Young, Rich, But Not Good Enough

He was young & rich & very influential. In fact, he was one of the most famous young men in his day.

It was 1987. Kirk starts his autobiography with Ch. 1 entitled “On Top of the World.”

He was 17 driving his new convertible through Hollywood with the top down so girls could see who he was. When he stopped at a light he said

“I’d glance over, flashing my famously crooked smile.

I loved the double takes, and ear-piercing screams…

I was supposed to be the coolest kid on the planet…Teen magazines plastered my face on their covers…I received 10,000 letters per week, mostly from girls who wanted to meet me, touch me, marry me.

I had a fan club that sent out a variety of keepsakes—photos, T-shirts, buttons, even a pillowcase with my picture just the right size for girls to kiss my fabric-y likeness as they drifted off to sleep.

Wherever I went people catered to me. I had everything the rest of the world craved—money, fame, fortune, any girls I wanted.

 But something was missing. Halfway through Kirk’s autobiography, he says,

“I was 17 and had already surpassed what most people hoped to achieve in a lifetime. The disturbing part was it all felt very empty to me, like biting into a big chocolate Easter bunny: it looks great on the outside, then pop!—hollow on the inside…

I felt like I would have traded it all for something else, but what the ‘else’ was, I had no idea. It was kind of depressing. I always thought being rich and famous would make me infinitely happy. But it didn’t.”

Many of us think “if I were rich, I’d be happy. My problems would be solved.”

So we spend our lives trying to build wealth.  Or we think, “If I could be young again.”

We buy gym memberships, vitamins, beauty creams, and Botox to look and feel younger. But does that really fulfill our deepest needs?