About two thousand years ago, Athenians gathered on the slopes of the Acropolis to watch a new Aristophanes play: Plutus, a comedy. The play humorously took a shot at a contemporary problem in Greek society, wealth inequality. Plutus, the god of wealth, was portrayed as a blind beggar who could not distinguish the worthy from the undeserving, often resulting in the lazy and greedy becoming rich. The commoner aspired to earn more, but was unable to.

Athens was filled with ideas, including ideas about money, whether it was Xenophon’s Oeconomicus or Aristophanes staging plays like Plutus. It was all up for debate. Nor was this unique to Athens. In fact, cultures everywhere, through various points in time had their own ways of discussing wealth.

Today, we instead doomscroll on our phones, looking for dopamine and financial advice in the same breath. A familiar television celebrity with a six pack and gelled hair at a premium airport lounge. Cut to a cocktail edit, with bubbles flowing. An aspirational lifestyle. A sneaky ‘swipe right if you want to keep 95% of your income’ Instagram post. The swiping takes one to a list of obscure trusts that you can offshore your money into.

Another influencer posts on ‘making your money work for you,’ at the backdrop of a luxury resort. Swiping right takes one to the ad for trading FX CFD that the celebrity was paid to endorse, where one can take a speculative bet on the price of an asset.

It leads one into thinking that these risky investments are how money is made, not by working hard nine-to-five. The heady mix of a plush, easy and rich lifestyle and some money advice thrown in has definitely got its audience.

Post the 2008 global financial crisis, discussions about wealth in public are largely in terms of the dangers of inequality and greed. British and EU politicians across the spectrum find it hard to talk about wealth generation without flinching because it is always typecast as the extreme 1% problem rather than acknowledging that wealth is still an aspirational subject for the 99%. Nuanced arguments about the utility of wealth, of what can wealth create or how much wealth is enough, or even the fundamental question of the necessity of wealth creation, are not in the public space. The pendulum has truly swung the other way.

But politicians are merely following the unsaid cultural norms of the era. In its core, we have struggled to create a culture where we can discuss money at our dinner tables and institutions. A 2019 Lloyd’s study showed that, despite people being concerned about finances, half of the adults surveyed were reluctant to discuss money. Successive studies in more recent years show that people found talking about money a greater taboo than sex, religion or politics. The space for discussing philosophy of wealth, or even just personal finance, has disappeared.

Yet just because we do not talk about it does not mean our aspiration to attain a better, wealthier life goes away.

There is another interesting angle. Surveys show that younger people, Gen Z and Millennials are more likely to talk about money than the lucky Boomers. And this is understandable, because life has gotten harder for the young: 62% of Boomers owned a house at age 35, compared to only 49% of Millennials. Graduate jobs have seen dramatic cuts in 2026, making conventional formulas for success — like a good, practical degree — seem redundant. With a harder economy to crack where rewards are not as free flowing as they used to be, and competition much stronger, the climb up the financial ladder has proven to be tough. So the demand to learn about money has intensified, whereas the regular avenues of supply for culturally-engaging, philosophical and accessible financial conversations have struggled to keep up.

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, talks about achieving Eudaimonia, normally translated as ‘flourishing,’ and tools like wealth which are instruments to achieve this. A flourishing man spends money liberally, and is neither prodigal nor stingy; but the level of wealth itself does not play a role in flourishing.

It is not just getting information that is the problem, because that is abundant in this internet. It is the lack of a philosophy that underpins what we do with the information that is the bigger problem, causing us to wonder if the ‘get rich quick’ schemes are really true.

‘Personal finance’ in particular has become a term used to talk about monthly expenditures and savings, offering little insight into the things about wealth that indeed are personal — what we value about the freedoms that the wealth creates.

British writers have always been expert in revealing the tensions and decisions in the personal elements to wealth. In Merchant of Venice, the Bard draws out the elements of the personal in finance in the play, pivoting the narrative to the morality of lending. On the one hand, the merchant needed to borrow money that he could use for business, though the Catholic church had prohibited lending with interest. And on the other, Shylock, the money lender, fuelled by his ill intent, took the opportunity to “get his pound of flesh” when the merchant defaulted on his loan. Shakespeare draws out the crux of issue: forcing a reckoning with our beliefs with respect to lending.

Same is the case when we start to wonder about our personal preferences about the value we want wealth to create today — whether we want wealth to expand our personal liberties, or if it should be beneficial to the greater community, or whosoever else, and who gets to decide that.

When we start talking about money openly, we can limit the impact of misguided finfluencers. We have to stop characterising wealth and money as taboo and start creating a positive culture around wealth.

Shibusawa Eiichi, the father of Japanese capitalism, argues in his book The Analects and Abacus that morality and capitalism need not be at conflict with each other and are, in fact, inseparable in a prosperous nation. It echoes the Aristotelean principles where wealth is not a pursuit in itself, but is a tool to create human flourishing.  These conversations, like the ones from Nicomachean Ethics and our dinner tables, from generation to generation, from the slopes of the Acropolis to the standing seats of the Globe, have more truth in them than filfluencers can ever hold.

Without this, we leave the young to learn about money from whoever is willing to speak to them, surrendering the field to the sway of algorithms and finfluencer clickbait while politicians passively rely on the tax bills of the billionaires they must decry to sate public opinion. From the comedies of Aristophanes to the dramedies of Shakespeare, the conversation on wealth creation has always belonged in the public domain. It is time we reclaim it.

Original photo by Strvnge Films.