doting, self-sacrificing mother produces children who grow up managing their mothers, not connecting with them.

That’s not love. That’s inverted emotional labor.

Through all of this, one truth became obvious:

You can’t inherit a world that wasn’t built for you.

But you can build one of your own.

And strangely, losing the scaffolding — financial, social, relational — clarified what I actually value.

Wealth isn’t entry into someone else’s system.

It isn’t proximity to power.

It isn’t being chosen, included, or endorsed.

Wealth is sovereignty.

Wealth is identity.

Wealth is the ability to choose your life without needing permission.

The psychology beneath social class runs organizations far more than strategy ever will.

Leadership teams reenact family dynamics.

Startups recreate founder childhoods.

Boards mirror unspoken hierarchies.

Teams absorb the survival patterns of the people at the top.

Class is simply the first institution that teaches us how belonging works — or doesn’t.

Today, I don’t chase proximity to any of those systems.

I study them.

I write about them.

And I build something entirely different: a life rooted in clarity, coherence, and emotional truth — not performance.

The irony is that stepping out of the class system gave me something I never found inside it:

stability.

Stability that doesn’t depend on being legible to anyone else’s system.