answer:“Offensive” needs to be retired. Obviously, it’s easy to find the concept of being rich as isolating and challenging to be ridiculous. But remember that African Americans have found it ridiculous for homosexuals to “compare” their struggles with race and discrimination. Rather than focus on comparisons or analogies and then getting out a ruler to compare struggles, maybe it’s possible to just acknowledge that life is difficult. We’ve had threads here on ask-public where we unanimously celebrated how much we all loathed the “first world problems” meme. While we certainly all might agree that there are relative levels of suffering among groups of people, it has become obvious that the “first world problems” meme transformed into a tool that was used against people’s legitimate suffering. Do I find it difficult to imagine that being rich is difficult? Absolutely. But do we know that lottery winners often discover that happiness was as elusive as it was when they were poor? Yep. Do we see famous rich people self-destruct and kill themselves or overdose? Yep. Am I losing sleep over the suffering of the rich? No. But can I honestly say that I would be better off creating a list of groups and people and ranking them in order of “legitimate” suffering? Absolutely not. I think this is too easy – the rich just seem such an easy target of derision. And this makes me pause – not because of the particulars or specifics. Rather, it makes the project of comparable suffering suspect. At least to me. Did I answer your question? Maybe not. Is it an appropriate analogy? Probably not. But being able to make that assessment requires that I exercise an intuition that I am entirely suspect of.