Mr Chu,

Oh how I hope you are young, because it took me well into my 40's to discover — unwillingly — that having lost a hard-won high perch I still had everything I needed to live a good life. Inexpensively.

I learned late that my true wealth came early, and my brief peak-earning-years foray into the manicured, exclusive suburbs led only to a self-conscious redefinition of myself by myself: of who and what I “was”. Who I should “be.”

But the country clubs (I don’t golf) and yacht clubs (I can’t swim terribly well) all chaffed on me like raw wool on bare skin.

Plus, my last name ends in a vowel.

I’d sneak away to the closest working class bar whenever I could to have a shot and a beer with people I actually felt comfortable with (hiding my crazy-expensive wristwatch all the while). I could not, for the life of me, adjust to the “vertical” and I hadn’t yet grasped the concept of the horizontal.

It all crystallized for me the day the one true and remaining friend I made during that period, a neighbor, came by my house while the gardeners were gardening and the contractors were ripping into the kitchen and the housekeepers were keeping and the nanny was herding the children and the wife was off lunching with The Girls.

“We’re juggernauts, you and I” he said. “Entire, personal economies depend on us. Those guys riding the mowers have families to support, too. That woman pushing the vacuum cleaner in your living room, the electrician wiring your patio…it’s fucking crazy. If we fail, they have to readjust. And they will all readjust better than we ever could.”

Before my friend’s spontaneous soliloquy I had taken all the noise, all the industry around me as little more than an annoyance: a cosmic chastisement for staying at home on a workday when I should have been in the city. But now, for the first time, I saw the juggernaut. I saw the macroeconomy that my signature on all those checks was master of.

If the weight of a marriage with small children, the weight of a mortgage and increasingly volatile investments wasn’t enough, here we have the sudden realization, the revelation that dozens of children I’ve never met are included in the “mouths I feed” lament? My arms hung down at my sides in stunned surrender.

Thanks to a greed beyond most mortal imaginings that lead to the Great Collapse things are different now. For me, that is. Ancient wisdom says be nice to those you meet on the way up because you’ll meet them again on the way down. Luckily I was always kind to service staff and tended to overtip.

As for the rest of us, including me? We’ve readjusted quite well. Best and most remarkably my kids. Because kids don’t get rich or poor be it either vertical or horizontal. They focus on what’s important. And if there’s enough of what’s really important in us then that, that is a juggernaut that can carry generations.