Most of Your Beliefs About Money Aren’t Actually Yours

Money is a made-up thing. Pieces of paper, metal, digital bits that we’ve collectively decided mean something. And yet, despite that, isn’t it funny how large it looms in our lives? How it dictates what we do, how we do it, when we do it? How it colors our moral and ethical outlook, the value judgments we make, and even the way we see the world?

Even at this hour in my life, this power that money wields — power we’ve handed to it by our own permission — still surprises me. Some of it good, some bad, some insidious. And I keep discovering newer things about how profoundly it shapes what I do, what you do, what most people do.

What gets me, though, is this: despite how central money is to everyday life, despite the fact that we toil and strive and go to great lengths to get it, our frameworks and beliefs about it are often flimsy, poorly constructed, and static.

We all instinctively understand that we’re not the same person we were yesterday. We know, deep down, that there’s no one real true self. We’re a composite of multiple selves, public and private. And as we grow through life, some of these selves die and new ones are born. This is what Heraclitus meant: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Nobody wakes up the same person they were yesterday.

And yet, knowing all this, knowing that very few things in life stay static, we somehow hold very static views about money. Views we rarely update. And in a lot of cases, we only update them after some money-related disaster has already happened.

Here’s what’s also strange: so much of what we believe about money was unconsciously absorbed from other people. It comes from our parents, our relatives, our friends, the communities we grew up in. It comes from envy and desire and jealousy about the lives other people lead, lives we mistakenly believe would make us happy if we could just have something similar. It comes from movies, books, music, and whatever we read in sixty seconds on our phones.

Oscar Wilde said it well in De Profundis:

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” That applies to money as much as anything.

We are, whether we realize it or not, always smuggling beliefs from the people around us. And for something as front and center as money, it’s shocking how little of what we believe about it actually came from us. Most of it was inherited. Most of it was absorbed without our consent.

One of the peculiar features of our time is that we live in a glass floor. Thanks to social media, a lot of what would have otherwise stayed private is now willingly broadcast. And most of what drives behavior on these platforms are the same base human desires that drive behavior everywhere else: status-seeking, signaling, the desire to belong, the desire to conform. Which is why you see what you see — the obscene displays of wealth, the curated lifestyles, the performances of success and arrival. All of it driven by the desperate need to seek status, to signal, to feel that psychological sense of security and superiority we so deeply crave.

The tragedy is that because anyone can see everything, we end up getting shaped by fleeting glimpses of other people’s lives. We know, somewhere deep down, that there’s more context to a person’s life than what they post. And yet we get pulled in anyway. We want the houses, the cars, the watches, the hot wives and hot husbands. We end up disenchanted and disillusioned with our own lives by comparison. And this shows up, very directly, in the mistakes we make with money. A staggering number of money mistakes can be traced back to this one thing.

In a very real sense, we become puppets. We hand these people enormous power over our behavior — people we’ve put on a pedestal in our own heads. Mental peasants, tilling on the belief farms of other people. We let them live rent-free in our heads, and they’re bad company, pushing us to do all kinds of dumb things with money that we never would have done if we’d stopped to think about what we actually believed.

And that’s the strange thing: one’s philosophy of money isn’t separate from one’s philosophy of life. It’s part of it. And our philosophies of life do evolve. As we go through love, loss, grief, pain, struggle, all of it, our views become more nuanced, more layered. But somehow, for many people, the money piece doesn’t evolve at the same pace. People walk through their entire lives with juvenile, unexamined views about money that keep getting them into trouble.

We have plenty of evidence that money is one of the most stressful things in a person’s life. It constantly induces anxiety and is at the root of a lot of problems. Which means one of the simpler ways to be a bit calmer is to just avoid money-related disasters. And the way to avoid those is to have a decent philosophy of money that you actually tend to.

Think of it like a garden. You don’t plant seeds and expect them to magically grow and bear fruit without any attention. You water it. You remove the weeds. You trim the overgrowth. You watch out for pests. You tend to it regularly, the same way you tend to your body.

A philosophy of money works the same way. It needs attention. It needs to be revisited.

And given where the world seems to be heading, with more shocks and disruptions to life’s trajectory than we’ve seen in the past few decades, now is as good a time as any to actually sit with some of these questions.

What is money for you? What does it mean to you? What place does it have in your life, and what do you want it to do? How do you want to make money in a way that lets you sleep without guilt or resentment? And how do you make sure it doesn’t leak into and distort everything else — your values, your relationships, your sense of what a good life looks like? In a sense, everything else is just scaffolding to get you to these questions.

Epictetus asked: “How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?” Grayling, in Philosophy and Life, echoes the same spirit: it’s never too late to wise up. You can wise up even on your deathbed.

Epictetus pointed out that a person might be struck by the force of this Socratic challenge even in the last hours of advanced old age, and at that moment ‘begin’, as he put it, ‘to be wise’. It is never too late.

I think that’s true. And I think it applies to money as much as anything else