I woke up feeling intensely guilty. When I was young, I used to go into a dark box at church and confess all kinds of guilt: about talking back to my parents, about unkindnesses, about impure thoughts. But now I feel guilty about just one thing: not being a millionaire. On the glowing boxes of my adulthood, the TV and computer, people are constantly getting rich quick.

When Time Warner merged with AOL this week, some predicted the end of print, and my life passed before my eyes. But I was far more disturbed that I had lost yet another opportunity to cash in, or to cash out.

I worked at Time in the early 80s. The magazine was not on the cutting edge of technology then. When Time named the computer as its 1982 "Man of the Year" we were still pounding out our stories on typewriters. I didn't hold on to my Time stock. And on Monday many of my old colleagues became multimillionaires. If there's a way to lose money, I'll find it.

I called a Washington psychoanalyst named Justin Frank. I told him I didn't want to feel deeply inadequate just because I didn't know how to day-trade.

He confessed his own feelings of inadequacy. "As a psychoanalyst, I subjectively feel like a dinosaur because I am exploring things in depth, and in the meantime everyone around me has got rich.

"We are moving into an era of decisiveness as opposed to an era of thoughtfulness. People feel guilty if they have a subconscious identification with Hamlet."

To trade or not to trade. I never cared about money before. It was not what Country Joe and the Fish taught me to value.

Once upon a time, money was an occasion for guilt. The robber barons who had exploited the poor would cleanse their lucre by buying great art or pouring it into charity; the Guilted Age. But now the only remorse that people feel about money is, why haven't they made more? "Once, new money tried to disguise itself as old money," says Michael Lewis, who wrote "The New New Thing," about a Silicon Valley billionaire.

"It gave some of itself away. It dressed itself up in airs and pretensions. Now old money cringes in the face of new money. Now even new money gets stale fast, and has a sell-by date."

We are obsessed about making money with our money. Making an honest living does not seem like a particularly sensible thing to do any more when you can simply hold on to a stock that rises to the stratosphere. "I have never seen so many disgruntled people at the peak of a bull market," says James Stewart, the author of "Den of Thieves" about the Wall Street scandals of the 80s and now an editor at Smart Money.

"People look at their portfolios going up 40% last year and they are whining and complaining to me that they didn't own Qualcomm. They don't even know what Qualcomm makes. If they had Qualcomm, they whine they wish they had more of it.

"Everybody brags about their gains. Nobody talks about their losses. As a subject for boasting, portfolios have supplanted sports and sex."

Jim Cramer agrees. He is the money manager who founded TheStreet.com: "People used to be mortified to talk about how much money they made. Now they get in my face and say, 'I caught 79 points on Oracle, what did you catch?' "

In the old days, you had to be intrepid or the owner of a Master's in business administration to get in on a gold rush.

Now your personal trainer knows as much about one-day price movements as Warren Buffett.

"It's not like a land grab, where you had to go out west, brave native Americans and horrible rains and run into the Donner party," Mr Cramer says.

"You don't have to brave anything at all. You just have to have a predilection not to sell."

So the generation that prided itself on its idealism has finally found its true signature. And the question that the children will ask is: "What did you do in the bull market, Daddy?" - New York Times