Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.

The line contrasts outward, socially rewarded attributes—money, physical attractiveness, celebrity—with the inevitability of their decline. Its pivot (“When those are gone”) frames aging, changing fortunes, and the fading of public attention as normal human conditions rather than personal failures. What remains, the quote suggests, is an ethical imperative: to be “useful,” i.e., to contribute, serve, or make oneself valuable beyond surface status. Read this way, it functions as a critique of glamour culture and a call to ground identity in durable purpose and responsibility rather than in temporary advantages.