I think you have a bit of a cartoonish view of rich people. Some are as you’ve said, the celebrity billionaires and so on, but a lot of them are actually doing just fine. They have the time and money to follow their passions, spend time with loved ones, experience the world, etc. Their wealth enables them to achieve the type of self-actualization that most people don’t. Meanwhile, the working classes are further and further atomized, alienated, forced to compete with one another, and generally ground down such that personal relationships become harder to cultivate and maintain, and the pathway to self-actualization gets further and further away.

It’s tempting to think that rich people are mostly soulless ghouls, and working people are much more in tune with their humanity and community, but frankly, that’s cope. The wealthy are the ones who have the means and opportunity to thrive, while everyone else has to spend most of their time and effort just getting by. Not all wealthy people are doing well, not all working people are doing poorly, but the Charles Dickens ideal of the rich and miserable Scrooge and the poor but happy Cratchit family is the exception, not the rule.

This isn’t a defense of the wealthy. Quite the opposite. It’s a damning indictment of the status quo. Everyone deserves the opportunity to thrive, and pretending that wealth doesn’t make it easier to do so obscures the reality and makes it harder to argue that wealth should be shared and controlled by everyone.