New York, NY — Several of the nation’s most powerful financial institutions are preparing to launch a comprehensive “Wealth Aura Compliance Program,” an eight-week finishing school for the newly affluent that promises to eradicate residual humility. Internally, the curriculum carries a blunter working title: Douchebag Training.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo Private Banking will pilot the initiative in Q1 2026 after executives observed high-net-worth clients “continuing to behave with humility, decency, and normal human tone of voice” — conduct they deemed “brand-dilutive to the wealth management ecosystem.”
“We’ve had cases where clients earning over $10 million a year were still tipping 20% or — God forbid — holding doors for people,” said Marcus Wellington III, a senior wealth-management advisor at JPMorgan who requested anonymity before immediately providing his full name and LinkedIn profile. “One client even said ‘excuse me’ when bumping into his housekeeper. It undermines the aura of scarcity we’ve curated around these individuals.”
The announcement has rattled both the wealth management industry and what one sociologist described as “the vast underclass of people who still think being rich is about having money rather than making everyone else feel poor.”
Diagnosing the “Modesty Crisis”
Internal memos cite a “sharp and alarming rise in nouveau riche modesty,” a condition executives warn could “erode public confidence in the natural wealth hierarchy and confuse the aspirational classes.” The banks now refer to the phenomenon as Post-Liquidity Modesty Syndrome (PLMS), afflicting clients who experienced a liquidity event but “failed to undergo corresponding personality deterioration.”
Symptoms of PLMS include:
- Maintaining pre-wealth friendships with non-accredited individuals
- Expressing gratitude toward service workers
- Driving vehicles more than two model years old
- Remembering names that cannot advance a deal
- Demonstrating awareness of prices under $100
- Feeling “weird” about having three empty houses
“These people got money but never got the memo,” one report laments. “They’re experiencing impostor syndrome backwards. They don’t feel like frauds for being rich. They feel like frauds for acting like assholes. This is the crisis.”
A particularly troubling case study describes a tech founder worth $340 million “eating lunch with his employees” and “asking his assistant how her weekend was — and then listening to the answer.” Another file notes the subject “made eye contact with a barista. Sustained eye contact. For multiple seconds. We’re talking about someone who could buy the entire coffee chain.”
The Eight Pillars of Insufferability
The $85,000 program (plus a $15,000 “materials fee” for a leather-bound binder participants will never open) walks clients through eight escalating levels of social weaponization.
Level 1: Aura Fundamentals & Spatial Entitlement
Students learn to enter a room like they own the building, complete with posture correction via a “swagger calibration device” (a rolled-up $100 bill taped to the spine), eye-contact dominance drills, strategic silence techniques, and the art of standing in doorways. A guest lecturer who once blocked an entire Whole Foods aisle during a portfolio call demonstrates how to maintain eye contact with inconvenienced shoppers to assert dominance.
Level 2: Speech Patterns of the Elite
Linguistic recalibration replaces words like “help” and “thanks” with “delegate” and “noted,” drills luxury brand pronunciation, and teaches the strategic humblebrag. Participants strike “sorry,” “excuse me,” and “is this seat taken?” from their vocabulary while practicing how to say “I summer in the Hamptons” without betraying awareness that it’s a sentence fragment.
Level 3: Financial Flexing & Casual Cruelty
Attendees master the art of making wealth everyone else’s problem: checking portfolios mid-conversation (advanced level: sighing afterward), lamenting tax burdens as a stealth brag, using “liquidity” to describe personal relationships, and deploying the “poverty proximity drill” to rehearse reactions when civilians mention actual problems.
Level 4: Class Disassociation & Empathy Suppression
Role-playing exercises train participants to recognize “the poor” through contextual clues like Costco memberships and visible concern about gas prices. Students perfect the Detached Smile, undergo therapy to forget pre-wealth realities, and learn the Service Worker Interaction Protocol — treating humans like furniture that occasionally talks.
Level 5: Children & Legacy Planning
Because insufferability must be heritable, modules cover naming children after things normal people can’t afford, youth sports as networking, trust-fund psychology, and explaining to heirs why they are better than their peers (both implicitly and explicitly).
Level 6: Performative Philanthropy
Students learn gala crying techniques, Instagram charity posting, naming-rights negotiation, and the competitive landscape of charity boards. “True generosity isn’t about impact,” explains program director Jennifer Ashworth-Carruthers. “It’s about ensuring everyone knows you could’ve bought another yacht but chose to fund this literacy program instead. The kids can’t even read the plaque with your name on it. That’s the poetry.”
Level 7: Relationship Recalibration
Students audit their friendships, identify relationships that no longer serve their personal brand, practice ghosting group chats, maintain one “normal” friend for dinner-party anecdotes, and rehearse prenup conversations framed as romance.
Level 8: Advanced Douchebaggery
Graduates learn to interrupt without consequence, offer unsolicited investment advice, craft humble origins mythologies, and deploy the ultimate power move: hiring someone whose job they used to hold.
Therapy for the Wealth-Conscience
Perhaps most controversial is the psychological component. Licensed therapists provide “financial personality recalibration” and “ego inflation therapy” designed to help clients embrace narcissism “as a healthy and necessary indicator of fiscal self-awareness.”
“True wealth is performative,” explained Dr. Linda Carrow, head of behavioral finance at Bank of America and author of the forthcoming book It’s Not Narcissism If You Can Afford It. “If you still feel guilty about your wealth, you’re doing it wrong. Guilt is for people who can’t afford therapy. Our clients can afford therapy, which is exactly why we need to eliminate that guilt through therapy. It’s very circular. It’s very expensive.”
Exercises include identifying “what was wrong” with pre-wealth versions of themselves, repeating “I deserve this” while staring at photos of multiple homes, and empathy reduction protocols that gradually expose participants to human suffering until they can watch hardship documentaries over lunch without blinking.
Success Stories & Dropouts
Banks tout glowing testimonials. Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sarah Chen now leases a Porsche she can’t pronounce and refers to former friends as “legacy relationships I’m strategically sunsetting.” Tech founder Marc Wellington emails in lowercase to assert dominance and schedules 15-minute meetings he leaves after three minutes. Patricia Vanderbilt-Hastings wrote a LinkedIn essay titled “7 Things Poor People Don’t Understand About Building Wealth.”
But not everyone finishes. Roughly 23% drop out citing “irreconcilable humanity” or “lingering capacity for shame.” One anonymous participant left after the “prosperity posture” drill required walking past unhoused people without acknowledging them. Another was removed for “dangerously stubborn moral frameworks” after pointing out that a single mother juggling three jobs might not be suffering from “poor educational investment choices.”
Expert Commentary: Teaching the Quiet Part Loud
Economic sociologist Dr. Raymond Foster calls the initiative an answer to the billionaire’s paradox: “They want credit for their wealth without accountability for what that wealth represents. They want to be admired for their success without anyone asking whose labor it was built on. It’s cognitively challenging. It requires significant training.”
Psychologist Dr. Amanda Reeves-Thornton adds that the program addresses a reverse impostor syndrome: “They’re rich, but they’re not rich. They have the money but not the weltanschauung of contempt. This training closes that gap.”
Critics are less diplomatic. “This is institutional sociopathy,” argues Professor Michael Rivera, who teaches business ethics at NYU. “They’re teaching people to suppress empathy, embrace narcissism, and treat inequality as a personal branding opportunity. It would be brilliant satire if it weren’t actually happening.”
Wealth Brand Protection & Competitive Pressure
In a joint statement, the banks framed the curriculum as “a necessary evolution in comprehensive wealth management services.” “Our responsibility to clients extends beyond portfolio optimization,” the memo reads. “We must ensure they project the confidence, authority, and appropriate social distance their financial position warrants.”
Internal documents describe newly wealthy clients who “maintain middle-class affect” as flight risks vulnerable to do-gooder advisors. “If we don’t train them properly, they might start thinking about their wealth in terms of social responsibility rather than social hierarchy. This represents an existential threat to our business model.”
Competitors are racing to respond. Morgan Stanley is developing “Excellence Embodiment Seminars,” UBS is piloting “Affluence Actualization Workshops,” and Bank of America is testing “Prosperity Personality Optimization,” featuring a farewell ceremony where participants symbolically say goodbye to friends earning under $500,000. Charles Schwab will offer a budget-friendly “Upper-Middle-Class Swagger Training” for clients worth a mere $5–$10 million.
Public Reaction & Cultural Shift
Online outrage has mixed with exhausted resignation. Critics call the course “late-stage capitalism’s mission statement.” Graduates defend it as “necessary for maintaining elite cohesion” and, astonishingly, “a form of self-care.”
Sociologist Dr. Angela Morrison warns that the program signals a broader shift: “Thirty years ago, there was at least performative shame around extreme wealth. Now they’re taking classes in how to flaunt it. They’ve moved from ‘quietly wealthy’ to ‘wealth as violence’ to ‘can I get a certificate in wealth as violence?’”
International expansion is already planned: London will receive the “Posh Intensification Protocol,” Dubai the “Opulence Maximization Program,” Singapore the “Discreet Dominance Training,” and China a “Wealth Face Enhancement” course. Domestic add-ons include “Philanthropy Without Empathy 2.0,” “The Art of Passive Cruelty,” “Cancel Culture Navigation for the Wealthy,” and “Succession Planning” for heirs who feel entitled while resenting their benefactors.
Demand from merely comfortable aspirants has birthed cottage industries like AspireRich’s “Fake It Till Your Stock Options Vest,” a $4,997 weekend intensive teaching tech workers to act as if they’ve already IPO’d. “Why should rich people have a monopoly on being terrible?” asks founder Trevor Musk (no relation).
The Quiet Part, Loud
Financial executives occasionally slip into honesty. “If our clients were still acting humble, people might realize that wealth is mostly luck, timing, and access to capital,” admitted one Goldman Sachs managing director. “We need them so aggressively confident that everyone assumes there must be a reason. The assholery is the reason. That’s the whole game.”
Another executive summed up the strategy: “We’ve already taught America how to go broke. Teaching them how to be unbearable while rich was the logical next step. At least we’re being honest about it now.”
Applications for the inaugural cohort are now open. Class sizes are limited. Terms and conditions apply. No refunds for persistent humanity. Side effects may include alienation from family, loss of pre-wealth friendships, and a sudden, expensive fascination with watches. If empathy lasts more than four hours after training, contact your wealth advisor immediately.