The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.

Sugar is here, the both of us, speaking straight into your ears.

I'm Cheryl Strayed.

I'm Steve Almond.

This is Dear Sugar Radio.

Oh, dear song, won't you please?

Share some little sweet days with me.

I check my love bags every day.

Oh, and the sugar you see in my way.

Hello, Steve.

Hello, Cheryl. So we are back. Today we're going to be talking about money, money, money, money, which I'm so interested to hear your insights about. And we have a couple of fascinating letters and a wonderful guest. But I think about money a lot. Money is just makes people crazy. And in their personal lives, their relationship with money is so twisted

and pathological. And that's certainly true in my life. I'm going to drop a little Freud on you.

I'm just going to do it. I come by it naturally, as I want to do. It is impossible, Sigmund says,

to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement,

that they seek power, success, and wealth for themselves, and admire them in others,

and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

So now I am going to read a letter from somebody who I think is struggling with these very confusions about wealth and what it means to be rich.

Dear Sugar, my family is rich. We were comfortably upper middle class when I was growing up, and now my father is one of the most influential people in my small home country. My

mother is also a successful lawyer. Neither of them comes from much financial privilege and I am

proud of them. They gave me things they never had, music lessons, art classes, summer programs,

elite high school and college educations in America. I'm a young theater director and writer living in New York.

Right now I live in my parents' fancy empty condo in Manhattan, which they insist they bought for

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