The Saturday Exhale Episode 9: Why Money is Mental Armor

Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.

VG: In a reading from Chapter 10 of StressHacked: The Mind, “Money As Mental Armor,” you quote Baruch Spinoza, who stated, “Those who know the true use of money and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs live contented with few things.” This reminds me of a quote from Voltaire, who you also reference in StressHacked, who remarked, “Don’t think money does everything or you’re going to end up doing everything for money.” You’ve expressed to me that money is a tool, and not an end in itself. This relates to your view of purpose, as money can never be a purpose. But money is the means by which we (often) realize our purpose. Without money, we can’t do anything cool, from whitewater rafting to installing a parallel society to engendering a non-violent resistance to the contemporary culture of weakness in our society. Actions take resources. Actions have a cost, including an opportunity cost of doing something else (including doing nothing at all).

There is an essay by Virginia Woolf I have recommended to you previously, titled “A Room of One’s Own.” In it, Woolf famously claims that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” reacting to the norms and mores of her early 20th century era where women were discouraged, to put it one way, from pursuing literary greatness in favor of having some subservience to men (in a sense, we are “all” Woolf if we feel the system is set out against us, and many of us do feel that way). It may seem unromantic, but we must meet some degree of sustenance if we are to accomplish anything. Diogenes lived in a barrel, but he lived somewhere.  

In StressHacked, you speak a lot about clarity. Clarity, to me, means the ability to think clearly (ok, a truism so far) which subsequently means not being bombarded by unrelated thoughts, emotions, impressions, unwarranted convictions, and so on, that cloud your ability to think clearly. The title of your chapter, “Money As Mental Armor” can be perhaps reformulated as “Money As Mental Clarity.” Having money is what gives you the latitude or leeway to think, uninterrupted, without anxiety, without worrying where your next meal will come from. Now, there is a limit to this, which you discussed in StressHacked, about having too much money, being bored, and being unhappy without adequate hormetic challenge, that sometimes results from having to fight to survive.

People want your advice about money for obvious reasons—you know how to make it. But your chapter took a decidedly different tone than this kind of money-making advice, warning what Spinoza, Voltaire, and Woolf already alluded to: money is the way you get there; it’s not the way. What do you say to young people who are struggling to make money? How do they make money and what do they do with it?

AT: In my experience, the times in my life when I have set out to try to make money, for the sake of money, in each instance it has become all consuming. In addition, it is a grind. When you are trying to make money, by definition, you will try to take it from others. Even if you feel what you are selling or providing has benefit, because the end is earning that money, the action becomes one of coercion, and those you are attempting to coerce will recognize this, to some extent, and will put up guards to protect themselves. 

When I have, instead, pursued something I was truly passionate about, with a loose concept of how it may make me money—perhaps even firm pricing, necessary to offer—but without ever considering the goal to be “money,” but simply to be involved with my passion, money has flown to me almost effortlessly. If you are pursuing a passion, and that passion has the ability to help others in some way they may need, your efforts become more grounded upon awareness of your existence.. And never on hard sales, or convincing others to do what may not be best for them. This leads to a dramatic shift in mindset, level of fulfillment, and also in financial success and results.

So, from my perspective, the key to earning money is, in part, not considering it.

VG: Another way I could ask this question is, “What advice do you have for men (in particular) about what purpose to pursue such that they can be financially stable and live a life of eudaimonia?” Perhaps this question makes no sense, as everyone’s purpose is different (and the point of an ‘examined life’ is to find out one’s purpose) but men have a lot of options to do things that incidentally may lead to money, but these options are becoming more and more precarious. For instance, many men go into the trades, and while this allows for a comfortable existence now, what does the future hold, if and when some of these jobs are automated?

I recall in a conversation between the Russian libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov and Hans-Herman Hoppe, Hoppe warned about academic training setting up the academic for being a mercenary if they do not have tenure at a university (and increasingly even if they do), as literary criticism and so on are not tangible skills, and so the academic would sell themselves to the patron of the highest bidder (if they do not, like Woolf stated, have a “room of their own”). These academics are those who “cannot fry an egg in a pan,” as Hoppe put it in that conversation, and yet market themselves not unlike a plumber or an electrician who provide services that people depend on for the basics of life.

It has also been stated that jobs in consulting—so, professions that are not quite as tangible as electrical work or plumbing—will go the way of the Dodo bird on account of AI. I personally don’t see that (quite yet, anyway). With all this insecurity about what the future holds, is your advice still to pursue your passion? How do you square finding a purpose with providing for oneself and one’s loved ones in an increasingly resource-starved world?  

AT:  I’m reminded of two quotes, from two thinkers that are, for all intents and purposes, intellectual opposites. Walter Lippman, in Public Opinion, said the following:

“The size of a man’s income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world. The income of the individual, and the income of the community determine the amount of communication that is possible. But men’s ideas determine how that income shall be spent, and that in turn affects in the long run the amount of income they will have. Thus also there are limitations, none the less real, because they are often self-imposed and self-indulgent.

There are portions of the sovereign people who spend most of their spare time and spare money on motoring and comparing motor cars, on bridge-whist and post-mortems, on moving-pictures and potboilers, talking always to the same people with minute variations on the same old themes. They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication. They suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene. Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter.

They move, as if on a leash, within a fixed radius of acquaintances according to the law and the gospel of their social set. Among men the circle of talk in business and at the club and in the smoking car is wider than the set to which they belong. Among women the social set and the circle of talk are frequently almost identical. It is in the social set that ideas derived from reading and lectures and from the circle of talk converge, are sorted out, accepted, rejected, judged and sanctioned. There it is finally decided in each phase of a discussion which authorities and which sources of information are admissible, and which not.”

But, to Hans Herman-Hoppe’s point of the academic being a mercenary—I presume for our current system, an observation I agree with, the question must be asked that in what way does our education, and the indoctrination accompanying it, direct where the energy, efforts, and financial resources of the academic, or otherwise societally trained individual, are directed? On this point, Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society said the following:

“The university graduate has been schooled for selective service among the rich of the world. Whatever his or her claims of solidarity with the Third World, each American college graduate has had an education costing an amount five times greater than the median life income of half of humanity. A Latin American student is introduced to this exclusive fraternity by having at least 350 times as much public money spent on his education as on that of his fellow citizens of median income. With very rare exceptions, the university graduate from a poor country feels more comfortable with his North American and European colleagues than with his nonschooled compatriots, and all students are academically processed to be happy only in the company of fellow consumers of the products of the educational machine.”

We are in a crisis. There is manufactured scarcity: in wealth, resources, career opportunities, but also, paradoxically, in workforce. Anyone running a business can attest to that. There is largely an inability to find good workers for most necessary and productive roles, at a time when millions of youth, and also those in middle ages, are broke, even homeless, unable to find a job. All the while AI, or mass migration from the third world, are proposed as solutions to solve these “worker shortages.”

This shortage is manufactured, like everything else. Our system is driving the youth to pursue education in sectors that don’t want or need their services, such as marketing, business management, finance, and the likes—not to mention the vast swarms of those pursuing liberal arts degrees. These grads, undesired and crippled by debt, resentful of the unfulfilled societal promises of their future worth as graduates, become weaponized by ideological agendas designed to perpetuate and expand the very system of their misery. This is true for the Marxists on the far left, and also for most of the various ideological wings of the far right.

For those wanting to liberate themselves from this invisible prison they are trained to exist within, where they will act as guard, inmate, and builder expanding the footprint of the walls, they must ask themselves one question before entering a career, or educational training: Does the role I am pursuing provide true value to real people? Or, is the job largely made up, a construct, and therefore prone to manipulation from the very forces that have currently elevated it as desirable?

Seek a life where you provide value to others, where your skills help people, where they work towards a better vision of society, and you will never find yourself undervalued and out of work for long. This holds true whether your path is one of tangible construction, or intangible concepts that strengthen us. Choosing this path requires rejecting the false signals. Struggle down this path, and your life will be easier in the long run.