the arbitrage of feeling rich

I think one of the craziest ironies of travel is that people love traveling to places that make them feel rich.

Here’s what I mean.

I’m in Vietnam right now. Because of the dollar arbitrage, everything is somewhere between one-fourth and one-twentieth of what it would cost in the States.

I had a bánh mì for $1.50.
Phở for somewhere between $2 and $5 — and that was on the pricier side.
An amazing meal for under $10: three imperial rolls, two spring rolls, and a noodle bowl, all of it super delicious and well prepared.

Massages? A 60–90 minute massage at a really high-end place might run $40–$50. A lot of perfectly good spots are more like $10.

Everything feels luxurious. You can just unwind and do stuff here. You don’t have to penny-pinch. It feels grand.

And then it hit me:

This is just what rich people feel like all the time.

hard work is ubiquitous, privilege is not

If you’re reading this and you’re in some higher echelon, don’t hate me too hard. I know almost every rich person has a hero’s-journey story. No one is the villain of their own narrative.

Yes, it was hard to get into Stanford.
Yes, you worked very hard at your prestigious job.

But I firmly believe: not all of our lives are levered equally.

Hot take number one: most people who are rich got there through some combination of privilege and luck.

Hot take number two: hard work is ubiquitous.

It’s actually not that rare to work your ass off. I know so many people who grind, and they’re not the ones at Google or Meta or Stripe or McKinsey.

In fact, many people in those “elite” jobs are relatively rested compared to the folks:

working multiple jobs,
doing service or manual labor,
cleaning houses,
working fast food,
grinding because they have no other option.

So when I hear, “I’m rich because I worked hard,” I don’t really buy it as the whole story.

I think most people have the capacity to work hard if they have just enough stability to not be in pure survival mode. Hard work is the baseline. It’s the ticket to the game. It’s not the thing that explains who ends up a billionaire and who ends up exhausted and invisible.

the abstraction of other people’s suffering

There’s another move that always shows up: the relativity argument.

“Compared to someone bathing at a fire hydrant in Kolkata, we’re all rich.”
Yeah. That’s true.

But zooming out that far often becomes a way to dodge the obvious: in so many societies, there is a massive chasm between the extraordinarily rich and everyone else. It’s a real, structural, material gap.

We’ve turned billionaires into secular gods.
We idolize them.
We act like their genius and work ethic alone explain the outcome.

I don’t buy it.

Sure, Elon Musk is probably a genius and a workaholic. I’m not denying that. I’m saying: that alone does not explain billionaire status. And I refuse to deify him or any of his peers.

The deeper problem is what happens in our own heads:

When we turn these people into icons, we forget that we’re made of the same basic stuff. What we don’t share is their setup:

a “modest” million-dollar loan from a parent,
an early exit from a tech company,
two doctor parents who quietly pay for school,
a family that can bail you out when you mess up,
a network that catches you every time you stumble.

These are invisible advantages. They’re the water they swim in.

For many people, that water simply doesn’t exist.

invisible second chances

I have a friend who is exceptionally privileged. He grew up on a wealthy island. When he got kicked out of one country for doing drugs, his father’s status helped him leave without serious punishment and continue his education elsewhere.

Someone without that status might have been sent to jail.

Another story: I know a woman who got pregnant at sixteen. Her parents — both doctors — told her, “If you want an abortion, it’s okay.” They helped her do it. They did not want her entire life derailed.

Today, she’s a renowned author living comfortably in San Francisco.

Now imagine the same situation, but in a family or community where abortion is not an option. Where the ideology says, “Absolutely not.” Where there is no money, no medical access, no emotional support. That “second chance” disappears completely.

These are invisible privileges. And it’s not that privileged people can’t understand them intellectually. Of course they can. They can say the words.

But it’s an abstraction.
It’s not a lived experience.

In the same way that I cannot truly understand what it’s like to be long-term homeless. Even if I “experimented” and put myself on the street for a week, I would always have an exit button. I would know, deep down, that I can tap out.

That’s the fundamental difference:

My version would be a two-way door.
Theirs is often a one-way door.

compounding advantages

That same privileged friend once said to me, “Yeah, you have to work five times as hard to get as far when your family isn’t rich.”

He didn’t mean it cruelly. It was just a statement of fact from his vantage point.

Privilege compounds like interest, and not just in a bank account:

in education,
in mindset,
in network,
in assets,
in random opportunities that show up purely because of who your parents are and who they know.

Even my own story has privilege baked into it.

I was incredibly lucky to end up at an excellent university. But that came from a random moment in AP U.S. history. I was sitting next to a friend — a violinist — who said, “I want to go to Northwestern. It has amazing academics and an incredible music school.”

Something in me just went, Yeah, that sounds right.
I thought, “I want a place like that too.”
And from that moment, I decided: I’ll try to go to Northwestern.

My parents had no idea what schools to recommend. There was no guidance counselor sitting down with me and mapping out colleges. It was a random, lucky moment of social proximity.

Yes, I worked my ass off to get in.
But I also got very, very lucky to even learn the name of the place at the right time.

Multiply that kind of luck and privilege — mindset, money, stability, network, awareness — across a lifetime, and you get a massively easier path.

And that’s where people get upset when I say it: yes, the rich have it easier.

You might say, “But my dad was abusive,” or “My mom had cancer when I was thirteen.” And those things are absolutely real. They hurt. They’re devastating.

But imagine going through those same traumas without money, stability, or options.

I’m sorry, but it’s harder.
The rich have it easier.
We can stop pretending we’re all equally levered.

the joy and the unease of arbitrage

So I circle back to the original feeling in Hanoi:

The joy and freedom of feeling rich because of currency arbitrage.

Imagine if every meal out cost what $1.50 feels like to you. If you had tens of millions in the bank and dropping $10,000–$30,000 on a vacation to Greece felt like nothing. Take 1–2 weeks off, fly business, stay in beautiful hotels, eat where you want. No anxiety. Just “sure, why not.”

On some level, that’s what’s happening to me here — in miniature — as an American spending dollars in Vietnam.

And part of that feels incredible.
And part of it doesn’t sit well at all.

Not because of individual people. This isn’t “rich people are evil.” It’s systemic. It’s about how the game is wired.

purifying money

Here’s my ethical take, the one I’m personally bound to and currently failing to fully meet:

Once you reach a certain level of financial ability, you have to give back.

Not “your job is useful to society, so that counts.”
No. Above and beyond.

You need to:

donate,
create something that serves others,
volunteer your time,
help underprivileged people get an education,
do something that costs you something.

Ideally, it should feel a little like a sacrifice. A little uncomfortable.

The mechanism I like best — at least structurally — comes from the Bahá’í Faith: Huqúqu’lláh, the “Right of God.” In its most reductionist form, it’s like a 19% luxury tax on what you don’t actually need.

It excludes:

your basic living expenses,
your primary home,
and anything you sincerely deem necessary.

It’s not enforceable by anyone. No one can demand proof. It only “counts” if it’s given joyfully. If you give with resentment, it doesn’t spiritually register.

I love that framing:

It’s individual, not imposed by the state.
It’s structured, not vague guilt.
It’s about purifying your money.

And that’s where this all lands for me:
How do we purify our money?

Personally, I don’t think I’d feel okay just paying taxes and calling it a day. There is too much suffering in the world, and I’ve experienced enough of my own that I can’t pretend this life I have now is solely something I “earned.”

paying it forward to the version of me that suffered

I’ve suffered. A lot. And yet I’m also lucky.

There were times in my life when:

Buying a Chipotle burrito hurt. It scared me.
I’d wear clothes inside out because I didn’t feel like I could afford to do laundry.
I lived in a studio with no dining table for months until my best friend’s mom found out and shipped me an IKEA table.

These might seem like small details in isolation, but they add up over years without much external support. They shape your nervous system. They shape your relationship to money and safety.

So when I say I want to give back, it’s not because I’m afraid of karma points or being “bad” if I don’t. It feels more like:

doing something for the version of me who suffered,
honoring the pain I went through by helping others have it a little easier,
extending to other people the kind of love and support I didn’t get.

And it’s also a way of admitting: I didn’t do this alone.
I’m not “self-made.”
I don’t believe anyone is.

a world where more people feel rich

Ultimately, what I want is a world where more people get to feel this lightness I’m feeling in Vietnam — this sense of, I can order food and not panic about the bill — without having to fly across an ocean to get it.

I don’t want people to:

feel like buying a burrito is a financial risk,
turn clothes inside out because laundry feels too expensive,
work their whole lives just to maybe retire at 65 while a handful of tech elites can tap out in their 20s or 30s and say, “We all suffer the same.”

I’m sorry, but we don’t.

And that’s the tension sitting underneath this whole travel experience for me:

On the surface, I’m just enjoying some phở and massages and cheap, delicious food.

Underneath, I’m marveling at the arbitrage — and wondering why we’re not angrier that the only way many of us get to feel this “rich” is by flying into someone else’s economy.

We still let billionaires rule our world like oligarchs.
We still chase the new American dream of exiting the hamster wheel as early as possible.

And we still pretend, somehow, that the game is fair.