“What do you think is different about the two families?”, my best friend asked the table.
We were at a ‘wash-up’ dinner, the day after a wedding back in 2019, all stewing in hangover.
The bride’s Dad was on my right, the bride floating around the room out of earshot. Like mine, the family was Irish and the first generation out of Ireland from two huge families.
On the surface, the question was provoked by how the ‘vibe’ of two families felt different at a party. Both of similar middle-class means. But one family was open and flowing in the spirit of the night, regularly at the bar buying each other drinks. The other, not so.
And my friend was reflecting on how much he’d enjoyed the vibe of the dozen or more people sitting around a table past midnight. A guitar, pints and whiskies and songs. A gang of cousins and aunts and uncles all from one of the families.
And the answer has kept me thinking ever since, like a riddle in a novel.
“Money.”
My mind recoiled at the Dad’s answer. But my body leant in. Something in me knew exactly what he meant.
Stewing on that question ever since – and reading about what money is and its history – has deepened my perspective on just how significant money is to how our lives play out, to how we relate to the world.
Think how often you have heard people talk about what money meant when they were young. The values attached to money, be it discipline or frugality or indulgence. Be it endless worry and threat, or generosity and the source of a smile and a treat. Maybe it meant skirmishes with the law, or less serious first lessons in the ethics of property rights. Maybe it meant your parents sacrificing so much of themselves for you to invest in your opportunities.
If I say the word ‘money’, what does it make you feel? Do you shrink or expand?
Ask yourself “what does money mean to me?” What are some of the words that go through your mind?
Do you immediately think of the past, or the future? Of a parent, or childhood memory, or your first job when every dollar meant so much. Or, do you think of the end of the month ahead and the increase in bills to be paid?
Let’s look at it another way. You see that Apple AirPod Pros retail at $249.00. How does that make you feel? Is it desire and excitement as to something new to the world, does it leave you asking curious as to the grandiose price, or give you an instinct of resentment in the luxury and disgust as you run some quick profit analysis and think of how everybody could hand that money over to a better cause?
I suspect that the answer to these questions signals many clues about our values, and about our attitude to ourselves and how we see and go about in the world. And from there, money may play a bigger role in how our lives play out than we realize. Because relationship with money shapes individuals and families as much as it shapes organizations, cities and nations.
Indeed money started out that way, as the Spanish observed the symbols of rare metals in the Inca empire and changed their representation from decoration to a sought-after store of value and means of exchange in Europe. You’ll find a wonderful summary of this epoch in the first chapter of The Ascent of Money by historian Niall Ferguson. To some, the value is in the simple symbols at home with a simple satisfaction. To others, money is an endless lever of trade and expansion and new things and new places. “Money is not metal, money is trust inscribed”, Ferguson writes. (1)
Where does the viewpoint come from that a world without money would be a utopia? It is an ideology that you will still hear today. Yet if we explore this question practically, we can see the outcomes in the results of communism, where the flow of money is centrally planned and the resource – the ‘getting things done’ in the economy – is centrally determined.
Is money a stock for you – as in a hoard that might run out, and so a threat? Or is it a continuous flow, a river and lever in your life, a tool to progress?
Of course it seems to be a stock on first thinking. But that’s the wrong answer. Money is a flow, and its expansive concept is at the root of all our progress. It is actually a technology in that sense, to the extent that it is one of the defining ‘Universal Order’ technologies that Yuval Harari proposes drove our development in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. (2)
Is our attitude towards money actually our attitude towards ourselves and towards how we see everything else in the world?
Have you ever noticed that you are in an “expansive” or generous money mood one day and constrained or limited – “tight” even – the next? On the bad days in our relationship with money, we need to remember that money is a tool for our own individual outlook and progress as well as for careful management by “money people” from your financial advisors to central bankers.
A tight self-awareness around our feelings about money is important to how our lives play out. Because this will influence where we are generous and where we invest, and where we defend and protect and maybe shrink. It will influence how we act towards others, and how we act towards ourselves.
Because money is not stuff, or a number, rather it is the lever for how we will grow, tell ourselves stories, experience and achieve. Go multiply that over the number of days you have left to live…
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(1) The Ascent of Money Niall Ferguson (2009), Chapter 1
(2) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Harari (2015), Chapter 9
Featured image shot by Christine Roy, who you can find on Unsplash.
