Money is freedom. (Or is it?)
"wealth without independence is a unique form of poverty." Morgan Housel
“Money is minted freedom,” Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from a Dead House, his book about the years in a Siberian prison camp. His fellow prisoners wasted what little money they earned on liquor and flashy clothing. Why? Because they could. Spending money was a fleeting moment of freedom. “For a man completely deprived of freedom, it is ten times dearer. Just to have it jingling in his pocket half comforts him, even if he cannot spend it.”
That’s how I saw money: freedom.
On my road trip, I am free as long as I can pay for gas, food, repairs, and a place to stay. Had I not saved up while working in finance, my options would be much more limited. Even so, I rarely eat out and stay in small towns, far away from the well-heeled crowd of tourists. And of course you could move relatively freely with very little money.
On the road from Boise, Idaho, to Eugene, Oregon, I met a drifter. “Dancing bear” Paul was walking along the highway, pushing a cart with his belongings. It spent the better part of the day driving across eastern Oregon’s high desert and this man was just walking (and aimed to make it to New Mexico eventually)! I passed him a cold Gatorade and listened to his story.
Paul had followed the Grateful Dead for some two decades. He knew where to find free hot springs and how to charm cops and rangers. His Robin Williams impression was immaculate (but, he noted sadly, he couldn’t perform in Vegas because he lacked permission by the comedian’s estate). I’ve rarely met such a free spirit! And yet, his movement on the material plane was limited. The body was free but also looking for free food. Free without a place to shower. Not the freedom I was looking for.
The freedom I longed for was captured in a viral video clip I posted years ago. It’s from the movie The Gambler. Poker addict Mark Wahlberg needs to borrow money and gets a lecture from John Goodman who explains that “a wise man's life is based in fuck you.” → Watch the clip.
You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do. You get a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible Jap economy shitbox. You put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that’s your base, get me?
That’s your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you for the rest of your life at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you.
That’s what I wanted. Freedom of movement, time, and choice. Freedom to roam, to flourish, and freedom to say no. Naively, I thought that more money necessarily meant more freedom. Like so:
But notice that the quote was all about the number and ignored the mindset. If I taught you how to earn, say, five million dollars in the next five years, would you be free? It depends. What if you moved along another rather depressing path?
How could this happen?
Hedonic treadmill: oldest trap in the book. Expenses grow faster than income and you never reach the promised land of ‘fuck you.’ The finance version of this is Kevin Spacey as a middle-aged trader in Margin Call. (Not to be confused with consciously trading some freedom for meaning by providing for others/raising a family.)
The inverse would be delayed gratification taken to an extreme: Marshmallow Mind, or the mistaken belief that the rewards “compound forever. They don’t. Eventually, they turn into a trap whose escape requires a radical break with our old identity.”
Lack of clarity is another killer. If you don’t know how much money you need, the goal post keeps moving (great chart via Hampton Founder; it’s always at least double of what you have . . .). “Most of the problems in my life have to do with my confusing what I want and what I need,” as David Foster Wallace once said.
And how much do we need? I love how Vivid Void put it:
That’s why we do the inner work: so we don’t try to use money to satisfy our existential yearnings.
Easier said than done. We know that making money is not the purpose of life. Of course, money won’t fill our inner void. But what will? A thorny question (and potential dark night of the soul). If you are very good at making money, if it feels satisfying, it is easier to keep doing that than to stop and step into the unknown.
I think of it like sitting on the couch and eating potato chips. As long as you keep eating, you don’t have to face the mess, the crumbs, the reality of what you just put into your body. Yes, eventually, the bag will be empty. But not yet. Just one more delicious, escapist crunch.
Finally, the better you are at making money, the more you leave on the table when you exit the game. The greater your future earning potential, the higher the price of your freedom. Without clarity on what we value, any amount of money can be a prison.
A “wise man’s life” is based not only on ‘fuck you money’ but on the willingness to use it when it matters.
— Frederik
Those last three paragraphs hit me. Such a good framing on how to look at money for real (inner) wealth and freedom. It's true, there isn't enough dialogue on the way we feel and think about money. It's so often tied to the numbers alone (which is also important, just not the full story).
"The tyrant believes that the more control he has, the more freedom he will enjoy. But the freedom that belongs to the tyrant is the freedom to be shielded behind ramparts, to insist on flattery from those he encounters and to devise ways of exerting his will on the world around him.
What we can easily fail to realize is how deeply we are guided through our lives by that same belief. With enough status, with enough power, with enough money, we could finally be free. The ads for lotteries promising instant millions eloquently sum up what we have so deeply in common with the tyrant’s agenda: to have enough money to be able to detach altogether from what the world might be asking of us and devote ourselves to a distracted indulgence of what we want from the world.
The tyrant’s dream of freedom is compelling: achieve independence, and you will be liberated from any possibility that the world might change you. The truth is that all the wealth in the world—all the gated compounds, handlers, security guards, offshore assets and vacation properties you could assemble—will still fail to hold life at bay or keep the world from changing you. The world’s job is to knead you like dough, that you might eventually rise into your fullest possible embodiment of compassion, clarity and engagement—and however you might attempt to thwart its work, the work goes on. The choice to refuse to rise, of course, is ultimately yours to make.
Our ideas of freedom through disconnection are tethered as though by an umbilical cord to the belief that the more you can limit your engagement with the world—the more you can determine and control your relationships with it—the better off your life will be. The image of the tyrant in his dark, fortified castle is different in degree, not in kind, from the houses in my mother’s neighborhood."