To afford something means you don't have to give it a second thought. If you're even considering whether you can handle it, you simply can't — because true affordability requires no contemplation of conditions or consequences.
A person's ceiling is determined by their talent, and how closely they can approach it depends on education—the essence of which is an arms race, a money-burning game.
If you take your family to a high-end hotel in Sanya for a week, it's about 10,000 yuan per person. If you take your family overseas—for example, to Tahiti—for a week, it's about 30,000 yuan per person. These are still within the spending range of ordinary people. But if you really want to go to those exclusive private islands that only celebrities and the elite frequent, it can easily run 100,000 to 200,000 yuan per person for a week.
In other words, for 98% of people, studying how to make money from that 2% is the key to survival, rather than hoping to become part of that 2% right away, or even worse, adopting their lifestyle before you've actually joined them.