I cannot remember a time when I was not conscious of wealth. At the age of seven, attending a private Quaker school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was embarrassed when wealthier friends from the Boston suburbs came over to my house, which was small, compared with theirs. Later, living in Arlington, Virginia, and at a public school, I felt the opposite: sheepish about a house that was grander than some of my friends’ homes. House size was one of the earliest metrics by which I clocked wealth.
Wealth was always something I quietly wrestled with. My father grew up in a poor farming family, but my mother came from money: her father was an early billionaire. Though I was raised materially as middle class, my own identity has had influxes from both extremes of the class circumstances into which my parents were born – inheriting a confidence and adventurousness, even feelings of invincibility, that come with privilege; while also tapping into the thriftiness, stoic resilience and determination that come from bootstrapping.
My grandfather, who never questioned his standing, pursued wealth with singular dedication. My early memories of him are anchored in his country estate in Millbrook, New York; I caught salamanders by the pool; visited the kennels where he kept hunting dogs; caviar was regularly served with dinner. Though he’s now in his 90s, his shadow looms large – as a patriarch who scandalised his WASPy beach club in Southampton with his European Speedos, competed in every endeavour (even beating my brother and me at backgammon as children), and whom others craned to impress, though he lived very privately.
A postwar Greek immigrant from a prominent shipping family in Athens, my grandfather arrived in the United States aged six, and came of age during the Greek shipping boom fuelled by the maritime handover of naval ships. Decommissioned ships purchased cheaply and repurposed to service newly expanded trade routes meant that Greeks dominated postwar shipping on the back of cheap bank loans guaranteed by the Greek government. As the only son in a family of daughters, my _Papou_ was the chosen one to carry on his father’s industrial legacy. In his early 20s, he experienced this birthright as a heavy weight, and rebelled. He dropped out of Princeton, wanting to pursue the bohemian dream and write novels, until my grandmother became pregnant with my mother and put an end to his literary aspirations. Dutifully, he stepped into the role of provider and shipping tycoon.
Upon his father’s death, my grandfather inherited a majority share of his father’s wealth and company. His sisters – veterans now of many legal appeals – maintain that rather than provide for his mother (who was still living), and for them, as detailed by his father’s will, he sidelined the women of the family, investing in his own business and art collection.
It’s not uncommon for the children and grandchildren of the super-rich to abandon their feathered nests
His own daughters, once grown, likewise received scant support compared with what they believed they were due (though he did provide them each with a down payment for a house and a buffer for retirement). My mother and her sisters skated through life with a Park Avenue mentality that was at odds with their more financially improvised circumstances. They favoured part-time work that afforded them time and flexibility, throwing themselves into the juicier aspects of living – travel, romance, motherhood, intellectual and mystical pursuits. They approached life with zest and dynamism – with _meraki_ (as we say in Greek, ‘to do something with love and soul’), compensating for a world in which the luxuries that they had grown up with were removed.
Given my own peephole onto the higher echelons of society, I became an observer of its eccentricities and many of its unenviable characteristics. The world of wealth was the ultimate insider subculture. I associated it with a frigid soulless quality that felt culturally void. As I’ve learned, it is not uncommon for the children and grandchildren of the super-rich to abandon their feathered nests and turn away from money and power. My ease with disowning class privilege largely came from my father. He grew up on less than $1 a day in a poor farming community in King City, Missouri. His county was one of the last to get electricity in the whole country. My dad was a walking Horatio Alger story, getting a scholarship to Harvard and charting his own course.
The author’s father (far right) with his four big sisters and cousins in King City, Missouri, 1954
The author’s mother as a baby with her British nanny in Central Park, New York City, 1959
My parents’ radically different class perspectives informed their approach to just about everything – my mom relying on an attitude of abundance, exceptionalism and, at times, entitlement; my father more cautious, frugal and risk averse – hardworking but given to bouts of shame in spaces not ‘meant for him’. A family friend once described the difference between my mother and father in watching them peel a pear. My father, meticulous, ensured no fruit was left on the peel. My mother was more slapdash. The observation stuck with me. I was constantly working to navigate between their worlds.
The author’s mother, photographed for a feature on society’s most eligible bachelorettes in _Town & Country Magazine,_ December 1981
Beyond my mother being a first-generation American and Park Avenue exile, my father’s ascension to the middle class likewise saw him enter a world far flung from the one he’d grown up in. In the region of Empire Prairie, Missouri, child labour and chores were part of survival. He slept with a hot iron in the dead of winter because, as the fifth child of seven, he didn’t have a room, but slept on the porch, exposed to the elements. His identity could not have diverged more from that of my grandfather, who resided in the glamorous Carlyle Hotel in New York for much of his later life, with a concierge, a cook and staff, yet both men were anchored in the idea of being ‘self-made’, a shared value that generated a degree of mutual respect between them.
My father was welcomed into my mother’s family. In fact, cross-class marriages were quite common in Greek society – especially when aristocratic daughters were paired with aspiring entrepreneurial merchant sons. There was a certain distrust of aristocratic sons, spoiled by luxuries of their upbringing: would they have the drive to achieve and provide?
I slept in a tiny bedroom without a proper door, but then I’d jet off to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival
Both my parents were terrible with money. Neither had learned about saving for retirement from their families. My father’s dad, a small farmer, was killed in a tractor accident when my father was 14, leaving no pension or savings. After it emerged that he had never paid taxes, his family faced crippling debts. My mother’s ‘loaves and fishes’ approach to her finances, meanwhile, left everything to chance inheritance. Both were outsiders in their own way.
The author’s mother trying out the farming life in King City, Missouri, summer 1982
The outsider identity was romantic to me. The extremes of lower- or upper-class psychology resonated with greater pulses of vitality and authenticity. When I was in my 20s, I swung between extreme frugality and lavish reward. In college, I hardly ever went out to eat. I slept in a tiny bedroom without a proper door for $320 a month, but then I’d jet off to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. I incarnated a Protestant work ethic by day; privileged hedonism by night.
Older and more tempered now, I’ve converted to the virtues of the middle class in a way that would horrify my younger self. I discovered a gift for navigating mainstream American culture like neither of my parents could. Embracing a middle-class identity has given me a sense of belonging, economic security and psychological safety. With time, I’ve come to appreciate the psychological self-regulation inherent in a ‘middling’ identity, to paraphrase the early English philosophers. David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Middle Station of Life’ (1742) offers an early endorsement of the superiority of middle-class life. He argues that the ‘middle station’ offers the ‘fullest security for virtue’, citing the challenges of being lower class as a life of ‘patience’ and ‘resignation’. He believed the middle classes have the greatest opportunities for friendship, wisdom and ability. I’ve come to agree with him.
The author’s parents shortly after meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982
The notable surge in billionaire wealth, power and influence is frequently in today’s news. A new billionaire is created roughly every day. Within the next decade, we are on track to seeding at least five trillionaires. A recent Pew survey on immorality found that only 18 per cent of Americans believed that ‘being extremely rich’ was immoral. Gambling, getting a divorce, having an affair, spanking children, and using marijuana were considered far _more_ reprehensible. What enables this permissiveness toward runaway wealth-accumulation?
In part, the eruption of a billionaire class keeps alive our own unclaimed and unfettered dreams of success, and exposes our own shadow-cravings for the spoils of their wealth. In other moods, however, we denounce them: don’t billionaires threaten the social contract to support an economy that works for all? Surely, we should make the billionaire an endangered species and tax them out of existence. Billionaires behaving badly, after all, has become quite a theme. We’ve all read about tech titans micro-dosing ketamine, influencing political elections and policy, holding lavish weddings, fathering children out of a misguided ethical concern about population growth, and acting out a toxic masculine script equipped with prepper compounds and ayahuasca retreats. Some psychologists have gone so far as to diagnose in the super-rich a ‘constellation of interlinked personality traits – Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism.’ They call this cluster the ‘Dark Triad’, and see it as endemic to the billionaire class.
The sociopathic and luxury-seeking qualities of the billionaire would have troubled moral philosophers of old. Many early modern thinkers wrestled with the consequences of newfound consumerism and were deeply sceptical of ‘luxury’, believing it led to individual and social dysregulation. As the 18th-century French poet and philosopher Jean François de Saint-Lambert wrote: ‘the primary cause of luxury is our lack of satisfaction with our situation, our yearning to be better off … this desire is the cause of men’s passions, of their virtues and their vices.’ In the words of the 18th-century writer François Fénelon, ‘luxury poisons a whole nation.’ There was a sentiment among moral philosophers that we lost our inner balance in the _striving_ self.
Committed to fashioning a middle-class identity made possible by a newly industrialising era, these philosophers would have seen the ‘runaway’ entrepreneur we see in a Bezos or a Musk as morally bankrupt – a social threat and pariah, causing injury to society and themselves. In the words of the 18th-century philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury: ‘the same irregularities of appetite which make him ill to others, make him ill also to himself.’ In some ways, these thinkers anticipated the mental distress that we so often see with hyper-affluence, the excessive ‘individuality’ or inability to ‘control their impulses’, which were then seen as a challenge to the early modern social order.
Talking about their privilege was a ‘coming-out moment’. Many felt shame or embarrassment around their wealth
But you don’t need to be a billionaire to experience the way wealth poisons and paralyses people, most especially perhaps, when it is inherited. Studies show that anxiety in wealthy teens is 25-30 per cent higher than in less affluent peers. There are higher pressures of attainment, more isolation, disconnection and peer pressures, and a value attached to not displaying vulnerability. One multigeneration wealth-holder – a close friend of mine, whose fortunes trace back to the settlement of Manhattan and were then exponentially enlarged by a great-grandfather who was a railroad tycoon – observes that wealthy families are wrought with dysfunction. He talked me through a litany of family stories that included substance abuse, personality disorders, inter-family theft, the trauma of losing money, sex tourism, and emotional abuse. As a child, he’d had seven nannies in 11 years, and found his mother distant and emotionally cold: when he was seven, he’d threatened to jump out of his apartment window. Family lore proudly cited William the Conqueror as a direct ancestor, but at the same time, given his family’s resources, there was very little pressure on him to make something of his life. His own agency felt curtailed. He struggled to feel seen. So often ‘people connect to my family story, rather than to me,’ he said.
Several young people with inherited money have told me that they’d imbibed deep lessons from their parents about not talking about their wealth so as not to be taken advantage of. They kept their wealth secret from boyfriends and girlfriends, classmates and colleagues. For many, talking about their privilege was a ‘coming-out moment’. A lot of them felt shame or embarrassment around their wealth. One young inheritor, Remy (not her real name), who happened to be adopted by a wealthy business owner in the Midwest, told me: ‘Occupy Wall Street happened when I was in middle school \[and\] a lot of the news I was receiving was that rich people were evil and should be punished.’ She felt strange about her wealth, alone and ‘wrestling with it on this tiny island.’ She avoided any discussion around class markers that would ‘out’ her as being rich.
Silence, or ‘not talking about money’, is one of several social cues the wealthy receive. Marian Moore, an activist who works with wealthy people to help them redistribute or ‘liberate’ their money, refers to these cues as ‘money manners’. There is so much unspoken etiquette around money, ‘unconscious beliefs that go unchecked’. An heiress and member of the owning class herself, Moore’s work largely concerns changing people’s consciousness around money. Though she credits a lot of her social justice work to her family, she says that they never talked about money either. She felt this strong division between her family’s social justice work and her financial education, which largely came from wealth professionals. ‘I knew I was going to inherit, because a lot of my older brothers and sisters had. I was sent to the bank to claim my inheritance at 18.’ She believes a lot of wealth professionals teach you things that aren’t true: that you can give away only a certain amount; that you can’t touch the principal; that you have a responsibility to future generations in your lineage above others. She laments that ‘the whole industry and livelihood of financial managers is wrapped up in getting you not to redistribute your wealth.’
The German heiress Paula Schwarz shared a similar sentiment about how systems of wealth management are intended to keep people wealthy and conventional. She first inherited money when her great-aunt died by suicide. This aunt had endured longstanding power skirmishes with her family – a family that had become billionaires through the successful sale of their family-run pharmaceutical company in 2006 for $4.4 billion. For the Schwarzes, wealth and patriarchal control went side by side. Her aunt had wanted a role in running the company but was pushed out by her brothers. Schwarz describes even the act of her working as transgressive. Her parents think ‘working is for peasants’, she tells me. In a world in which capital begets capital, work for the wealthy can sometimes feel performative, an act of blending in.
Schwarz was hell-bent on breaking the cycle of elitism. I first heard about her through mutual friends in Berlin. Schwarz was part of an emerging scene of impact entrepreneurs working to address refugee issues and she founded ‘Startupboat’ in 2015 as an entrepreneurial incubator to support refugees and provide innovations and interventions that address the challenges faced by migrants. Years later, I reconnected with Schwarz, who has since moved to a remote Greek island at the centre of the migration crisis to continue her work with refugees.
For her, life today is a far cry from her upbringing where she lived under strict social control. At 18, she had to sign a power of attorney, giving her father control over her money. She couldn’t even get a cellphone contract or open a bank account in Germany without his permission. She describes the plight of her mother during that time as even worse, having money but no rights, and being ‘treated like a society dog’. Schwarz has liberated herself from her father’s stranglehold and now speaks openly about how money was used as a system of control in her family.
Patriarchy comes up repeatedly in these conversations around wealth. Women who had their spending policed by their husbands (my own great-grandmother had to beg her wealthy husband for her weekly ‘allowance’). Women who found themselves squeezed out of fortunes. Women who traded in their identities for social roles and to meet expectations of a certain class identity. Great wealth seems to heighten the patriarchal imperative.
In contrast to the portrait of the silenced or ornamental woman, my mother and her sisters were brave. Perhaps because of their father’s relative indifference, or their material disinheritance, they lived on their own terms – lively and forceful, and at times overly expressive (to the point of treading on other people’s feelings). While rich in vitality, they were materially broke for huge swathes of time. They moved through life as if they had never been taught the rules of the game, which of course they hadn’t. They certainly hadn’t been initiated into the rites of middle-class existence: financial planning, budgeting, juggling child-rearing without nannies and cooks, even paying parking tickets: all these were alien to them.
Later, I came to see my mother and her sisters as you might regard exiles, living with a profound sense of dislocation from their class identity. But as a child I perceived them to be free as wanton goddesses without a dominion. The younger generation of males in our family describe growing up with their mothers as living under a matriarchy. These women’s rejection from their billionaire father paradoxically enabled an interesting, empowered female micro-culture, making it difficult for any man (child or partner) to have standing.
In bequeathing his children less than 1 per cent of his approximately $103 billion fortune, Bill Gates is allowing them to carve out their own identities
Since my mother’s relative disinheritance in many ways forged her emancipation, my grandfather might have done her a service in forcing her hand at independence: she was able to make a life of her own. Still, not inheriting the family’s wealth left a wound. At some level, it meant not being loved.
For others, the path of redistributing wealth or reckoning with the karmic debts of wealthy forebears brings a renewed sense of purpose, belonging and societal responsibility. In a YouTube interview with Raj Shamani in 2025, Bill Gates said that leaving children massive wealth ‘wouldn’t be a favour to them … I want to give them the chance to have their own earnings and success.’ In bequeathing his children less than 1 per cent of his approximately $103 billion fortune, he is allowing them to carve out their own identities.
Brian (not his real name), a young person with wealth and privilege from Portland, Oregon, whose family initially inherited $15-16 million, describes his journey as ‘focused on freeing myself’, pursuing liberation from the karmic debts of his ancestors. For Brian, wealth redistribution is key to ‘own\[ing\] his shit and his family’s historic legacy.’ His family made most of their money in the mid-1900s, from selling pipe and hardware supplies to developers in the Portland area. Today, Brian is redistributing money to Indigenous sovereignty, housing and racial justice, and other causes in line with his annual redistribution plan. He redistributes in areas where his family’s wealth was extracted, perpetuating and benefitting from ‘structural harm’. Brian says it ‘has taken \[him\] a long time to come out of his shell’, and that his wealth confined him in a small ‘range of allowable relationships and reflections’. He calls out the habit of ‘being agreeable’ as part of wealth culture.
Brian is also a member of an organisation called Resource Generation that actively organises people aged 18 to 35 with access to wealth and class privilege to engage in wealth redistribution. I first learned about Resource Generation from my college friend Adam, who’d morally wrestled with a $1 million inheritance in his 20s. At the time, I thought his self-consciousness and fragility felt off-putting: in the scheme of things, his inheritance was tiny and could easily secure him a house or education for his children. I found myself channelling a judgmental and pragmatic auntie: ‘Why dismantle your privilege?’ Even Adam would admit that his anguish around wealth and that of many of his peers from Resource Generation was inconsequential. Thinking ethically about how to spend $1 million or $5 million or even $10 million won’t course-correct the deep structural inequalities of the world. It would take a restructuring of capital at a different scale – billionaires in lockstep – to truly reverse course.
She’s able to give away more money than she makes without it having any substantial impact on her life
What I found in Resource Generation was an awareness incubator – a certain therapeutic journey that wealthy members had undertaken to scrutinise themselves and the structural conditions that had led to their fortunes. The journey they’d gone on was profound. They could talk about their money with ease. They seemed healed from the paralysis that can come with wealth.
Another member, Erin (not her real name), originally from Tokyo, inherited wealth from her father and grandfather who worked in investment banking and finance. She shared how her parents, ‘Reagan-conservative types’, would be against her engaging in wealth redistribution: ‘They would see it as a rejection of their work and sacrifices.’ Nevertheless, her trust gives her freedom ‘to spend money in ways and on causes they don’t approve.’ She’s able to give away more money than she makes without it having any substantial impact on her life. For her, coming to this conclusion was profound. It meant letting go of an artificial scarcity mindset.
We don’t think of wealthy people as possessing a scarcity mindset, but for many intergenerational wealth-holders it is a deeply ingrained mentality, passed on by frugal forebears. A wealthy friend explained this psychology to me: ‘When the world feels unsafe or when people feel insecure, that scarcity mindset can become contagious.’ It can be this faux feeling of ‘not having enough, even for the wealthiest.’ In this mindset, any form of substantial philanthropy can be dubbed ‘financially irresponsible’. The scarcity mindset creates a justification for hoarding wealth. Many families have lived through ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ economies, and know all too well how wealth can fluctuate. As a boy, my grandfather witnessed people starving during the Great Famine in Greece in the 1940s, begging for food at the gates of his house. Wealth afforded him protection, but taught him that, if he didn’t work hard, he too could be a step away from hunger. For many ultra-wealthy people, hoarding is essential to their economic security and the security of their lineage.
Erin said that one impetus for her joining Resource Generation was that she felt like her wealth was the product of deep inequality, but she also felt psychologically crippled by her parents’ fears and programming around money. Resource Generation ‘helped me face up to that and start redistributing my money more significantly.’ In her graduate research and previous international development work, Erin has been working to understand how ‘to make changes to the international financial system that would make it less extractive.’ In many ways, it feels like she is working against the legacy of the financiers who created the conditions of her privilege.
At the same time, Erin says she doesn’t have any friends who are working class. She believes part of the psychology she’s had to wrestle with is the unspoken wealth ideology that ‘the rest of the world exists to serve me’. She doesn’t connect easily with working-class people or people outside her class background – another thing she wants to remedy.
One young heiress that Marian Moore worked with famously disinherited herself. Elspeth Gilmore, an heir to the Publishers Clearing House, wanted to transform her class identity. She didn’t want to be part of an ‘owning class’ anymore, and asked Moore to support her in redistributing $7 million. In 2016, she took a more unusual, experimental and relational approach to giving this money away – inviting a group of 12 people (cross-class and racially diverse artists, activists and movement organisers) who each received $200,000 to invest in social justice and an additional $100,000 as a personal gift, followed by a second $230,000 disbursement, no strings attached.
Elspeth’s approach is radical for the economic mutualism she created. In the US right now, economic connectedness (relationships between classes) is lacking. Yet, economic mobility – and therefore, the cultural ideology of the US built on a ‘land of opportunity’ ideal – is dependent on creating a culture of class exchange. Bootstrapping or grit don’t bring economic gains. Relationships do. Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, has shown this in his work on social capital and economic mobility. His research points out that economic connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of economic mobility. And that, increasingly, these cross-class friendships are diminishing.
My grandfather renounced his Greek citizenship to protect his wealth by becoming a citizen of the Bahamas
While some of the world’s wealthiest people are wrestling with their privilege and social responsibilities, too many are basking in their power. Even philanthropy culture is often a vanity play, allowing the wealthy to boost their social reputation with little reckoning or any genuine relationships with those who have less. In the words of Aaron Horvath, a sociologist at Stanford and an expert on philanthropy and civic culture, who has started a new initiative called Private Wealth and the Public Good, ‘philanthropy has more often helped valorise affluent citizens, bypassed democratic processes, and advanced the ideology that private accumulation naturally serves public ends.’
One of the pieces of legislation Horvath is tracking is the ‘billionaire tax’ in California, which, if passed, could impose a one-off extra 5 per cent tax on the ultra-wealthy. The fear is that such a tax would push billionaires out of the state and into tax-free havens, and offshore accounts. My own grandfather never became a US citizen, and eventually renounced his Greek citizenship to protect his wealth by becoming a citizen of the Bahamas. This disconnection from place and nationality is at odds with some of the ultra-wealthy of old (titans and ruthless capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon) who nonetheless put their money to work to support local and national prosperity; and who invested in shared infrastructure for education, the arts, and culture. Some of the more paternalistic schemes that saw industrialists like Milton S Hershey and Henry Ford take an active role in ‘place-making’ can feel nostalgically refreshing compared with the place-agnostic billionaires of today.
Part of the immigrant trope is that there is always a ‘better place’ where prosperity can be found, encouraging the upwardly mobile to trade local roots for economic gains. So it is no wonder that many people who have pursued wealth have cut ties; no longer having a loyalty to place that would have carried more communitarian obligation. Seen in this context, with wealth accumulation as a journey of severance from social obligation and cultural contexts, you can understand how movements to tax the wealthy might be met with deeply ingrained defence mechanisms. The group Patriotic Millionaires is trying to change the pervasive mindset on tax evasion, spurring the ultra-wealthy to embrace shared prosperity and surrender to a fair tax burden. Its language is clear, and scathing: ‘wealthy Americans like us have rigged the tax code to give ourselves countless handouts, leaving working people paying higher rates than billionaires.’
Awareness around the merits of taxation is a significant lever for reigniting the wealthy’s social contract to society. But what would a more broad-based re-education for billionaires look like? Every year, I read about the billionaire ‘summer camp’ in Sun Valley, Idaho, which supports elite networking and corporate deal-flow during recreational activities like hiking, rafting and golf, and I think: what would a radically different version of a billionaire retreat look like?
I fantasise about the more existential curriculum with which I would microdose billionaires: it would be a dynamic learning experience with an intersectional component on feminist theory and racial justice, as an offset to bro culture, patriarchal culture and white supremacy. I would problematise philanthropy (from Victorian-era to modern-day models); institute immersive field trips to understand the complexity of poverty and inequality today; offer a social capital amplifier to build relationships outside of one’s bubble or class strata, and self-development classes that aid in excavating one’s authenticity (versus internalised class identity). Not least, I’d add a quick module in understanding the merits of taxation and a field trip to Scandinavia with some northern lights and dog-sledding thrown in to support hedonistic drives. Then to the Brazilian rainforest to learn how to be good ancestors and environmental stewards.
This re-education would enable wealth-holders to explore the phenomenology of their wealth – understanding it from a therapeutic and structural dimension. Developing such awareness would help cut through the distortions that great wealth creates – the habits of exceptionalism, a false ‘merit’ narrative, and a defensiveness around being ‘deserving’ or ‘entitled’ to that wealth. Ultimately, it would allow billionaires to reflect on the raw injustice of deep-seated inequality. While some wealthy people are finding avenues to migrate out of the odd world of privilege in which they’ve found themselves, there are many more looking to take up permanent residency in the wealth bubble.
Today, many billionaires indulge their own dystopian prepper fantasies, fortifying their escape plans and apocalypse compounds. But if we could replace these salvation daydreams with a more humanity-focused and noble endeavour, like ‘prepping’ for the common good, it could be transformative. If society is at risk of collapse, billionaires have the greatest power, resources and responsibility towards ensuring our collective survival. Even without the dystopian backdrop, billionaires can and should adapt, giving away their money and learning to become _mere_ multi-millionaires in order to support wide-scale social flourishing. Their own class descension can serve to re-empower humanity. And, as my mother’s experience attests, they may come to rehumanise themselves on the way down.