In West Virginia, a man in a black cowboy hat pulled into the grocery store he stops at every morning before dawn on his way to work. The clerks know him; they call him the Cowboy Man. He ordered what he always orders, — biscuits and bacon, and then, almost as an afterthought, he slides a lottery ticket onto the counter beside the breakfast. He is already a wealthy man. He owns a thriving construction business and does not need the ticket and rarely buys one. But the jackpot has climbed into the hundreds of millions, and it is nearly Christmas. So he thinks to himself, why not?
The ticket ended up matching all the winning numbers.
Jack Whittaker had just won $314.9 million, at the time the largest prize a single ticket had ever taken in America. He chose the lump sum, a little over $113 million after taxes. Standing before the cameras, he thanked God for letting him pick the right numbers and said, with the calm of a man who already had enough, that the money would not change his life.
He was wrong. It changed everything. And the shape of that change is one of the oldest warnings we have: older than lotteries, older than money in the form we know it. The trouble was not that Jack Whittaker gained the world. It was what that world cost him.
The World, Gained
The money came in, and his life began to come apart. A little at first, then completely. There were the thefts. Once, more than half a million dollars in cash was lifted from his car while parked outside a strip club. Then there were the lawsuits, the bar fights, the drunk-driving charges, the endless procession of strangers and old friends with their hands out, until he could no longer tell who wanted him and who simply wanted his money.
And then there was Brandi. His 17-year-old granddaughter, the light of his life and his chosen heir. He gave her an allowance of two thousand dollars a week. But that money drew people to her the way it drew them to him; for what she had, not who she was. She fell in with the wrong company, then into drugs. In 2004, almost two years to the day after winning the lottery, her body was found wrapped in a tarp behind an abandoned van.
His wife of forty-two years left him. His daughter died not long after. Toward the end, Jack Whittaker, the man who had gained more in a single instant than most people will see in a lifetime, made the comment that underscores the whole story. He wished he had just torn the ticket up. There is no control, he said, for greed.
The Oldest Accounting
The question underneath his ruin is not new. It is, in fact, one of the most famous questions ever asked, and it is phrased, tellingly, in the language of business.
The Gospels say that Jesus asked, “for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” The line appears three times, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which is scripture’s way of saying it matters. Notice the verb. Profit is an accountant’s word, a ledger word. The teaching does not say that wealth is evil. It says that wealth is an entry on one side of a balance sheet, that there is another column, call it the soul, the spirit, the authentic self. A person can run a magnificent surplus in the first column while quietly going bankrupt in the second, and still call herself rich the whole time.
Nearly every tradition has kept the same books. The Hebrew preacher of Ecclesiastes, surveying a life of accumulation, concluded that whoever loves money will never have enough of it, that the appetite grows by feeding. The Buddha located the root of human suffering not in poverty but in craving, the thirst that gaining more only inflames. Lao Tzu warned that there is no greater misfortune than not knowing when you have enough. The Stoics drew the sharpest line of all. Wealth, they said, is neither good nor bad in itself but merely an indifferent; something that turns dangerous only when we mistake it for the good and let the soul take its orders from it. Islam keeps the same distinction between dunya, the fleeting lower world, and what endures beyond it.
Different centuries, different traditions, different languages, all talking about the same entry in the ledger. The material world is not our higher self. And the unnerving thing about the exchange rate between the two is that the trade can go through without you ever noticing it has occurred.
The Misread Pyramid
We have a more modern picture of this soul, though we rarely call it that.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is usually drawn as a pyramid. Food and safety at the base, love and esteem in the middle, and at the peak, glowing like a destination, self-actualization. The popular model of this hierarchy is a ladder. You climb it rung by rung. First secure the lower needs, slowing climbing to the top; and there, having arrived, you rest in perpetual bliss.
That is nearly the exact opposite of what Maslow intended. The lower needs behave like hunger: feed them and the craving stops. But the higher needs do not switch off when satisfied. Self-actualization is not a plateau you reach. It is an activity you keep performing. The exercise of your skills and talents toward something. Late in his life Maslow grew uneasy even with that summit and sketched a level above it, self-transcendence. The turning of a person away from their own fulfillment and toward something beyond the self; a cause, another person, a work that will outlast them.
That orientation beyond the self is, for all intents and purposes, what the old traditions were pointing at with the word soul. And it is exactly what money cannot buy and can easily corrode. Viktor Frankl, who found meaning in the one place on Earth built to extinguish it, argued that we have the question backwards. We ask what we want from life. The question that actually sustains a person is the reverse. What does life ask of me? Meaning is not extracted from the world like interest from invested principal. It is generated in response to a demand of you. A task that needs doing, a person who needs you. Gain a world that asks nothing of you, and you have not been enriched. You have simply lost your anchor.
The Work of Being Human
Long before hierarchical pyramids and acronyms, Aristotle asked what a human being is for.
He reasoned by analogy. A flute-player has a function, and a good flute-player performs it well. A knife has a function, and a good knife cuts well. Does the human being as such have a function? His answer was that we are the creature that reasons and acts, and that our flourishing (eudaimonia, the word we imperfectly translate as happiness) is not a feeling we receive but an activity we perform. The soul doing its proper work well, across the whole length of a life. You cannot flourish in your sleep. You cannot flourish on a couch.
Like most of us, I did not arrive at any of this the easy way. For most of my working life I was building the first column and mistaking it for the whole ledger. The title, the role, the next promotion; I did not so much want these things as assume my worth was determined by these things. David Brooks has an interesting way of describing these two columns. Adam I, the résumé self, who builds and climbs and accumulates, and Adam II, the eulogy self, whose virtues are the ones people actually talk about at your funeral. I spent decades feeding Adam I and took it on faith that Adam II would naturally take care of itself. Only in the last ten years or so have I started to turn toward the second, slowly and clumsily and with no illusion about the timing. It is easy to find the eulogy virtues once the résumé ones are safely banked. The pivot is real. It is also convenient, and I would by lying if I pretended otherwise. Aristotle’s couch, I have come to think, is not always idleness. Sometimes it is a career absorbing enough to do the soul’s forgetting for you.
Consider, then, the man who genuinely had everything. By his early fifties Count Leo Tolstoy possessed worldwide fame, wealth, a devoted family, and authorship of what many still call the greatest novel ever written. And he found himself unable to rise from his bed weighed down by a single question. Was there any meaning in his life that the death awaiting him would not erase? He hid the rope so that he would not hang himself. Here was a man at the peak of every pyramid. He was not brought down by lacking anything. He was brought down by a discovery; that his climbing had been the only thing that got him out of bed. He had gained the world. And yet, he could no longer find his soul anywhere inside it.
It is the rope, specifically, that persists in the telling, not the despair, which is common enough, but the fact that a man who had mastered nearly every form the written word offers could not trust himself with a length of cord in his own house. The summit had not made him safe. It had simply removed every excuse for the emptiness he found there.
A Reasonable Objection
Isn’t this simply the comfortable story that people without fortunes tell themselves? That money can’t buy happiness, that the rich are secretly miserable, sour grapes dressed up as wisdom? And worse, isn’t there something faintly obscene about romanticizing having less, when poverty is itself a destroyer of souls? When real money buys medicine, safety, time, the freedom to raise children without fear? Tell the family that cannot make rent that wealth is merely an indifferent.
This is true, and the traditions knew it. None of them, read honestly, says that the material world is worthless or that need is noble. Ecclesiastes does not praise poverty; the Stoics called wealth a preferred indifferent, the sort of thing a sane person would rather have than not. The warning was never against the material world. It was against the exchange. Against the moment, so easy to miss, when material goods stop being the things you use to live a life and become the thing you live for instead.
Jack Whittaker’s tragedy was not winning the jackpot. It was that he had no identity or purpose that the money could not dissolve. Had he been anchored to some work, some service, some person he was helping, the windfall would have been a tool he could put to work. Unanchored, it became a corrosive solvent.
The question, then, is not how much of the material world you have gained. It is whether you have kept hold of yourself while gaining it.
The Price of Everything
This warning lands harder today than in the centuries that first issued it. The people who wrote it lived in worlds where most things had no price, where friendship, reputation, devotion, and time sat outside the market entirely, where money simply could not reach. We do not live there anymore.
The philosopher Michael Sandel describes the drift of recent decades as a move from having a market economy to becoming a market society; a place where almost everything is quietly, or not so quietly, for sale. A price tag has quietly been slapped onto things our grandparents would have found unthinkable. Attention. Privacy. The self repackaged as a personal brand.
This runs through institutions of every stripe, wherever performance becomes easier to measure than character. A university that prizes rankings over character formation. An organization that prizes customer engagement over trust. Each is running the same trade, just denominated in a different currency.
This is what makes the exchange so much harder to see. Jack Whittaker’s trade was visible. A ticket, a number, a backwards slide you could mark on a calendar. Ours is invisible, because it is continuous. No one offers us the whole world for our soul; the deal is far smaller and never announced. A sliver of the soul for a sliver of the world. An hour here, a principle there, a relationship kept for what it returns. Over and over, on terms we would never quite agree to out loud. There is no single catastrophic ticket. Only a slow auction of the self, conducted so quietly that we never hear the gavel fall.
Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He meant it as an insult to a certain kind of person. It has since become something closer to defining large swathes of contemporary society.
What It Profits
Picture Jack Whittaker near the end. Not at the grocery counter on that lucky morning, but at a small grave in West Virginia, the black cowboy hat in his hands, standing where his granddaughter lies buried two years after that ticket that was meant to bless his family. He has the house, the cars, the millions, the famous name. He would trade all of it, every dollar, to have torn that ticket up and kept the ordinary mornings he had taken for granted. The biscuits, the work he didn’t need to do, the girl who was loved before she had a reason to be loved for her money.
That is the accounting the religious traditions meant; not a threat about the next world, but a description of this one. Whittaker, at least, got to see his ledger totaled. The grave made the exchange legible; the wish to tear up the ticket was a man reading his own balance sheet at last. Tolstoy’s ledger was quieter but no less final. Every worldly proof of a life well spent, and a rope he did not trust himself to keep in the house. Most of us are never handed the question so cleanly, which is exactly why it has to be asked now. While the trade is still in progress. While there is still something left to anchor to.
So, what are you anchored by? What have you been handing over, in increments too small to notice, for the life you currently have? And, the question both Whittaker and Tolstoy would give anything to have asked sooner: is it an exchange you would still agree to, if someone read the terms back to you line by line?
What does it profit a man? It is the oldest question we have about money. And it has never once been a question about money.
© The Good Human Practice | Published every other Thursday
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