The serpent appeared to Eve and told her to eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. “Try it,” said the snake. “You’ll like it. It tastes like chicken. Plus, if you eat it, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ ”

Today, the fruit of temptation now falls from the Tree of How to Make Money. Money, it’s now believed, will make us as gods. In fact, this belief, that having a lot of money is going to drastically change our lives for the better, might well be called the root of almost all civilized Western and Eastern (and Northern and Southern) life. Being rich will solve everything, or so the popular mind tells us.

It’s not true. It’s a hell of a lot of work being rich, and it’s also often incredibly boring. Now, I could tell you this just as the result of my own experience, because my sister—a strict keeper of rules—says I am rich, and my wife, who insists she should have a Bentley for her next birthday, says I am rich. And for a journalist and economist, I am fairly rich. But I spend almost all of my time with people who are really, truly rich, as in jet-airplane-owning rich, and their lives seem to me like peonage.

Just look at a few of the burdens the rich bear: They have a vast amount of recordkeeping. Any really rich person worth a halfway decent eight-figure-or-greater amount will have a substantial array of assets (if he has any brains at all). They will be highly diversified in stocks, E.T.F.’s, mutual funds, hedge funds, index funds, real estate, private equity holdings, annuities, and natural resources. These things all throw off a vast spawn of paperwork and e-traffic. You cannot have a financial manager take care of everything. They make mistakes. They forget to do things. And they “accidentally” charge you the same fee on money markets as they do on stocks. If you are even a medium-smart rich person, you have to be part accountant and study your holdings at least once a month, and the more holdings you have, the longer it takes. Then you have to torture yourself about not earning a return on your investments that’s as good as those that you read about in newspapers and magazines and hear about in the locker room.

I want to be honest about this: Going through statements is not like having good sex, to the extent that I remember good sex.

If you are a normal rich person like the ones I know, you cannot have only one home. You have to have many homes. A typical well-heeled man or woman will have a home in a large city like New York, a home in a skiing area like Vail, a home in a warm winter resort like Palm Springs, Indian Wells, or Palm Beach, and a pied-à-terre in a foreign capital. Even I, a migrant laborer compared with the truly rich, have a home in Beverly Hills, a home in Malibu, a writing retreat in Rancho Mirage, another in a high-rise condo in West Hollywood, and a pied-à-terre in Washington, D.C., (which is sort of like a foreign capital nowadays) and some others I won’t mention right now.

Every one of these houses has taxes that need to be paid, plumbing that needs to be fixed, walls that need to be repainted, air-conditioning that needs fixing if it breaks when the weather is truly sweltering, DSL service that needs reconnection if it stops working when the stock market is down 200 points in one morning, and—bien sûr—swimming pool pumps and filters that require posthaste fixing if they break at 2 a.m. and make a sound like a fire engine all night long.