Wealthy Before You Know Who You Are: The Psychology of Young Founder Wealth

MONEY AND IDENTITY • July 28, 2026

The House Is Quiet and You’re Twenty Four

It’s a Tuesday in early spring, a little after four in the afternoon, and she’s sitting on the floor of a house she bought two months ago because the person who sold it left the furniture and it seemed easier that way. Her back is against a kitchen island she has never cooked on. There’s a wire confirmation open on her laptop across the room, screen dimmed, and a text thread from her old roommate she’s read eleven times and hasn’t answered. The house makes a sound she doesn’t recognize yet, some pump or fan cycling on, and her heart rate climbs before she can identify it. She’s twenty four. Two months ago she signed documents that mean she never has to work for money again.

Nobody warned her that this would be the loneliest afternoon of her life, and she has absolutely no idea who she could say that to.

If you’re reading this, you probably know some version of that afternoon. Maybe your version is a hotel room after a closing dinner where everyone toasted you and you felt like a hologram. Maybe it’s the moment your parents’ voices changed on the phone. Maybe you haven’t sold anything yet and you’re watching a secondary sale or a vesting cliff move toward you with a feeling you’d describe as dread if dread weren’t such an ungrateful word for it.

Here’s what I want to name immediately, because most writing on this gets it wrong in one of two directions. The problem isn’t that you’re too young to handle money, and it isn’t that you’re broken. The problem is sequence. Very large wealth can arrive before a person has had the ordinary opportunities that build a durable sense of self: time to try things and be bad at them, friendships formed on rough equality, a slow apprenticeship in saying no, and enough low-stakes failure to learn that failure isn’t fatal. Money arriving first doesn’t erase those experiences. It makes them harder to get.

This isn’t the same conversation as sudden wealth syndrome, though it overlaps with it, and it isn’t quite the post-exit identity crisis that hits founders in their forties, though it rhymes. What’s specific here is age. The wealth landed during the years that were supposed to be spent on figuring yourself out.

That gap between financial reality and developmental experience is what I want to look at carefully in this piece: what it actually is, what the research supports and doesn’t, and what closing it involves. I’ll say up front what this article is not. It’s educational writing, not therapy, not diagnosis, and not financial, tax, or legal advice. It doesn’t assume you’re struggling, because plenty of people in your position aren’t. And it won’t tell you your prefrontal cortex made you do it.

What a Developmental Mismatch Actually Means

Developmental psychologists have a name for the stretch of life that founder wealth tends to interrupt. The psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD, then at the University of Maryland, proposed emerging adulthood as a distinct developmental period running from the late teens through the twenties, focused on ages 18 to 25, in his 2000 paper in American Psychologist (PMID: 10842426). What makes the period distinct isn’t biology. It’s the specific combination of instability, self-focus, feeling in between, and above all identity exploration: the trying on and discarding of work, beliefs, relationships, and versions of yourself.

Now hold that next to a founder’s actual early twenties. Four to eight years inside one company, one narrative, one set of decisions where every choice is high stakes and increasingly public. Not a period of exploration. A period of extreme commitment, which is a genuinely impressive thing to have sustained, and also a very narrow window through which to have viewed your own possibilities.

There’s a second layer. Whatever you absorbed about money before you were ten is still running, and now it’s running against numbers it was never built for. The money scripts you learned in childhood don’t dissolve when the balance changes, and in young founders they’re unusually visible, because there hasn’t been time to build anything over the top of them.

This is where I want to be precise about the three levels this operates on, because the concept is useless if it stays abstract. Clinically, what we’re describing is a mismatch between environmental demand and developmental experience, producing a coherent set of adjustment difficulties in a person with an otherwise unremarkable psychiatric history. Metaphorically, it’s what happens in the proverbial House of Life™ when someone drops a fully furnished second story onto a foundation that was poured last year: nothing is technically wrong with the foundation, and everything about the structure now feels precarious. On a Tuesday afternoon, it looks like standing in a kitchen appliance store, being asked which range you want, and having a genuinely blank mind, because you have opinions about distributed systems and almost no opinions about your own life.

Notice what that mismatch isn’t. It isn’t a claim that you’re a child, or that you can’t be trusted with your own affairs, or that competence at twenty four is impossible. You built something people paid a great deal of money for. That’s evidence of substantial capability. Capability in one domain simply doesn’t transfer into the specific experiences that build identity, intimacy, and limits, and pretending it does is how capable young people end up isolated with a wealth manager and a therapist they don’t tell the truth to.

What Brain Research Does and Doesn’t Say About Being Young and Rich

You’ve heard the line. The prefrontal cortex isn’t finished until twenty five, therefore young founders can’t make good decisions, therefore the money is dangerous in their hands. I want to take that apart, because it gets repeated constantly and it’s not what the neuroscience supports.

Leah Somerville, PhD, a developmental neuroscientist at Harvard University, addressed this directly in a 2016 commentary in Neuron (PMID: 28009272), written specifically because claims about continued brain maturation were being used to justify youth-focused policy. Her argument is that the field lacks an agreed definition of what brain maturity even is, lacks a settled way to quantify it, and therefore can’t responsibly hand policymakers or the public a bright-line age. Brain change continues in some measures well past the twenties. There is no single moment at which a brain crosses a finish line, and “twenty five” is a rhetorical convenience rather than a measured threshold.

So I’m not going to tell you your brain made this hard. What is true, and better established, is that your twenties are a statistically loaded decade for mental health in general. A meta-analysis of 192 epidemiological studies covering 708,561 people found that 62.5 percent of people who develop any mental disorder have their onset before age 25, with a peak onset age of 14.5 years, in the 2022 Molecular Psychiatry analysis of age at onset worldwide (PMID: 34079068). Anxiety, mood, substance, and psychotic conditions cluster their median onset across the late teens through the early thirties.

Read that carefully, because it’s easy to misuse. It says nothing about wealth causing mental illness and nothing about founders specifically. What it says is that the window in which founder wealth tends to land is already the window in which most psychiatric conditions first appear, for everyone. If something is surfacing for you now, the simplest reading isn’t that the money broke you. It’s that you’re in the age range where these things surface, under unusual pressure and with less social scaffolding than most people your age.

In my sessions with driven women, this reframe does real work. The founder who’s convinced her insomnia and panic mean she’s uniquely unfit for the life she just built usually relaxes when I point out that a twenty six year old with no exit at all has a similar base rate for a first anxiety episode. Her situation makes it harder to get help, not more likely to occur.

When Your Whole Identity Was the Company You Just Sold

There’s a term from identity research that describes the founder pattern almost too well. The psychologist James E. Marcia introduced a framework of identity statuses, including foreclosure, in his 1966 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PMID: 5939604). Foreclosure describes a firm commitment to an identity that was adopted without a period of exploring alternatives.

The closest empirical analogy I know comes from sport, not startups. In a study of 72 varsity athletes surveyed during their final competitive season and again three months after retiring, strength of athletic identity significantly predicted anxiety symptoms after retirement, even after controlling for pre-retirement anxiety, per a 2017 study in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry (PMID: 28795636). The parallel finding for depressive symptoms pointed the same direction but wasn’t statistically significant.

The limits matter, because this is the kind of study people overclaim. Seventy two athletes is a small sample, it’s self-report, the follow-up is three months, and athletes are not founders. What it supports is modest: how fused a person’s sense of self is with a single role appears to matter for how they do when the role ends. That’s a hypothesis about founder exits, not a fact about them.

Consider Camila, 26, who grew up in a Mexican American family in the Central Valley and sold her developer tools company at twenty five, eighteen months after her Series A. She’s sitting in a rented office she doesn’t need, at ten in the morning on a Thursday, with a laptop open to a blank document titled “what now.” Her calendar, which for four years held nine meetings a day, holds one item: a dentist appointment. She keeps opening the company’s old Slack, which she still has access to for another two weeks, and reading messages that no longer require anything of her. Her chest feels hollowed out and slightly electric, the way it used to feel before a board meeting, except there’s nothing coming.

What I’d name with Camila is not depression, at least not yet, and not ingratitude. It’s the specific disorientation of a foreclosed identity losing its object. For four years the question “who am I” had an efficient answer that also generated a to-do list. The answer is gone and the question stayed. That’s a developmental task arriving late and all at once, and it’s the reason a lot of founders start the next company within ninety days, which is a very effective way to not answer it.

Two things make this different from an ordinary career change. Your identity wasn’t only yours, it was a company and a press narrative. And there’s no next rung: a promotion hands you a new role, while an exit hands you a blank page and a lot of money, which functions at first as less structure than a person needs. This is why a woman founder’s identity after her exit rarely looks like what she planned, and why the first year after an exit is the hard one.

This is also the moment where the language matters clinically. What Camila is describing sits close to what clinicians call an adjustment reaction, which the DSM-5 and ICD-11 both define around distress and functional impairment following an identifiable stressor, as reviewed in a 2019 paper on adjustment disorder in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (PMID: 31315203). I’m naming the category to make one point only: distress after a major transition has a recognized clinical shape, which means it can be assessed and treated. Whether any individual meets criteria for anything is a question for an evaluation with a licensed clinician who knows her history, not for an article.

The Relationships, Requests, and Advisors That Change Shape Around the Money

The part almost nobody prepares you for isn’t the money. It’s what the money does to the room.

Peer relationships in your twenties are supposed to form on rough equality. You split rent, you split the check, you’re all approximately as unfinished as each other. That symmetry is what lets closeness develop, because nobody has to manage anyone. Large wealth removes it, and removes it fastest in the friendships that matter most.

There’s suggestive research on why the closest relationships take the worst of it. A 2025 scenario-based study found that upward wealth comparisons harmed well-being across family, friends, and internet strangers, with comparisons to friends showing the strongest negative effect and stress mediating the impact, in the Frontiers in Psychology paper on wealth comparison across social distances (PMID: 41383418). It measures being on the lower side of a comparison, and it isn’t longitudinal, so I hold it loosely. It still maps onto what I see from the other side of the gap: your closest friends are the ones for whom your outcome is most expensive, because they’re the natural comparison group.

Which produces the two failure modes I watch for. Founders start paying for everything, which turns friendship into patronage, or they start hiding and minimizing, which turns it into performance. Both try to restore a symmetry that’s gone. Neither works, and together they’re the mechanism underneath the isolation of a founder whose friends can’t hold what her life has become.

Meanwhile the requests start. A cousin’s business. A former cofounder’s bridge loan. A parent’s mortgage. A college friend’s fund. Each one individually reasonable, each one a small referendum on whether you’re still a good person, and all of them landing on someone who has not had ten years of low-stakes practice at saying no. Boundary-setting is a skill built through repetition in situations where the cost of a mistake is small. Founder wealth removes the small-stakes reps and hands you the exam. If you never got to practice, learning what boundaries actually are and how to hold them becomes urgent developmental work rather than a self-help nicety.

I want to be direct about why the social thinning matters beyond hurt feelings. A meta-analysis of 90 prospective cohort studies including 2,205,199 people found that social isolation and loneliness were each significantly associated with increased all-cause mortality, with pooled effect sizes of 1.32 for isolation and 1.14 for loneliness, in the 2023 Nature Human Behaviour meta-analysis (PMID: 37337095). Those studies are general population, not wealth transitions, and association isn’t causation. Still: a thinning social world is not a lifestyle detail. It’s the variable I’d most want to protect if I could only protect one.

Autonomy is the third developmental task that gets skipped here, and it gets skipped in a way that looks like the opposite.

From outside, a twenty five year old with substantial liquidity looks maximally autonomous. She can go anywhere, fund anything, answer to nobody. From inside, a dozen new authorities appear at once, all more experienced, all speaking a vocabulary she doesn’t have yet, all with opinions about her life: a wealth manager, a tax attorney, an estate planner, parents whose relationship to her competence changed the day the wire cleared, and founders with strong views about what she does next.

Real autonomy isn’t the absence of constraint. It’s the developed capacity to disagree with a competent authority and to sit in not-knowing long enough to form your own view. That gets built through years of small disagreements where you were sometimes wrong and survived it. Compress those years and you get someone either compliant with whoever sounds most confident, or reflexively contrarian, which is compliance wearing a different jacket.

Here’s the pattern I’d flag. You sense that a decision is wrong. You can’t articulate why in the language the room is speaking. You defer. Then you feel a low-grade resentment you can’t justify, because these people are good at their jobs and you hired them. That resentment is information, and it usually means a decision got made in your life without your actual participation.

Family money dynamics amplify all of it. When wealth arrives in one member of a family, the system reorganizes, usually without anyone saying so. Some families become deferential, which is isolating. Some become entitled, which is exhausting. Much of the psychology of inherited wealth and its guilt transfers directly, even though your money was earned in four years rather than four generations. So does the shame that arrives with sudden wealth, which almost nobody expects.

Consider Imani, 24, who’s still CEO. A secondary sale eight months ago made her personally wealthy while the company remains private and unprofitable, which means she goes to work every day at a place where her equity is theoretical for everyone except her. It’s a Wednesday, and she’s in a one-on-one with an engineer who mentions offhand that his rent went up and he’s nervous. Imani feels her face arrange itself into concern while something behind her sternum goes tight and hot. She bought a house in cash last month. She has told exactly no one at the company. She goes home, doesn’t eat dinner, and reads apartment listings in a city she doesn’t live in for two hours.

What Imani is carrying isn’t guilt about money, exactly. It’s the impossibility of being both the person who holds other people’s livelihoods and the person who needs somewhere to be honest. The role has no seat for her own experience, and at twenty four she has not yet learned that she’s allowed to build one outside of work.

Both/And: The Money Is Real and So Is the Gap

Now the correction, because everything above can be read as an argument that early wealth is a misfortune, and that would be both false and insulting.

The best available evidence says large windfalls tend to make life better in durable ways. Economists Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, and David Cesarini studied Swedish lottery players five to twenty two years after they won, and found that large-prize winners reported sustained higher overall life satisfaction, on the order of 0.037 standard deviations per one hundred thousand dollars won, with effects on happiness and mental health that were smaller and not statistically distinguishable from zero, in work published in the Review of Economic Studies and available as the long-run effects of lottery wealth working paper. This is close to the cleanest natural experiment we have on wealth and well-being, because lottery wins are random in a way that exits are not.

Hold both halves. Money reliably improves the conditions of a life and doesn’t reliably improve the interior of one. Note too that lottery winners receive money without having built anything, which removes the identity rupture entirely. Founder wealth bundles the windfall with the loss of a role, so the founder version is harder and the lottery findings can’t transfer wholesale.

The affluence research points the same both/and direction. Suniya Luthar, PhD, then at Columbia University, and Bronwyn Becker studied 302 sixth and seventh graders in an affluent suburb and found clinically significant depressive symptoms among older girls, links between internalizing symptoms and substance use, and associations with achievement pressure, in their 2002 Child Development study of affluent youth (PMID: 12361321). Those are middle schoolers, not founders, and the finding isn’t that money harms people. It’s that money doesn’t protect people, which is a different and more useful claim.

So here’s the honest position, and it’s the one I’d want you to leave with. Most people who come into wealth young are going to be fine. Some are already fine and reading this out of curiosity. Some are quietly not fine and have been performing fine for eighteen months. All three can be true in the same friend group, and none of them says anything about the person’s worth or grit.

And you’re allowed to be grateful and disoriented in the same breath. That’s not hypocrisy and it isn’t a failure of perspective. If you’re waiting for the disorientation to resolve before you let yourself take it seriously, understand that the waiting is the thing that turns a six month adjustment into a five year one. You didn’t do this wrong. You did something rare, quickly, and the ordinary human parts of your life didn’t get the same acceleration.

The Systemic Lens: The Cult of the Young Founder

Everything I’ve described is usually experienced as a private failing, and almost none of it is private. It’s manufactured, and it’s worth naming who does the manufacturing.

Start with the founding myth, because the numbers demolish it. Studying the universe of US business founders, Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda found that among the fastest growing one in a thousand new ventures, the mean founder age at founding was 45.0 years, in their 2020 paper in American Economic Review: Insights. The mean age across all US startup founders is around 42, per the National Bureau of Economic Research summary of the same research. Middle-aged founders outperform young ones on the outcomes venture capital claims to care about.

So the veneration of the twenty two year old founder isn’t a response to evidence. It’s a preference with economics behind it: younger founders are cheaper, more available, and more willing to accept an arrangement in which the company is their entire life. The story that youth is an advantage is useful to the people telling it.

Arnett’s own framing makes the second systemic point. Emerging adulthood, he argued, exists only in cultures that grant young people a prolonged period of independent role exploration. It’s not a biological entitlement. It’s a social provision, which means it can be withdrawn. The startup path withdraws it in exchange for equity, and it does so at exactly the ages when the exploration would otherwise happen. When a founder later discovers she has no idea who she is outside the company, she’s not discovering a personal deficiency. She’s discovering the terms of a trade that nobody described to her as a trade.

There’s a class dimension too, and it’s where the research gets uncomfortable. Reviewing the literature on upward mobility, Edith Chen, PhD, Gene Brody, PhD, and Gregory Miller, PhD, describe a pattern they call skin-deep resilience, in which economic success and good mental health in adulthood can come at a cost to physical health, driven partly by prolonged high striving, competing demands between origin and destination environments, and a sense of alienation and not belonging in spaces built by and for higher-status groups, in their 2022 Annual Review of Psychology article (PMID: 34579546).

For the founder who came from a working-class or immigrant family, this is the piece that gets missed entirely by advisors who assume wealth is uncomplicatedly good news. She’s now expected to be fluent in rooms her parents were never allowed into, to represent her family’s mobility, and to feel nothing but lucky. The body has opinions about that arrangement, which is why what new money does to the body shows up in sleep, appetite, and gut long before it shows up in words. And the gendered version adds another layer: a young woman with money is scrutinized for how she spends it in ways her male peers are not, which makes ordinary experimentation feel dangerous.

In My Clinical Experience: What the First Year Usually Looks Like

What I see consistently, across founders who come in during the first eighteen months after a liquidity event, is a fairly predictable arc, and knowing the arc helps.

The first phase is momentum. Two to eight weeks of logistics, paperwork, celebration, travel, and the strange relief of tasks. Nothing surfaces because nothing is quiet. Founders tell me later that this period felt fine, which is true and uninformative.

The second phase is the drop, and it arrives when the logistics run out. Sleep goes first for most people. Then flatness or a jittery inability to rest, sometimes both in one day. Appetite changes. And a symptom I’ve come to expect: they can’t make small decisions. Restaurant, flight, paint color, all of it stalls, while last year’s term sheet felt easy. That isn’t fragility. Company decisions had a criterion, which was the company. Personal decisions require a self with preferences, and that’s the part that got deferred.

The third phase is where the fork appears. Some founders start the next thing immediately, which sometimes works and sometimes functions as an anesthetic. Some collapse into the depression that follows an exit. Some treat the year as developmental rather than transitional. The ones I watch come through best name the developmental piece early, and stop asking family and advisors to be their only mirrors.

Consider Naomi, 28, whose equity vested in a public listing at twenty two and who spent the next six years as a senior leader at the same company before leaving last year. She’s on a video call with me, in a chair she says she’s owned for four months and has never once found comfortable, describing the fact that she got engaged, bought a place, and ended a friendship of ten years in a nine-week stretch. Her question is whether she’s making good decisions or just making decisions. Her hands stay very still while she talks.

What Naomi is doing isn’t recklessness. It’s compressed exploration. Six years of deferred identity questions arriving simultaneously and getting answered at the speed she learned to work at. Part of the clinical work with someone in this position is simple and unglamorous: slow the tempo, separate the questions, and build in the pauses that a normal decade would have provided for free.

How to Heal: Doing the Development You Skipped

This is the part I want to be concrete about, because “work on yourself” is useless advice for someone whose entire skill set is execution.

Separate the money decisions from the identity decisions. They arrive together and they operate on completely different timelines. Structural money questions can be sequenced with professionals over years. Identity questions can’t be outsourced and shouldn’t be rushed. Confusing the two is how founders end up funding a foundation as an answer to a question about meaning.

Put a deliberate floor under the tempo of irreversible choices. A simple rule I’ve watched help: nothing structurally irreversible, including marriage, relocation, or a new company, inside the first year, unless it was already underway before the money arrived. This isn’t about doubting your judgment. It’s about giving preferences time to appear.

Rebuild contexts where you’re a beginner. This is the most reliably useful thing I recommend, and it sounds trivial. Take a class where you’re mediocre. Join something where nobody knows your outcome. Being new at something alongside other people does developmental work that the founder decade removed.

Find peers at your actual altitude, and don’t make them your only ones. Founders who’ve been through a liquidity event can hold what old friends can’t, and they can also become an echo chamber where the only acceptable identity is “person who does big things.” You want both: people who understand the money, and people who don’t care about it.

Practice small refusals on purpose. If you skipped the decade of low-stakes reps, you have to manufacture them. Decline a small ask you could easily accommodate. Notice what happens in your body. That is the training, and there’s no way around the repetitions.

Get help that treats the body and the history, not just the story. When a transition like this destabilizes someone, it usually does so along fault lines that were already there, which is why I work with EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic approaches rather than insight alone. If you’re weighing modalities, the practical differences between EMDR and somatic therapy for driven women is a reasonable place to start, and if the transition itself is the presenting issue, therapy oriented to what founders do after an exit is a more specific fit than general talk therapy.

Expect the timeline to be longer than you want. Founders arrive with a quarter in mind. What I see is acute disorientation easing in months and the identity rebuild taking a year or more. That isn’t slow. It’s the actual speed of the work.

If you want structured places to work on the money and worth patterns underneath all this, Money Without the Mayhem addresses money shame and financial trauma directly, and Fixing the Foundations™ is my signature course for the deeper relational work when the presenting problem turns out to have older roots. Both are currently waitlist only. If one-to-one work is what you’re after, you can see current options for working with me directly. And if you’d rather just read for a while before doing anything, I write weekly at https://anniewrightlmft.substack.com.

Who I Am and Why I Know This

I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist and a trauma-informed executive coach. I’ve been in practice since 2013, and I’ve spent over 15,000 clinical hours working largely with driven women: founders, physicians, attorneys, and executives whose external lives read as enviable and whose internal lives frequently don’t match. I founded a trauma-informed therapy center, scaled it, and exited it, which means I’ve also personally sat in the specific quiet that follows the end of a thing you built. I’m currently writing my first book with W.W. Norton.

I say that as context for the claim, which is clinical and not moral. When people tell me money at twenty four was harder than they expected, I believe them, and not because they were spoiled or unready. A life has an order to it, and this one arrived out of order.

What I want you to take from this is smaller than a plan. If the gap I’ve described is familiar, it’s a gap in experience, not in character, and experience is the one thing that can still be acquired. You can be the person who built something extraordinary at twenty three and the person who’s still figuring out what she likes. Those aren’t in conflict. They never were.

You built something real. Now build the rest of it, at a pace that has nothing to prove.

Warmly, Annie.

Related Reading

1. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties.” American Psychologist 55, no. 5 (2000): 469-80. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10842426/
2. Somerville, Leah H. “Searching for Signatures of Brain Maturity: What Are We Searching For?” Neuron 92, no. 6 (2016): 1164-67. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28009272/
3. Solmi, Marco, et al. “Age at Onset of Mental Disorders Worldwide: Large-Scale Meta-Analysis of 192 Epidemiological Studies.” Molecular Psychiatry 27, no. 1 (2022): 281-95. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34079068/
4. Marcia, James E. “Development and Validation of Ego-Identity Status.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3, no. 5 (1966): 551-58. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5939604/
5. Giannone, Ferdinando, et al. “Athletic Identity and Psychiatric Symptoms Following Retirement from Varsity Sports.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 63, no. 7 (2017): 598-601. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28795636/
6. Luthar, Suniya S., and Bronwyn E. Becker. “Privileged but Pressured? A Study of Affluent Youth.” Child Development 73, no. 5 (2002): 1593-1610. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12361321/
7. Chen, Edith, Gene H. Brody, and Gregory E. Miller. “What Are the Health Consequences of Upward Mobility?” Annual Review of Psychology 73 (2022): 599-628. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34579546/
8. Azoulay, Pierre, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda. “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship.” American Economic Review: Insights 2, no. 1 (2020): 65-82. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180582
9. Lindqvist, Erik, Robert Östling, and David Cesarini. “Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being.” Review of Economic Studies 87, no. 6 (2020): 2703-26. Working paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24667
10. Wang, Fan, et al. “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of 90 Cohort Studies of Social Isolation, Loneliness and Mortality.” Nature Human Behaviour 7, no. 8 (2023): 1307-19. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37337095/
11. O’Donnell, Meaghan L., et al. “Adjustment Disorder: Current Developments and Future Directions.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 14 (2019): 2537. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31315203/
12. Wu, Yi, et al. “Wealth Comparison Across Social Distances: Implications for Well-Being.” Frontiers in Psychology 16 (2025): 1661009. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41383418/

This article is educational and reflective. It isn’t therapy, diagnosis, or clinical advice, and it isn’t financial, tax, or legal advice. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a licensed clinician in your state.

Medical Disclaimer