Who You Are Is What Makes You Wealthy
What "thin places" (and petting squirrels) teach us about money, meaning and life
Hey all,
Recently, I compiled what I think are the strongest lines from past Root of All essays into an ebook. The idea was to offer it as a gift to those who have been so gracious to recommend my newsletter.
But I’ve come to realize how burned out most of us are from “subscription fatigue.” Many of us would rather be handed a live rattlesnake than a link to subscribe to one more thing that clutters our email inbox. So, I’m just going to post it here to download, free of charge.
Happy reading!
If money doesn’t make you happy, have you tried living for a change?
That story is painful because it’s supposed to be the happy ending.
A man in his 40s achieves what many people spend their lives chasing. Financial independence with an eight-figure net worth. The freedom to never work again. On paper, it’s an extraordinary accomplishment.
And yet, he’s miserable.
There are a lot of ways to read a story like that. You could say it’s a warning about FIRE (financial independence, retire early), or ambition, or the dangers of making money the scoreboard of your life. But I think the deeper lesson is simpler and more unsettling:
He built a fortune, but failed to build a self.
Money can give you options. It can buy back time. It can create space, reduce pressure and open doors that would otherwise stay closed. But money cannot tell you what to do with your freedom, or tell you who to become, or tell you what makes you feel alive.
As Napoleon Hill once wrote:
“Your real wealth can be measured not by what you have, but by what you are.”
When 200,000 miles is shorter than 3 feet
At roughly 200,000 miles away, astronauts can see Earth in its entirety. Outside the capsule window, a marble swirled with color that we call home floats in the vastness of space.
What’s a breathtaking view is also a life-altering one. As NASA astronaut Christina Koch recently put it, “You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth… and that we are way more alike than different.”
This shared experience among astronauts has a name: the overview effect. A profound shift in perspective from seeing Earth in its wholeness leaves astronauts with a deeper sense of beauty, awe and connection to humanity. They see a deeper reality than the rest of us, stuck on the very thing they’re looking at.
It’s an example of how thoughts and beliefs can change simply from seeing things from a different point of view. Thankfully, you don’t need to travel to the moon to change your perception. Similar experiences have been recorded throughout human history, from the windswept cliffs of Scotland to an ordinary American street corner.
In the heart of Louisville, Kentucky, at the intersection of Fourth and Walnut, you’ll find what may be the only plaque in the country dedicated to a person’s mystical experience. It marks the spot where, in 1958, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote that he had been “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”
Merton described it as if he had been given a glimpse into the secret beauty of their hearts. He was left wondering, “If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.”
I like to say the cause and solution to most of life’s problems is a matter of distance. Which is the strange thing about knowing yourself: you can never get any. Yet, many of us are farther from knowing who we really are than we’d like to think.
The organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while about 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, only 10–15% actually meet the criteria. She said:
“On a good day, about 80% of people are lying about themselves to themselves.”
Whether you consider yourself spiritual or not, chances are you’ve had revelatory or mystical encounters like the crew of Artemis II or Merton. Maybe they’re preserved in the amber of a childhood memory, like your first time seeing the ocean’s endless horizon.
These experiences are what ancient Celts called thin places — locales where the veil separating heaven and earth is lifted, where you steal a look at the divine.
There’s a Celtic expression that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but much closer in these thin places. Throughout history, various cultures have described them as moments of peace, of connectedness, of transcendence and, above all, of aliveness.
But more than just reveal the divine, thin places reveal us. As the travel writer Eric Weiner put it: “In thin places, we become our more essential selves.”
Somewhere along the way, it seems like we’ve stopped looking. We quit engaging in the things that make us feel alive, and end up strangers to ourselves. Instead, we look for meaning in places that have none. Like money:
What I think the chart is really showing isn’t that we’ve come to love money more. It’s that everything else has wilted around it, leaving us to construct meaning ourselves. That’s hard work, and it requires a self-awareness most people don’t have. Money becomes the default because it’s the one form of meaning left that’s quantifiable and externally validated.
When wealth becomes your center of gravity, however, it can create poverty in other areas of life — identity, purpose, relationships, family. The result is a man with $10 million and nothing to do.
There’s a cost to living that kind of inauthentic life. Researchers have found that when people fail to behave authentically, they experience such a heightened state of discomfort that they can feel a strong desire to wash themselves physically.
Merton once asked: “Is it possible you could live your whole life and die without ever having met the person that lived your life?”
For too many people, the answer is yes. Hospice nurses and emergency medical workers report a common deathbed regret: the dying wish they’d lived more true to themselves, and not as others expected.
Like this one:
To avoid that end, you have to own your actions and line them up with what you believe and what you need.
Carl Jung put it this way: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
The way to do that might be to find more places in your life to “pet the squirrel.”
The “thin” and “thick” of things
The painter Wassily Kandinsky believed that great art should act like a thin place. And encountering it would be a kind of internal tuning.
He wrote: “[In great art] the spectator does feel a corresponding thrill in himself… Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they ‘key it up,’ so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument.”
The musical motif of life was echoed recently in a commencement speech by the country musician Eric Church, who compared life to a guitar and its six strings — faith, family, partner, ambition, resilience, community and your unique self.
“When all six are in tune, the chords they make can stop a conversation cold, carry a broken person through the worst night of their life, or make a room full of strangers feel for three minutes like they’ve known each other forever. But if even one is off, the whole chord unravels. Not gradually, not politely. The moment you strike it, you know.”
That, he said, is not failure. “It’s the inevitable, universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn’t stop to let us tune up.”
He went on: “You were made uniquely, wonderfully, distinctly. There’s a sound only you can make. A voice that has never existed before you and will never exist again. A contribution only you can bring. A way of seeing that belongs to only you. The world does not need another cover song. It needs an original.”
The difference, Church added, “between a life that sounds like music and a life that sounds like noise is whether you stop and listen. Whether you’re honest enough to hear which string has drifted out of tune, and humble enough to make the adjustment instead of just turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices.”
What he’s getting at, I think, is to notice where you feel thin and where you feel thick — and to use that noticing to make a song that feels alive. Pay attention to the moments that make you feel alive, the easy ones and the hard ones alike. They’re how you tune.
You can think of thin places as the moments that right-size your understanding of who you are in relationship to the vastness and mystery of existence.
It’s why some spiritual writers have said thin places help us become “less thick.” That is, more self-aware. More aware of your place in the universe. More aware and accepting of your potential and your limitations. All the things on which we grow as people: changing habits, pursuing new goals, letting go. Getting comfortable being you.
(A quick note here: By thin and thick I don’t mean size, as if thin is good and thick is bad. The qualities are about distance, proximity to the truth.)
The Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz once said:
“The first place everybody goes wrong is they start to believe things that aren’t true. They tend to deceive themselves.”
Similar to body dysmorphia, the condition in which someone obsesses over flaws in their appearance that often only they can see, people now report what’s been called money dysmorphia — a perceived financial situation that is drastically different from what it objectively is.
According to one study, 43% of Gen Zers and 41% of Millennials say they struggle with money dysmorphia. Of those, a staggering 95% admit it’s hurting their finances (overspending, risky trading, hoarding) as well as their mental health, contributing to anxiety and depression.
For some, feeling behind leads to overspending. They figure they’re too far gone for splurges to really matter. For others, money dysmorphia manifests as a constant fear that the rug could be pulled out from under them at any moment — a mindset shaped by watching parents go through the housing crash, by crushing student debt, or by the social comparison of seeing peers live it up on Instagram.
Money can show you who you’ve been living as. It just can’t tell you who you truly are.
The way to have a healthier relationship with anything — money included — is through a healthier relationship with yourself. And that self is found in thin places: the moments that make you feel alive.
And if you’re convinced it’s too late, it isn’t. There’s still time to stop and pet the squirrel.
Close encounters of the thin kind
The question is which places. And how do we get there?
When I was a sophomore in college, I hiked with two friends to the top of a ridge outside the small town of Interlaken, Switzerland. Across the valley I could gaze at peaks of the Alps coming in and out of focus behind wispy white clouds. I struggle to articulate the feeling other than to say it felt otherworldly, as if I’d been dropped into the pages of a fantasy novel.
I was struck by an indelible sense of longing and awe, but also of connection, as if the mountains and I were the same. Whatever that means. All I know is that in that moment, I had never felt so delightfully small. I realized I didn’t know everything. I wasn’t the center of anywhere.
You don’t plan a trip to a thin place. You stumble upon one. But there are ways to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expecting one.
But the Harvard theologian Peter Gomes wrote that “the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy and mystery.”
1. Suffering
Not all thin places are beautiful. Some are painful, forcing you to navigate a new world. In the middle of a busy day, you get a call that someone you love has suddenly died. In the space of a few minutes, you are standing in a different world, crossing the threshold from one place to another.
This kind of encounter is not what you would choose. But suffering can also be a means of making us better.
Psychologists have a name for it: post-traumatic growth. Research has shown that many people who go through real suffering — illness, loss, trauma — come out changed in five specific ways. Deeper relationships. A greater appreciation for life. A sense of new possibilities. An increased feeling of personal strength. And a deepened spiritual or existential life. Not in spite of the suffering, but through it.
Take it from the Olympic medalist Alysa Liu: “I love struggling. It makes me feel alive.”
In a way, there’s a kind of creative hope that arises only out of suffering. Without friction, there is no transformation. Look back at what’s broken you and ask what it gave you. What you did you learn and what is it still asking for? Most of us never sit with the hard things long enough for the thin place to open.
2. Joy
Joy is more than fleeting happiness. We know now that happiness is a baseline, rising and falling. Anything in life, from a donut to a million dollars, we get used to.
Joy is different. It’s a deep sense of well-being, freedom and gratitude, independent of circumstances. Deeper and broader than any one pleasure. Call it fulfillment if you want. It’s rooted in love, in hope, in truth — your values, your inherent worth, your sense of unlimited possibility.
It’s the things that persistently give your life shape. Family. A craft. A place. A community.
It’s playing with your children in the waning light. It’s a long weekend with friends, where life isn’t all so calculable.
So, notice the moments that reliably light you up. Not the ones that should, but the ones that actually do. When was the last time you lost track of an hour? Who were you with? Then defend those things. They’re easier to lose than they look.
In his journals, Henry David Thoreau wrote of the immense value of joy:
“We have lived, not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth, but in proportion as we have enjoyed.”
3. Mystery
There’s a particular kind of help that comes from being made small. Stand at the base of a redwood. Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Stand under a sky thick with stars in a place far from any city.
Something happens that you didn’t go looking for. You feel smaller, and somehow the smallness feels like relief. Being in the presence of something vast and not immediately understood reduces self-focus, encourages social connection and fosters prosocial action.
“Go touch grass” may be a sarcastic meme these days, but it’s actually astute advice. Time in nature is shown to boost well-being. One study found that people who took “awe walks” experienced greater joy and prosocial emotions, increased generosity, and greater decreases in daily distress over time.
Get out of your head. Walk. Sit. Look up. Stand near something bigger than you and let yourself be quiet for once. Awe doesn’t survive a busy mind.
In a time when so many of us feel lonely and trapped by our phones, walking, as Hippocrates is said to have put it, truly is the best medicine.
The moments of suffering, joy and mystery can help tune the strings of your life. They can help you make a song that is wonderfully, unmistakably, authentically you.
You may not fly around the moon. You may never meditate as the waves crash against the shores of Iona or look up wistfully at the snow-capped Himalayas. But around you, every day, there are moments that show you something different — if only you dare to look, and dare to step through.
That is what makes life beautiful. We get to live as the unique selves we are. But we only get one shot at it. And the regret of the dying may be worse than the dying itself.
Or, in the words Maxwell Anderson once put in the mouth of St. Joan of Arc:
“One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief — that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
Notes to my future self:
Money can show you who you've been living as. It just can’t tell you who you truly are.
When wealth becomes your center of gravity, it can create poverty in other areas of life — identity, purpose, relationships, family. There’s a cost to living that kind of inauthentic life.
Notice the moments that reliably light you up. Not the ones that should, but the ones that actually do.
Wtih gratitude,
J.S.
Jacob this is astoundingly good. Reading it made me feel more grounded. The idea of being open to a thin place is enormously appealing
What a life-altering piece of writing, truly. There is a quiet, sacred hope steeped in the structure of your prose. I enjoyed how you connected multiple disciplines to highlight the in-depth nature of your essay.