I'm in Shaoxing tonight, getting ready for tomorrow's Porsche experience at Zhejiang International Circuit. But honestly, the Porsche event isn't the only striking thing I've encountered today.
Next door sits the AMG Experience Center. And parked outside, in the kind of formation you'd expect from a military parade, are dozens of G-Classes. Every shade imaginable — light yellow, dark orange, that famous pinkish blue, matte white. I stopped walking and just stared. Even in Shanghai, you catch two, maybe three, on a good day. Here they're lined up like inventory at a dealership, except this isn't a dealership. This is a single experience center in a mid-sized Chinese city. Then around the corner: three or four dozen AMG models. GT, G63, C63, S63 — all of them gleaming under the same afternoon light, arranged like brushstrokes on a very expensive canvas. I didn't count. I didn't need to.
A single G-Class runs around 2 million RMB. That's the type of car most of China's 1.4 billion people will never get close to. And yet here they sit, parked casually, as if they were shopping carts. Every car wears a Zhejiang sticker — meaning these particular vehicles belong to this one location. Multiply that across the country, then the planet, and you start to feel something shift in your chest.
It reminded me of a trip to Germany in 2018. I was at a train station — Berlin or Munich, I can't recall which — and I watched a double-decker freight train roll slowly past, its flatbeds stacked with S-Classes, dozens of them, headed to port, bound for everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per car, moving like grain. Ordinary cargo.
That's the thing about scale. It doesn't change the object. It changes the observer.
For most people, a G-Class is a lifetime dream. For Mercedes-Benz, it's a unit. For a billionaire, it's a Tuesday. The car is identical in all three cases. What differs is the altitude of the person looking at it.
And this isn't only true for material things. It's just as true for ideas, for problems, for risk. The entrepreneur who has failed ten times reads a market downturn differently than the one facing their first. The historian who has studied a hundred collapsed empires isn't frightened by the same headlines that terrify everyone else. Knowledge, like capital, compresses cost. It makes the expensive feel ordinary — not by making you reckless, but by giving you genuine perspective on what something actually is, stripped of its mythology.
Expensive things become inexpensive at the right altitude. The question is always: how high up are you standing?