We all know: it’s like everything from “Money
is status,” “Money is power,” “Money
is sex appeal.”
I just read that “The more beautiful the
woman the bigger the diamond and the uglier
the man who gave it to her,” you know, so
it’s—why is that?
That has nothing to do with the daily transactions!
That is something emotional.
That’s how the man believes he’s going
to feel with a beautiful wife, how the woman
feels when she’s got an expensive rock on
her hand.
These are all feelings, they’re status,
like, “I made it,” proving yourself to
your third grade teacher or your nemesis in
high school or your parents.
There’s so many ways in which we project
onto money the ability to not only make us
happy but to make us “better” or better
than other people or safe, or—so many deep
gut level emotional feelings are playing themselves
out in our relationship with money.
And, you know, fine.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen.
“We will all be very conscious and we will
not have any emotions in our relationship
with money.”
I’m not saying that.
I’m just saying the more aware you are of
what you’re projecting onto money in terms
of meeting emotional and psychological and
even spiritual needs the clearer you’re
going to be in those daily transactions.
In fact that’s part of why once you start
to become conscious of money and stuff in
your life this way, you stop spending so much
money.
But around that is another level: there is
the cultural narrative, the rules of the game
of our economy, of the financial system which
in so many ways governs not just our daily
lives but who wins and who loses, who has
power and who does not have power, who gets
to say what the game is, who gets to play
by the rules and break the rules.
I mean this is a cultural context.
It has nothing to do particularly with what’s
going on in our individual traumas and histories,
it has to do with a longer historical moment
in time, and the basic meme of the financial
system is growth.
I mean it’s really—in a way it’s sort
of a very long-con Ponzi scheme, because it
has to keep growing in order to keep meeting
its obligations.
Money is produced—I mean the actual pieces
of paper and metal, the credit that you have
isn’t just like you go to a job and somebody
gives you some pieces of paper, it’s—money
is loaned into being by banks.
Banks have the authorization to create money
but it’s not like they have to have $1,000
in the vault in order to lend you $1,000.
No, they have to have $100 in the vault to
lend you $1,000, and then they lend you the
$1,000 with interest.
So in the world of money everything has to
grow.
Everything has to keep growing or it’s Game
Over, which is a difficulty for us now because
of the capacity of the planet to support this
ideology.
So that’s that construct of money, which
is fascinating.
People study economics and financial systems
were mesmerized by how people have played
this system to the detriment of many people
except for themselves.
And then but what we say is that outside of
that whole thing, those are all stories.
What we actually know for sure as individual
human beings we know that we have a body,
that we know that we’re alive, and that
we invest some of the minutes of our lives,
some of the vital force of our lives in a
process that produces money for us.
However it produces it, whether it’s a job,
whether it’s investments, whether it’s
dog sitting, whatever it is whether it’s
stealing the Topkapi diamond.
It’s like whatever it is, we invest some
of our precious life energy in this thing
called getting money.
So money for us is your life energy.
The value of money to you is how much of “you”
you invested in getting it.
And once you understand that, once you understand
that money is something that’s abstract
and seems unlimited, like, “if I go into
debt it doesn’t matter, I’ll just keep
having jobs and I’ll keep paying it off.”
I mean it’s just an endless sort of stumbling
process.
But you understand that your life is limited,
you know.
We’ve got—I’m going to say 85 years
on the planet because now I’m 73 so I don’t
say 75 anymore.
So we’ve got a certain limited time on the
planet.
We’re going to spend a third of it sleeping.
We’re going to spend another third of it
commuting and showering and sitting at a desk
and doing somebody else’s bidding.
That’s not a lot of life.
So you think, I’ve got a third, I have a
third of my waking hours, are mine to do whatever
I want.
Who am I?
So it’s like it then sends it into an existential
question.
Who am I?
What do I care about?
What do I want my little dent in time or scratch
in eternity to be?
What do I want the impact of my actions to
be?
What do I want to learn?
What do I want to understand?
What do I want to feel, taste, touch?
What do I want, in what Mary Oliver calls
“my one wild and precious life”?
So that once you do that tip and then you
go like okay, so what am I earning?
I’m earning let’s say $36 an hour.
And I’m not going to do the whole shaggy
dog story of like you’ve got to add onto
that hour the extra time you spend getting
trained and commuting, and the vacation where
the first three days of your vacation where
you’re inert and you’re just staring.
That’s all time associated with that hour.
The commute expense and the training and you’re
a consultant and you think you make a lot
of money but you spend hours and hours to
get the business for that one hour of time.
On average I will say—just run the experiment
in your own life—that $36 for an hour will
whittle down to about a quarter of that.
So call that $9.
Now we have a figure.
An hour of my life is worth $9.
That’s interesting.
Okay, you’re going out for coffee and a
muffin?
That’s an hour.
So then you have to ask value questions around
that, like, “Am I really glad that I spent
an hour of my one wild and precious life on
this coffee and muffin?”
How do I actually even engage with that question?
The way we suggest you engage with it is this:
Did it make me happy commensurate with the
value that I convey, I put on this one hour
of my life?
“Yes!
You know, like without that coffee and muffin
every day my life would be like, you know,
sort of at a 50 rather than at a 90.”
Is it in alignment with my values, with what
I say is important?
And what I think my purpose in life is?
And these are not easy questions to ask but
you might as well ask it when you’re buying
your coffee and muffin.
When else are you going to ask it?!
To what am I dedicating this, my existence?
And somehow or another you sort of get a vague
sense purchase by purchase.
It’s really the most amazing meditation
on how do I invest my life to create the maximal
value for myself and other people in the world?
