Money Tips for People Who Hate Money

7 ways to think about wealth when you’d rather be thinking about almost anything else

I imagine the streets of ancient Athens were filled with many oddities. But the strangest of them all might have been found inside a large ceramic jar. Living in one for a time was the highly esteemed philosopher Diogenes, who was a walking embodiment of the Cynic belief that true freedom comes from detaching oneself from possessions and desire.

I think many men would happily live like this…

As legend has it, Diogenes refused to join the formal greeting for Alexander the Great and remained resting in a grove. The king approached and asked whether there was anything he wanted. Diogenes replied, “Yes, that you should stand a little out of my sun.”

Alexander was said to be so struck by the audacity and grandeur of spirit in a man who could treat him with such indifference that he later told his courtiers, who laughed at the philosopher, “But I’ll tell you this: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”

We can’t say with certainty that this encounter happened exactly as told. But what we do know is that the morality of wealth has been under suspicion by the likes of Diogenes and others since antiquity.

The same suspicion runs through virtually every major tradition.

Aristotle drew a distinction between oikonomia — the art of managing a household well — and chrematistics — the art of accumulating money for its own sake. The first was noble and necessary; the second, unnatural, a perversion of the proper purpose of exchange.

The Hebrew Bible rails against charging interest on loans to the poor. The New Testament contains more warnings about wealth than about almost any other subject.

Confucius ranked merchants at the bottom of the social hierarchy, below farmers, craftsmen, and scholars.

The Stoics taught that wealth was a “preferred indifferent” — fine to have, dangerous to pursue.

The point is that unease about money is not a modern neurosis. It’s one of humanity’s oldest and most consistent moral intuitions.

Over the past few years though, many essays have explored the seeming disconnect that people are, by many measures, wealthier than ever and yet deeply unhappy.

I guess when the number of the world’s richest individuals that can fit in a minivan have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world, it’s no surprise that cynicism — the lowercase kind, not just the philosophy Diogenes belonged to — is raging today.

In America, trust is plummeting and around 80% of people don’t feel confident their children’s lives will be better than their own. It seems many people are developing a darker view of the financial system itself.

But it comes down to more than inequality alone.

Research suggests that how we feel about extreme wealth is shaped both by the world around us — our culture, our country, our norms — and by our own moral instincts. For some people, vast excess does not merely seem unfair. It feels, well, dirty. Maybe even as dirty as a unshowered man living a jug.

When you think about who might morally object to money, it’s easy to picture free-spirited artists — painters, writers, musicians — who want only to hone their craft, to make art for art’s sake. Or maybe the “dirtbags,” the climbers and surfers and backpackers who would rather be one with nature than tied to a job.

But that’s not quite true. Many of those people have had enormous financial success. Andy Warhol, for instance, who once said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

And plenty of business leaders — people uniquely gifted at building entities that create a great deal of money — have still expressed uneasiness with money itself.

Take Anita Roddick, the immensely successful founder of The Body Shop, who once said:

“The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed.”

Heck, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie even wrote a book about it, The Gospel of Wealth, famously stating:

“The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Maybe hate is too strong a word. But there are people of all stripes, backgrounds and interests who, when it comes to money, struggle to see dollar signs because they are too busy rolling their eyes.

If that’s you, the bad news is that you can’t simply go live in a jar in the middle of someplace like Times Square or Trafalgar Square.

As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once put it: “There is no alternative.”

But when you look at the lives of people who, by most measures, found success without being obsessed with money, you learn that you do not have to love money to make it work for you.

So, to those who hate money, here are some money tips.

Chase good work and let the money follow.

Some people argue that “follow your passion” is bad advice. But that doesn’t make “follow the money” good advice.

The cultural notion that obsessing over money is bad for you is backed by research. People who base their self-worth on money tend to be more miserable.

You’re better off obsessing over doing or building something other people value.

It’s why Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, took an almost spiritual approach to money:

“Making a profit is not the goal, because the Zen master would say profits happen ‘when you do everything else right.’”

A similar formula shows up in the story of Matt O’Hayer, the serial entrepreneur and founder of Vital Farms, seller of ethically produced, pasture-raised eggs. He launched more than 50 businesses, yet found that only when he built around a deeper purpose and stopped trying to get rich did he become truly successful. As he explained:

“When I stopped looking for the payoff, the big bucks, that’s when I had the biggest success I’ve ever had.”

It’s a kind of financial paradox: the less you fixate on money and the more you focus on doing good work, the more likely money is to follow.

Debt ruins art.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky published his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in serial installments for a magazine. It wasn’t a clever, creative twist or PR stunt to generate buzz. It was desperation for money.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Tolstoy or Turgenev, who were well off, Dostoyevsky lived by his writing and struggled to make a living.

If not for this, his wife Anna wrote in her memoir after his death, “He could have gone carefully through [his works], polishing them, before letting them appear in print; and one can imagine how much they would have gained in beauty. Indeed, until the very end of his life [he] had not written a single novel with which he was satisfied himself; and the cause of this was our debts!”

Financial worries contribute to real psychological distress, including anxiety and depression. Any unease you might feel about caring too much about money pales in comparison to the distress of not having enough of it.

Let me put it this way: you don’t need a mansion, but you do need a floor.

What you do is not who you are.

Toni Morrison’s father gave her one of the best anti-money lessons: “Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.” The Nobel Prize winner’s interpretation was even better:

“Whatever the work is, do it well. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”

Morrison at work

For anyone who hates the emotional weight money carries, this is gold. Earn. Be serious. But refuse to turn wages into self-worth.

The same ethos was held by Chouinard, who called himself a “reluctant businessman” who would rather be known as “a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier and a blacksmith.”

Still, last time I checked, most hobbies require a bit of financial investment. The lesson being: You don’t have to weld your identity to what you do for money, but keep in mind how money can help you do the things that truly are you.

Don’t devalue your most important asset: your time.

The writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he built himself on the edge of Walden Pond and spent two years calculating the most important financial ratio of his life: how many hours of work does it take to buy one hour of freedom?

His conclusion was radical and irritating to his neighbors: most people, he wrote, were laboring their entire lives to afford the very things that kept them from living.

He wrote:

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

He wasn’t anti-money. He was pro-accounting. Just a different ledger.

Rather than being wholly anti-consumerist, maybe the better aim is to be a time elitist. For instance, before any major purchase, convert the price into hours of your time at your real hourly rate. The math will occasionally save you from yourself.

By the same token, it helps to value how you spend the time that earns those dollars in the first place.

After being handed what felt like a death sentence, Steve Jobs saw the urgency of valuing time. During his famous commencement speech, he said,

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

If you hold money lightly, hold your wants even lighter.

Leo Tolstoy was one of those rare things: a rich writer. He was one of the most famous people on earth and a wealthy Russian count with large estates.

Tolstoy was also, by his own account, deeply troubled by money. He went so far as to equate money with a form of slavery. So, he decided to eseentially downsize his lifestyle — by a lot.

He began giving away his copyrights. He renounced the royalties on his later works so anyone could publish them freely. He dressed like a peasant, learned to make his own shoes, and tried — with mixed success — to live as simply as the serfs who had once worked his land. His wife thought he had lost his mind.

The lesson here is not to take as combative a stance as Tolstoy did, unless you, too, have tremendous intellectual property, like War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Rather, if you want to care less about money, you’ll likely have to want less, too.

That’s the tradeoff. Yet, it may also be the secret to real wealth, according to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus:

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

Stop thinking of what money is and start thinking of what it can provide: freedom.

In an award speech, the author Ursula K. Le Guin put this beautifully near the end of her career. Writers deserve their share of proceeds, she said, but":

“The name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.”

For people uneasy about money, this is a liberating test: ask not “How much does this make?” but, “What does this let me protect? My time, my standards, my voice, my independence?”

I doubt tech entreprenuer Naval Ravikant and Le Guin would have seen eye to eye on much. But he arrived at a similar conclusion about money’s real point:

“Financial wealth can give you freedom and more time. It can give you peace.”

In many ways, money is like art in that it’s better understood as a verb than a noun. It isn’t the end. It’s the means to protecting what you care most about, whether for yourself or for others.

What we often come to discover as true wealth is free, so you might as well have money for what isn’t.

I’m someone who used to think the goal was to earn more and more. Every new job, every new year, was supposed to mean a bigger paycheck. But whenever I got more, I realized I generally wanted the same things: to play catch in the yard, to stare into a campfire with someone while sharing a silence as comfortable as the heat of the flames, to feel that bittersweet pull of wanting to read a book while not wanting it to end.

I could go on, but you get the point. These are experiences that cost next to nothing, but that make you feel like the wealthiest person alive. But at the same time it helps to have money for all the practical burdens — bills, taxes, repairs — that might otherwise distract me from the joy of all the free wealth around me.

The irony of a capitalist system is that you can live inside it while still hating parts of it. You can reject what money often comes to represent and still use it to stay true to your values.

Maybe the deeper irony is that these tips for people who hate money enough to merely tolerate it are not all that different from the habits required to use money well if you love it.

The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote something to the effect that the love of money “is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous.” Nearly 100 years ago, he imagined that:

“The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.”

Spend any time on social media and it can be hard to believe that. It’s an endless stream of things you should be buying, investments you should already be in, people who seem to be getting richer, living better, pulling further ahead than you.

As Martin Amis writes in his novel on the subject:

“Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.”

But who cares what money thinks anyway?

What matters is what you think and how you choose to live. You can live well in an impersonal economy by making personal, ethical decisions within it. You can be less cynical about money and more hopeful about the possibility of living a virtuous life in a world so often organized around it.

You don’t have to love money. But you may need to leave a little room for it inside the tight embrace of your values.

Notes to my future self:

1. Unease about money is not a modern neurosis, it’s one of humanity’s oldest and most consistent moral intuitions.

2. The less you fixate on money and the more you focus on doing good work, the more likely money is to follow.

3. You don’t have to love money. But you may need to leave a little room for it inside the tight embrace of your values.

With gratitude,

J.S.

P.S. If you enjoy my writing and have any interest in working with me, get in touch: jacobsschroeder@gmail.com.