If money were a person, I would be a dickhead

Back in 2022, during our year of nomad travel, I did a week-long Awakened Leadership group retreat in Bali. It was an intense experience where we explored our emotions on shadowy topics like death, sex and money, and we did it in a hot jungle environment that often hit 100% humidity.

One of the exercises on money was to explore our relationship with money as if it were an actual person. At the time, since I was making a decent income and our costs were low, this was one of the easier sessions for me. On the other hand, this might just mean that I found sex and death trickier.

Things are different now. I’ve been back in London for a while, where it’s very expensive, I have a baby, and I recently learned that I have to spend tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket on knee surgeries to, hopefully and finally, resolve lifelong knee instability. That’s not to mention a total right hip replacement that I’ll talk about another time.

So, the situation right now is that I want to be making substantially more money than I am and, at the same time, I’m spending a lot of what I have. Now that the stakes are higher, I’m realising that my relationship with money quite isn’t as harmonious as I told myself it was in Bali.

It doesn’t feel good to admit it, but it looks like my relationship with money is actually pretty dysfunctional, and at times even abusive.

I expect money to just be there for me, but I don’t put in consistent work to look after money. I worry that I’m not good enough for money, that I don’t deserve its loving presence in my life. I’m not that grateful for how money does show up for me, protect me, and give me the opportunities that it has. I feel I don’t know what money wants or how to make it want to be around me, which makes me both scared and angry.

Basically, I project an enormous amount onto money, when really it has nothing at all to do with money, and everything to do with my own insecurities and fears.

What’s interesting is that this becomes much more obvious when I think of money as someone I care deeply for, and who I could imagine caring deeply for me. I would feel horrible if I caught myself acting this way towards someone I loved, so why do I allow it with money? I can even see what remains of my disorganised attachment style making itself known, pushing away and pulling closer at the same time, sending mixed messages and always wondering why things are more complicated than they really need to be.

Looking at my relationship with money as if it were a person, it feels like what I really want is to feel in connection with money. I want to feel grateful, at ease and loving towards and around money. I want to see it as a source of fun and aliveness, not of craving and aversion.

I’ll start by recognising that the strategies I’ve been using so far aren’t working, because I’m trying to solve for the wrong things. Even if I got a lot more money, I’d likely feel similarly. Where my money scales, so does the dysfunction of my relationship with it.

Instead, I shall practice gratitude. I shall bow deeply to the dignity and freedom I have been afforded by money to be able to spend time with my boy, to travel, and to drop those tens of thousands of pounds to significantly improve my health for my and my family’s benefit.

And I will approach money with a spirit of play within the context of an infinite game. The point of money is not to win or to accumulate, but to flow as an expression of purpose, value and active participation with all the other games of life.

As with all other things, I want to relate to money sincerely, not seriously. I realise now I’ve been much too serious with money. I’d rather learn to dance with it.