Wrestling our Money Demons

I discovered Tom Morgan sometime in the early 2020s and have been a fan ever since. I even wrote a post summarising some of his ideas, and Tom has written a ton since. I love his newsletter and highly recommend subscribing. You may not agree with everything he says, and you may vehemently disagree with some of it, but he's one of those writers who force you to think, and those are often the people most worth following. This piece resonated with me because it has many of the ideas I've been thinking with, and wrestling with, for years. The first is the idea of enough: the feeling that we'll never have enough is a kind of sickness, which Tom calls Wetiko. Tied to it is the question of what money is for. What should it do, what can it do, and what is it doing to us? Working in finance, I've long been preoccupied with this, because I think of money as a means to an end. It's very easy to let money consume you, to set imaginary number goals and chase them, only to discover there's nothing at the end of that road. I regularly ask myself what I'd be doing if I didn't have to worry about money. It's not an easy question. It's jarring and disorienting, because it forces you to think about uncomfortable things: what gives you meaning, what your purpose is, what brings you joy, and whether anything does. These aren't questions about work or a job in the traditional sense, though there's an element of that. Where they point, at least when I ask them, is what gives me joy. But I recently realised that joy wasn't quite the feeling I was looking for. It's what makes you whole. Wholeness is an all-encompassing feeling that includes meaning, purpose, joy, calm, belonging, balance and a sense of fullness, where you're perfectly attuned because you're doing the thing that speaks to you. The other idea is curiosity. It's become something of a cliché, but neither Tom nor I mean it in the usual sense, the mechanical acquisition of knowledge. I think of curiosity as an orienting force. It's a calling, a feeling that speaks to you and pushes you in the direction you're supposed to walk. It doesn't give you answers, at least not at first, but it sets you on a path where you'll discover your wholeness. If you agree with me that there's a profound sense of alienation and lack of purpose across society, then curiosity and seeking wholeness are, if not the full answer, at least part of it. I've been actively trying to follow this for many years, and paradoxically more so in the age of AI. I've been doing all the things I think are fun and might help me feel whole, which is why I've become such a big fan of AI: it has opened up a lot of creative possibilities, and lets me go down whichever path my curiosity sets me on. I'm having more fun than ever. I'm fully aware of the debates around AI and all its trade-offs, but in my own case the possibilities it has opened up have been life-changing. Back to Tom's piece. Reasoning from scarcity, believing we may never have enough and letting the money monster consume us as we chase that quote-unquote enough, often sets us down a path that ends in a graveyard filled with the bodies of a million dreams and hopes. B.