You are rich.

Rich is a pretty simple word, right? When I think of it, I imagine lavish, gold-plated cars, mansions big enough to be mistaken for Buckingham Palace and private jets. After all, a quick Google search returns pictures of people tossing money in the air, of folks posing in front of their personal yachts.

I’m here to tell you that those images are skewed portrayals of the idea of being “rich.”

Before you dismiss this piece as just another cheesy “be grateful, kids” article, hear me out. Yes, my goal for this column is to give you a greater appreciation for what you have, but it’s up to you to decide what you will do with it. I hope that is something.

There’s a website called Global Rich List, the premise of which is straightforward: type in your annual income, and the site compares your level of wealth to that of people around the world. According to the 2012 U.S. Census, the mean wage in the United States per person was $26,695, so I entered that figure on Global Rich List.

The results I got back were astounding. To earn that $26,695, the average laborer in Zimbabwe would have to work 26 years to earn the same amount. That’s nearly half the life expectancy (57 years) in the country.

That annual income boils down to $13.90 per hour. The average laborer in Ghana makes just eight cents in an hour.

On that same salary, if you wanted to buy a quick can of soda, it would take you just three minutes to earn enough for the refreshing taste. If you were an average worker in Indonesia, however, it would take you two hours if you wanted the same. That’s 4,000 percent longer.

And with that income, you could pay the monthly salaries of 164 doctors in Malawi. One hundred sixty-four.

Think you’re rich yet? There’s more reason to believe you are.

According to The World Bank, of the 7.15 billion people alive right now, 2.4 billion — that’s billion, with a b — live on less than two dollars per day. More than one billion — again, billion — lack access to clean drinking water, and 800 million go to bed hungry every day. All of the sudden, that half-priced shake at Sonic feels like a luxury.

In terms of GDP per capita, Malawi is the poorest country on the planet. Even if I switched things up and stopped comparing average U.S. wealth to the worst of the worst, as Americans, we remain incredibly rich. The 25th-poorest country on Earth, Tanzania, has a GDP per capita of, when converted to the dollar, $998. If you’re working for minimum wage in the United States, it would take you just over three weeks to earn the GDP per capita of Tanzania. That’s an entire country. And we’re camping overnight in parking lots to be the first to buy cell phones?

I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro in an air-conditioned two-story house, with practically unlimited food and drink upstairs. My iPhone 5s rests on the desk beside me, while behind me, a 42-inch television silently displays the night’s sports highlights. When I finish this piece, I will brush my teeth and climb into my warm bed. I don’t deserve any of this.

But I have it, and odds are, the way you live isn’t a whole lot different from the way I live — rich. It’s fair to say that it’s time to stop complaining about how pricey the next iPhone is, how we didn’t get our Starbucks this morning, and how the wi-fi signal won’t reach to the basement. Maybe it’s even time to physically help out those third-world countries.

Weird.