What Wealth Cannot Buy: Alexa Clay's Billionaire Therapy and the Deeper Poverty

The pear and the poverty

Alexa Clay's father peeled a pear like a man who had once been hungry. Her mother left the fruit on the skin — abundance assumed, waste unnoticed. That image, small and domestic, cuts to the essay's center: wealth does something to the self before it does anything to the economy. It rearranges the senses. It teaches the hand not to linger.

Clay's essay, "Therapy for Billionaires" (Aeon, June 2026), is a brave piece of memoir-as-social-criticism. Her grandfather, a postwar Greek shipping magnate, is the essay's ghost: a man who accumulated art and influence while, by his sisters' account, sidelining the women his father's will was meant to protect. Clay uses him not as a villain but as a case study in what runaway wealth-accumulation does to a person's capacity for relationship. From there she moves outward — to the psychology of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, to the "Dark Triad" literature on narcissism and Machiavellianism among the super-rich, and finally to a proposal: something like a therapeutic retreat, a structured reckoning for those whose fortunes have outpaced their humanity.

She is right about nearly everything she names. And she stops just short of the question that would break the whole analysis open.

The diagnostic and its limits

The secular therapeutic frame Clay draws on is sophisticated. She cites 18th-century moral philosophers — Fénelon, Shaftesbury, Saint-Lambert — who worried that luxury destabilizes the inner life before it destabilizes the social order. She notes that anxiety in wealthy adolescents runs 25–30 percent higher than in less affluent peers. She distinguishes inherited wealth from earned wealth and maps the specific psychological distortions of each. This is careful work.

But the frame has a ceiling. Psychology can name the wound. It can sometimes dress it. What it cannot do is explain why the wound exists in a person who, by every material measure, lacks nothing.

The Catholic tradition has long held that this is not a paradox but a diagnosis. John Paul II, in Redemptor Hominis, described hyper-accumulation as a form of "abuse of freedom" that simultaneously restricts the freedom of others — though he was equally interested in what it does to the accumulator.[^4] The person who draws "maximum profit" and treats the other as a means to that end pays a price, John Paul insisted, registered not in the ledger but in the self. "The drama," he wrote, "is always man."[^4]

What psychology calls the Dark Triad, the tradition calls something older and less clinical: the refusal of gift.

The gift that must be received

Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of love begins not with the lover's decision to love but with the infant's awakening to being loved. Before the child can give, it must receive. It must find itself addressed, named, called into being by another's gaze. The self is not first an isolated subject who later chooses relationship. It is constituted in being addressed. This is not sentiment. It is ontology.

When Clay describes her grandfather's relationship to his sisters, his daughters, eventually his grandchildren, she is tracing — without quite using this language — the portrait of a man who stopped receiving. He became the address, not the addressee. Everyone craned to impress him; no one's gaze could reach him. Surrounded by staff and guests and admirers at the Carlyle Hotel, he was alone.

The tradition of Catholic integral anthropology, including the work informing Antiqua et Nova on human dignity in technological contexts, insists that the person is not first a subject and then a social being.[^6] The person is from the beginning relational, constituted by encounter with another who cannot be reduced to a function or a utility. Wealth, in its pathological forms, is precisely the systematic replacement of encounter with transaction. The billionaire does not meet the employee; he manages a resource. He does not receive the gift of another's attention; he purchases it. The self that only transacts — that never truly receives — begins to hollow.

This is the poverty Pope Francis names beneath the prosperity statistics: not only the poverty of those without resources, but the poverty of those whose resources have insulated them from the risk of genuine contact.[^1] "Wealth has increased," Evangelii Gaudium observes, "but together with inequality."[^2] The inequality is not only economic. It is existential.

The crisis of the therapeutic proposal

Clay's strongest move — and her most vulnerable — is the proposal for structured retreat: a therapeutic camp where the super-rich might do the inner work their wealth has allowed them to avoid. She imagines something like a truth-and-reconciliation process, a space for grief and accountability.

This is a genuinely good instinct. The Catholic tradition endorses examination of conscience, confession, reparation — forms structurally similar to what Clay imagines. But here is where the traditions diverge in a way that matters.

The therapeutic model, even at its best, tends to keep the self at the center of its own healing. The billionaire goes to camp, confronts his shadow, integrates his trauma, and emerges more self-aware. Valuable. Not sufficient. Because the wound is not first psychological; it is relational. And a relational wound cannot be healed in a workshop. It can only be healed in an encounter — a real one, with a real other, who cannot be managed or optimized or discharged by writing a check.

Benedict Groeschel, who spent decades working with people at every level of material fortune, used to insist that the rich man's problem is not that he has too much money but that he has too few genuine relationships — relationships in which he is not the patron but the petitioner. The healing he needs is not insight but dependence: learning, perhaps for the first time, what it means to need someone who cannot be paid to be there.

Evangelii Gaudium frames this as a theological imperative: "Money must serve, not rule."[^3] But serving requires actual encounter with those being served, not administered philanthropy. The ancient claim Clay quotes from John Chrysostom (via Francis) lands harder than most of us want to let it: "Not to share one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them."[^2] The claim is not primarily about taxation. It is about the structure of reality. Goods held in isolation are goods severed from their source. The person who cannot give has not yet understood what he received.

What the pear still teaches

Clay ends her essay in the middle class, which she has learned, somewhat against her younger self's romanticism, to love. There is wisdom in that landing. Hume was not entirely wrong that the "middle station" offers particular opportunities for friendship and for the practice of virtue. But the tradition she is reaching toward — without quite grasping its handholds — suggests the question is not where on the wealth spectrum one stands. It is whether one has learned to stand before another person: to be seen, to be addressed, to receive without managing the reception.

The pear her father peeled so carefully was not only frugality. It was a kind of reverence — for the fruit, for the labor behind it, for the fact that it might run out. Her grandfather presumably never peeled his own pear. In that small, repeated delegation of the ordinary, something was lost: the daily practice of finitude, of need, of things that cost what they cost.

Whatever therapy the billionaire class eventually receives — and Clay is right that they need something — the deepest medicine will not come from better self-knowledge. It will come from the shock of genuine encounter: the moment when another person's irreducibility breaks through the managed surface of a managed life, and the self, surprised, finds it has been addressed all along.

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References

[^1]: Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Infinita (2024): "the dignity of the poor is doubly denied because of the lack of resources available to meet their basic needs."

[^2]: Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013): "Not to share one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood."

[^3]: Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013): "Money must serve, not rule!"

[^4]: John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis (1979): "The person who, on the one hand, is trying to draw the maximum profit and, on the other hand, is paying the price in damage to the person."

[^6]: Pontifical Academy of Life, Antiqua et Nova (2025): "it is unworthy to transfer responsibility from man to a machine."