What Are You Actually Worth?
By: Damintha Gunasekera
There is a question every Sri Lankan family asks about a successful person, and it is never "Is he happy?" It is "How much does he make?"
I have been on both ends of that question. I spent twelve years abroad, across multiple countries, before choosing to come home. During that time, I watched the country that supposedly perfected the pursuit of money begin to quietly abandon it as a measure of a life.
We have not received the memo.
Recently in these pages I wrote about irisiyawa, the habit of resenting the person next to us who rises. This column is about the deeper question underneath that habit: what we think rising means. Because envy needs a scoreboard, and we inherited a scoreboard with only one column on it.
The scoreboard we imported
In Sri Lanka, wealth means money. Full stop. The neighbour's son who landed the Dubai job. The cousin who sold her startup. The businessman with the new Prado. We measure people this way, we raise children this way, and we sling mud this way, too. Get rich too fast in this country and the whispers start: he must be selling something, he must know someone, it cannot be clean.
Money as the only scoreboard is relatively new for us. For most of our history, standing was measured in land, in learning, in family, in service to temple and village. Those measures had their own deep problems, and I am not romanticising them. But the reduction of a human being's worth to a single number is a modern import, and it arrived alongside an economic order that needed workers who would keep running.
Here is the irony. The people who built that order are now having doubts.
The Americans are changing their minds
The Charles Schwab Foundation runs an annual survey on how Americans think about wealth. The 2025 edition found that Americans believe it takes 2.3 million dollars in net worth to be considered wealthy. That number is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that when asked what being wealthy actually means, Americans now place equal value on happiness as on money, and rank physical health, mental health, relationships, life experiences and free time above net worth and material possessions. Eight in ten say they feel wealthy in the quality of their relationships and the amount of free time they have, whatever their bank balance says.
Think about what that means. In the country that invented the modern rat race, the runners are looking around and asking why they are running. I saw it up close. Five days a week, eight-hour shifts, living for Friday, dreading Sunday night. Paid just enough to stay motivated, spending it at the mall for a hit of happiness that fades before the credit card statement arrives.
The Buddha had a word for this, and every Sri Lankan schoolchild has heard it: dukkha. It is usually translated as suffering, but the more precise reading is the impossibility of lasting satisfaction. The pleasure of the new phone, the new watch, the new car is real, and it is designed to fade. That is not a design flaw of consumerism. It is the business model.
We knew this 2,500 years before behavioural economists rediscovered it. And yet we are the ones teaching our children that the number is everything.
What the number cannot buy back
I travelled recently in Cambodia, a country that has endured more than most, and one I wrote about not long ago for darker reasons. It taught me something else too. What struck me was not that people with little money seemed content, which would be an easy and lazy observation. What struck me was that they still had things we have traded away without ever pricing them.
Ask yourself what those are worth. Then ask what it costs to buy them back at fifty-five, when the money has finally arrived but the health is going, and the children have grown up around your absence. There are people in Colombo and in New York who can answer that question, and their answer is that you cannot.
This is not an argument against money. Money matters enormously, and anyone who lived through 2022 in this country knows that poverty is not noble and financial security is not vanity. Nor is this an argument against work, ambition or enterprise. We need more entrepreneurs, not fewer.
It is an argument against a single scoreboard. Your health is wealth. Your family is wealth. Your network, your experiences, the languages you speak, the places you have understood from the inside, the free hours you actually control. A full accounting of a life includes all of it. A society that counts only the money will produce people who are rich and bankrupt at the same time.
Why this matters now
Our education system was built to produce employees: sit the exam, get the job, work for four decades, collect the pension, die respectably. That pipeline made sense in the world that built it. It is cracking in this one.
And a bigger question is coming. If artificial intelligence delivers even part of what is promised, more people will face a question our grandparents never had the luxury of asking: when survival no longer consumes all your time, what is the rest of your life for? I do not claim to know how that transition plays out, and I am suspicious of anyone who says they do. But a country that has already answered "what is enough" will handle it better than a country still chasing a number someone else invented.
So here is the question I want to leave with you, the same one the Schwab survey put to a thousand Americans. How much would it take for you to consider yourself wealthy? And before you answer with a number, ask whether the people who reached that number look like the life you actually want.
We are sitting on one of the oldest and most sophisticated traditions of thinking about desire, satisfaction and the good life that humanity has produced. It would be a strange thing if the West rediscovered it before we remembered we had it.
