Jeff Bezos is Telling You Something

As the wealthiest person in the history of the world, Jeff Bezoscan make news just by switching his preferred brand of morning coffee.  However, the news of his impending divorce(and immediate attachment to another partner) seems to be significant in adifferent kind of way.

It’s not just that Jeff is super-rich and also is getting divorced.  It’s that he is super-rich and yet isgetting divorced. Not that most people would assume that wealthy people arenecessarily successful spouses; rather, the point is that it underscores what itreally takes to succeed at life, and what success even means.

I should point out here that I am in no way judging JeffBezos. I don’t know what happened in his marriage, what they tried or didn’ttry to remedy things, whether his wife was a saint or a scoundrel. None of uswill ever know, and it’s not our business. But the point is that neither Jeff nor his ex-wife can be happy abouthow things have turned out. Perhaps they are happier to be splitting than theywould be to remain together, but it’s safe to say they did not get married withthe intent of enjoying a few decades together then parting ways. That wasn’t theinitial plan, I would wager.

So there is a loss here. And it’s a big one. Researchhas shown that the single greatest factor in a person’s happiness andwell-being is the quality of their relationships. If the relationship betweenJeff and his ex-wife was deficient enough to lead them to bail on it, it’sclear that it wasn’t bringing them the happiness it potentially could. We’veseen plenty of miserable Hollywood celebrities hopping in and out of marriages,and we know that being rich isn’t the same as being happy. Yet I think this episodebrings home the point even more strongly. This isn’t just another wealthy thecelebrity. It’s the guy at the very top of the totem pole, and even he wasunable to maintain a successful relationship. (Again, this is not to say thathe is or is not at fault – it just means that even billions of dollars are not validcurrency for a happy marriage.)

Although we all know in our heads that money can’t buy love, too many of us still end up spending more of our time, energy, and focus on our jobs and our financial success than on our families, our marriages, and our relationship success. The Bezos divorce ought to serve as a wakeup call for all of us: you can amass literally more money than anyone has ever possessed and still miss out on the greatest thing life has to offer: a deep, meaningful, lasting relationship.