Horizontal Wealth: Doubling Down on What You Love

Terry Pratchett distinguished between vertical wealth—spending on status symbols and luxury goods—and horizontal wealth, where increased income deepens engagement with things you already value. If books brought you joy before wealth, horizontal wealth means buying more books, upgrading to better editions, and investing in finer furniture to display them.

Rather than using wealth to pursue new status symbols, horizontal wealth preserves and intensifies existing pleasures. Willison exemplifies this by building a library extension to support his work in “blind research”—pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without direction or immediate utility. The philosophy suggests that true affluence lies in having more of what you actually wanted all along.