The longer I think about it, the more one question keeps returning: why does wealth on the internet always have to be shown.
It’s not about people boasting. That has always existed.
What strikes me more is something else: how visibility has become a condition for recognition. As if money that isn’t displayed isn’t fully real.
On one side, there are people who manage to succeed almost invisibly. Without narrative. Without celebration. Without any need for public validation. On the other, those who document every symbol of success: the watch, the car, the airport, the hotel.
For a long time, I tried to treat these two worlds as equivalent. Neutral. Neither better nor worse. But the longer I observe them, the harder it becomes to ignore the difference in tension that underlies each one.
It does not see calm. It sees movement.
It does not see infrastructure. It sees the front.
So if money is to exist within it, it must be translated into something the algorithm understands: image, scale, repetition. Wealth becomes a message, not a condition. Proof, not consequence.
In this sense, displaying wealth is no longer an aesthetic choice. It is functional. It becomes the only way to be classified, in digital space, as “someone who made it.”
The problem begins when the signal starts replacing reality.
Because the internet never shows the other side. It doesn’t show the costs, the tension, the instability. It doesn’t show a life subordinated to the next campaign, the next launch, the next moment that has to be “played well.” We see the outcome. Never the infrastructure.
As a result, it becomes very easy to confuse wealth with its imitation.
And success with its representation.
Perhaps that is why what is truly stable increasingly refuses an audience. If something is sufficiently grounded, it does not need constant confirmation. If someone is self-sufficient, they do not require collective approval to feel that their position is real.
And yet online, silence itself begins to look suspicious. As if the absence of exposure were a sign of failure rather than a choice.
I don’t know whether this is a natural evolution of media or something that is slowly ceasing to serve us.
But more and more often, success on the internet feels like pornography: each new image has to be stronger, faster, more visible to keep working.
And I wonder whether others see it too.
— Michał
Refined Money
