It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) was an Anglo-American essayist and aphorist known for polished, epigrammatic observations on manners, class, and self-deception. This remark belongs to the tradition of late‑Victorian/Edwardian social satire that treats wealth not as pure privilege but as a kind of social confinement: money draws one into a narrow world of status competition, conventionality, and tedious company. Smith moved in literary and upper‑middle‑class circles in England and was sharply attentive to the performative codes of “society,” making him especially alert to the way affluence can dictate one’s associates and daily life.

The aphorism flips the usual envy of the rich by presenting wealth as a burden: the “wretchedness” is not material but social. To be rich is to be surrounded by other rich people—those most invested in display, propriety, and hierarchy—so one’s freedom of companionship shrinks. The line implies that money can purchase comfort while simultaneously purchasing a milieu that is spiritually or intellectually impoverishing. Its sting comes from the generalization: the problem is not individual wealthy persons but the social ecosystem wealth tends to create, where conversation, values, and relationships are filtered through status.