When Financial Success Became the Primary Pursuit
Preface
It started, like many existential spirals do these days—with a prompt on social media:
“If money were a person, how would you describe your relationship with them?”
Classic content bait.
Engagement farming in the costume of introspection.
The kind of question you scroll past with a smirk… until it doesn’t let go.
Because I realized:
I didn’t need to imagine the relationship.
I was already in it.
And honestly?
It’s complicated.
This is the story of how money stopped being a guest—and quietly became the architect of a life I never meant to build.
I. A Guest Who Stayed Too Long
If money were a person, I think I’d still let them in.
They’ve helped me move, rebuild, show up, provide.
They’ve paid for food, for medicine, for the plane tickets that kept love from becoming memory.
But somewhere along the way, they stopped being a guest.
They stayed too long.
They started making decisions, rearranging priorities, speaking on my behalf.
They didn’t knock anymore. They just started living here.
What once refined my life slowly began to define it.
I’ve made good money and felt poor in spirit.
I’ve earned the title, kept the house, played the role—
and still felt like I was chasing something I couldn’t name.
Because the chase itself had become the point.
And the more I look around,
the more I wonder if we’re all being slowly shaped
by a voice we no longer remember inviting in.
We didn’t make money the problem.
We made it the point.
II. The Shift: From Means to Meaning
There was a time when money lived in the margins—
a tool to support life, not define it.
It bought grain, gave shelter, kept families afloat.
But it wasn’t sacred. It wasn’t central. It wasn’t self.
Somewhere between the market square and the modern spreadsheet, that changed.
Money stopped being just a means of exchange—
it became the lens we see through,
the standard we measure with,
and the story we tell about what matters.
We no longer ask, “What do you do for work?”
We just ask, “What do you do?”
And we assume the answer will earn.
Our ambitions evolved not from longing—but from logic.
The kind measured by return on investment.
Even dreams started asking for proof of income.
And behind that shift was a quiet system.
Not a villain, not a policy—
but something more insidious: The MAN.
Malice. Apathy. Negligence.
Not in the violent sense,
but in the systemic kind—
where profit quietly replaces purpose,
where usefulness outranks meaning,
and where dignity becomes a luxury for the few.
And so, the story changed:
- We didn’t dream—we planned.
- We didn’t create—we produced.
- We didn’t ask what matters—we asked what pays.
And in doing so, money made its move.
It stopped serving our lives, and started scripting them.
III. Education: Where the Relationship Begins
No one told us to worship money.
They didn’t have to.
It was already woven into the way we were taught to dream.
Most of us inherited this—
not as a command, but as a culture.
We learned to color inside the lines
because there were grades for that.
We learned to show our work
because outcomes needed evidence.
We learned that success was something you could earn—
and worth was something you could prove.
And in those quiet lessons,
money started speaking before we even understood its language.
A chart in a counselor’s office.
A parent’s raised eyebrow at a creative career.
The word “practical” said with love,
but carrying the weight of fear.
We don’t mean to pass it on.
But we do.
We ask children what they want to be,
then rank the value of their answers in silent calculations.
Doctor. Good. Artist. Risky.
We praise dreams,
then translate them into paychecks.
And it doesn’t take long for a child to learn:
Curiosity is lovely.
But profitability is safer.
It’s not malice.
It’s not even intentional.
It’s inheritance.
And until we name it,
we keep handing it down.
IV. The Myth of Scarcity and the Gospel of Hustle
The most powerful story we were told about money wasn’t about wealth.
It was about lack.
There won’t be enough.
You better get ahead.
You better earn your keep.
You better not stop.
And so, we didn’t.
We learned to run before we learned to rest.
To grind before we understood grace.
To hustle—not just as a habit,
but as a way to prove we deserved to exist inside the system.
Scarcity wasn’t just economic.
It was emotional. Spiritual. Existential.
If we didn’t produce, we didn’t matter.
If we paused, we fell behind.
If we weren’t useful, we were invisible.
So we built identities on effort.
Measured character by output.
Labeled exhaustion as integrity.
We called it ambition.
But often, it was just fear—
fear that we’d lose our place,
or worse, that there was never really a place for us to begin with.
This is where The MAN doesn’t need to punish us.
He only needs us to stay tired.
Because tired people don’t ask questions.
Tired people don’t remember how to dream.
Tired people confuse survival for meaning.
And the truth is—
we’re not just complicit in the system.
We’re exhausted by it.
V. What We Lose When Money Becomes Meaning
When money becomes meaning,
we lose more than presence.
We lose permission.
The permission to be slow.
To be uncertain.
To be tender.
To be enough—without proving it.
Because when value is always measured in output,
we learn to hide what doesn’t scale:
our grief, our awe, our love, our longing.
We trade wonder for efficiency.
Care for control.
Community for competition.
Rest for relevance.
We stop asking what brings us alive
and start asking what will sell.
Even our joy becomes curated.
Even our healing becomes content.
Even our dreams get filtered through the lens of monetization.
And slowly, we forget that we ever had a choice.
This is the quiet cost.
Not just of capitalism—
but of forgetting that meaning was never meant to be outsourced.
We’re not here to justify our existence.
We’re here to live it.
But when money becomes the meaning,
we lose the thread.
We lose the fire.
We lose the grace of simply being.
VI. A Rewriting: Refining, Not Defining
Money was never the villain.
It was meant to serve the story—
not script it.
It was meant to help us build, not tell us what to build.
To sustain the dream, not decide it.
To refine life, not define it.
But we forgot.
And in that forgetting, we gave up something precious:
the freedom to decide what matters for ourselves.
It’s not too late to remember.
To let money be a guest again.
To welcome its usefulness without letting it rearrange our soul.
To teach our children that worth is not a number.
That success is not a finish line.
That a dream does not need to be monetized to be meaningful.
This isn’t a call to renounce money.
It’s a call to relocate it—
back to the margins where it belongs.
Let it support. Let it serve. Let it stay in its place.
Because the life I want?
The one I want to leave behind?
It’s not defined by profit, performance, or prestige.
It’s defined by presence.
By care.
By quiet decisions made with a whole heart.
And if money can help refine that—
then let it come.
But if it tries to define it?
I’ll thank it for its time—
and walk barefoot into a life of my own design.
Let money support the story. Not script it.