The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit. - Morgan Housel

John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That's all you know about them.

We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that's the (self-edit: only) information we have in front of us.

The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising.