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Your Finances Are Not “Personal”
Identifying with money is always a mistake
Most people think of money like bread: It’s an essential commodity, it has to come from somewhere, and if you haven’t had your daily share, you gotta go out and win it — or make it yourself.
Unlike actual bread, however, you don’t need money to survive. You can’t eat money. You need water, food, a place to sleep and a place to pee. Money doesn’t solve any of those problems directly. It’s just paper. Metal. Nowadays, it’s even just 1s and 0s on a screen. If push came to shove, those wouldn’t do anything for you.
“Well, but I can trade money for all of these things,” you might say, and since we’ve had a somewhat reliable system in which we exchange money or some other symbol for goods, shelter, and services for thousands of years, I can’t blame you for having that expectation — but that still makes money a thing you trade, not a thing you need.
You can live without money. Have you ever imagined it? If so, it was probably a dark scenario. Homelessness, hunger, bad health — these are the conditions we associate with the absence of money, but if money is only a stand-in solution to these problems, surely, there must be people who solve them directly, no? People who cut out the middleman and chose the source over the surrogate.
