You’re Thinking About Money Wrong

Think Tank #146

It’s the “root of all evil.” It’s coveted as the ultimate good. It controls lives. So many people think that if they just had a little bit more of it, their worries would gone and they would finally be able to do what they’ve been putting off, that their shackles would be lifted and life would finally be happy.

Yet it seems like no matter how much you have, you always want more. Money just won’t loosen its grasp over you. A few extra dollars quickly gets eaten or drank or gambled or shopped away. A higher salary is a green light to buy a bigger house, which means a bigger mortgage and the need for a bigger paycheck.

This may seem obvious—money is the ultimate trap of life! If you’re prone to political thinking and utopian/dystopian dreaming, you may be thinking of all the ways that the ‘elite’ classes of society manipulate money to keep more for themselves. But thinking of money as a ‘trap’ only highlights how irrational most of our common thoughts about money are. After all, if money is the trap, then how is money also the liberation from the trap?

Well, when people say ‘money is a trap,’ what’s really happening is that they’re being imprecise with their language (and by extension their thoughts). Taxes and monopolies and mandatory insurance policies may be traps, but the money system itself is not a trap.

Money is often explained as an abstract representation of value. An upgrade from the barter system—the best facilitator of exchange we have come up with. Ideally, if you make something good and you sell it, you create value, and thus earn money.

Of course, this rarely happens in life—with few exceptions, people who seem to provide the most value in life generate the least money, with more useless money concentrated at the top. However, this isn’t the problem with money—it’s the problem with humanity. Societies have organized themselves this way long before money got involved. Slavery predates currency. Life’s simply not fair, and our finances reflect it.

Perhaps, then, money is not an abstract representation of value. Still, it represents something. Luck? Power? Well, purchasing power, at any rate.

Let’s return to that “root of all evil” thing, a statement which is extremely pervasive and entirely false. Money is not the root of all evil. In fact, it’s not the root of any evil—it’s just a concept. However, the obsession with money is a manifestation of one particular kind of evil: greed.

It seems like a lot of us were raised to keep accruing money and to only rest when we’ve amassed so much of it that we never have to worry about it again. However, this would mean that the point of life is to work really hard for a couple years and sit down and drink wine and get hand-fed grapes or whatever it is you envision sedentary aristocrats doing.

In reality, we take our bad times in stride and enjoy our good times when they come. This is why we have to really force ourselves to save money—because the more money we have, the more we would like to finally spend. And there’s nothing wrong with it.

If there’s anything that is almost entirely absent from conversations about money, it is any sort of metaphysical element, even among spiritual people. It’s strange that finances are almost always the one entirely secular thing, when a lot of people are more than happy to accept that external factors impact life circumstances, and money is just a reflection of those circumstances.

Have you ever noticed that every time you have a little extra money in your bank account, a bill comes in the mail to wipe it clean? Have you ever noticed that when money is tight, you start finding money in drawers and getting a series of lucky breaks? Perhaps we need to give it up, accept that we will always have the amount of money we’re supposed to have, and just do what we need to do without worrying about it. After all, whether you like where you work or not (and if you don’t, change it), most people would agree that the ‘meaning of life’ is not to sit idly in a home you did not earn, contributing nothing of value to the world.

There are two ‘catchphrases’ I’ve learned from my mother:

“It’s only money,” (typically uttered after being hit with a large and difficult expense), and “Money always comes.”

They’re both true, and before anyone starts saying “must be nice to have enough money to never have to worry about it,” my grandfather worked three jobs to make ends meet, and my mom was one of seven kids crammed into a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.

The point is to stop worrying about money. Don’t let it consume you. Don’t give it more thought than it absolutely requires. It doesn’t make any more come, and in fact, the people who chase it the most (seeking after cheap ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes and whatnot) end up seeing it escape them the fastest, like sand falling out of a clasped hand.

Have you ever heard the stories of extremely lucky gamblers and lotto-winners who strike it rich over and over again simply because they know that they will? They’ve bent reality to their will—they have the money-god wrapped around their finger.

Money always comes—at least, just the right amount of it does. And besides, it’s only money.

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