The Wealth Trap

Sometimes being wealth is such a pain. The fear of losing your millions never leaves your side.

You can't differentiate between friends, relatives and swindlers. You feel you have to keep up with appearances.

You can leave your home without being followed by cameras and news hounds. Life becomes a pain when your children think they own the world. Worse, your wife you owe her and not vice versa.

Nothing is a challenge anymore. You can buy most things. Even diamonds and cars lose their lustre. Who cares about automobiles when you have 50 in the humungous garage.

Colleagues and friends become too fawning and ingratiating. Who's the real friend? Poverty brings out the truth in all of us. Wealth blurs the lines of friendship. It is the harbinger of sad trails and even more sorrowful tales.

Fame is that elusive companion who keeps dogging you for all the wrong reasons. There's only so much you can accumulate without being de-sensitised and de-sanitised about living's truer paths and meaning.

If money is the arbiter of happiness, then only tycoons and moguls will be the only ones who have the key to peace of mind. Unfortunately, life plays jokes on all of us.

Wealth is not legal tender in the happy ranch. There's no currency but simplicity, honesty and integrity in the land of contentment.

Millionaires beware! The money trap buys not satisfaction but only a sense of well-being which, if allowed to fallow, leads to distraction and subtraction.

2008 may prove to be a year that dreams fall apart. So in a way, the playing field where joy is found will be levelled before long. Thus, we will find that at the end of life's journey, wealth is but another test that could make or break us.

Many rich people die unhappy. In fact, a large number of them are the saddest people in the world. If there's but one lesson we can learn from them, it is that true wealth like true happiness cannot be bought.

The real treasure is embedded in all our hearts and many of us wander all over the place and around the world looking for it when all the time, it is within us.