One of the most brilliant essays I have ever read on Substack. Thank you, Tamara, for redefining so many concepts for us, from eroticism, to desire, to change, to attraction, fear, love, the body, the smile, privacy, men, intimacy, likability, disagreement, freedom…. and now money.
For those who haven’t explored your work the past six months, please, do yourselves a favor and get ready for a formidable ride.
That means more than I can say, thank you, Clara! And thank you for reading not just one essay, but the long thread that weaves through them all. Each theme you mention (desire, freedom, intimacy, money) is just another mask the human condition wears when it walks into the room. I keep trying to catch it in a different light.
Redefining is maybe too generous, I think of it more as re-seeing. Tilting the lens just enough to trouble the obvious and make it shimmer with ambiguity. Because beneath every familiar word is a fault line, and I’ve always been more interested in what trembles underneath than what stands firm on the surface.
Your comment feels like being truly seen, not only for my words, but for the obsessions behind them. And that kind of reading, that kind of reader, is rare. So thank you again, for riding the curve of thought with me! It’s the company that makes the road worth writing.
What I learned from this essay couldn’t be packaged into a syllabus or reduced to a lecture as you might think. It wasn’t a lesson per se, it was a reckoning. A pulling back of the curtain on how deeply money has infiltrated not just our systems, but our psyches.
I didn’t walk away with bullet points. I walked away with perspective, and in a world saturated with information, that is rarer than a degree of you know what I mean.
What this essay did was reframe things I’ve felt but couldn’t articulate: the moral tension of pricing your own work, the quiet shame of debt, the strange grief of watching art get monetized until it becomes content. It made me question how many of my decisions are actually mine—and how many are shaped by invisible economic scripts I never consented to but have internalized nonetheless.
In all honesty? I’ve sat in Ivy League seminars where complex ideas were reduced to jargon and ego games. This essay did something better: it told the truth, with clarity, wit, and the kind of courage no diploma can teach.
You managed to touch upon all of the misconceptions about money that most of us running the rat race haven't come close to gleaning: that all money is debt; that the barter system underpinning capitalist ideology is actually mythology; that money has become a means of measuring character; that the pursuit of money purely for its own sake is an endless treadmill; that the economic success we ascribe to hard work and an ascendency of character is, more often than not, merely the product of an inherited pole position, and ability to game the system; that nation building is as much about industriousness as it is about debt extraction from poorer nations forcibly backed into a geopolitical corner.
What's brilliant is that you take all of those insights, which are based on highly technical and often abstract evidence, and bring them into everyday life. Not merely to make them comprehensible, but relatable, and identifiable in everything from our choice to pay $4 extra for a cup of coffee, to the homes we choose to buy and the careers we pick to fund the entire mess.
Money isn't a harvest: it was invented precisely to solve the problems inherent to harvests; to create a store of excess value that wouldn't rot away uneaten and unused. As such, it creates two problems: that of abstraction, where money could be created separately from value, and that of exponential accrual, where certain circumstances allow for an owner or CEO to make a thousand times more than his employees, while convincing the world that he's bringing 1000 times the value.
None of this is to mention that you avoided the obvious pitfall of the capitalist/communist false dichotomy, and you make it clear that money is still important, still valuable, and, like any other instrument, can still be used for good. I could go on forever. A brilliant piece!
What an exquisite comment, especially coming from you, the one who inspired me to write this essay a long time ago when I read yours.
Thank you, Andrew! You’ve taken my scaffolding and built a second structure beside it, equally incisive.
Your point about money being invented to solve the problems inherent to harvests is sharp, and I love how it reframes the origin as not abundance, but the anxiety of excess. Rot avoidance. And from that anxiety emerged abstraction: tokens for grain, numbers for tokens, and eventually, faith-based systems where the true commodity is belief itself. That slippery slope from preservation to manipulation is at the heart of so many current distortions.
And yes, that exponential accrual isn’t only economic injustice, it’s a narrative coup. Convincing the world that 1000x value exists in a single human’s output is perhaps capitalism’s most seductive fable. It’s not just math; it’s myth dressed up in performance reviews.
And your mention of sidestepping the tired capitalist/communist dichotomy means a great deal. We are in desperate need of new metaphors, new models — not binary slogans, but layered truths that can hold both critique and care.
I’d be delighted to hear you go on forever… this kind of exchange is exactly the kind of economy I believe in: one of minds, generously engaged.
And for those who want to read your formidable piece, here, my inspiration was this one:
Thank you, Tamara! This kind of intellectual reproduction was exactly what I'd hoped for when joining Substack. I'm glad that we can inspire each other.
This is one of the most incisive, unflinching, and eloquently mournful pieces I’ve read on the architecture of money, as an inheritance of control, a grammar of value, and a psychological regime.
Reading this, I was struck by how much the mythology of money, its narrative veneer of fairness, efficiency, and neutrality, is precisely what allows its violence to go unnoticed. It reminds me of David Graeber’s observation that the real function of economic myths isn’t explanation but exoneration. The barter story, in that sense, is a fable designed to launder power through the illusion of cooperation.
What I would add, perhaps as an extension of this already devastating critique, is the role of abstraction in our alienation. The further removed we become from the material consequences of money, through algorithms, indexes, ETFs, NFTs, DeFi, “buy now, pay later” schemes, the harder it is to even locate the point of injury. The debt isn’t owed to a village elder or temple scribe anymore, it’s owed to a cloud of code and clause, managed by a hedge fund whose name sounds like a coastal breeze. Trust me, I do know better than anyone else.
This abstraction allows cruelty to become automated. The eviction notice isn’t hand-delivered by someone who knows your name, it’s generated by software, rubber-stamped by policy, and carried out by a contractor whose job is insulated by layers of institutional plausible deniability. No one person is responsible, which is precisely how the machine continues. The debt becomes sacred, and the debtor becomes shameful.
But the most piercing section for me was the elegy for the poet. I think we all know someone like her. Hell, we are her. I’ve watched friends with rare voices take jobs writing UX copy for dating apps or running brand campaigns for “disruptive” pet food startups because poetry, though sacred, won’t cover a dental bill. And that’s the wound money leaves behind, it doesn’t just extract labor, it deforms aspiration. It turns vocation into “content”, and content into metrics.
I don’t think the answer lies in aestheticizing poverty or romanticizing precarity, no one wants to be the starving artist, despite the mythology, but rather in what you point toward at the end: a re-sacralizing of patronage not as noblesse oblige, but as mutual cultural stewardship. The quiet miracle of someone paying more than what was asked, not for clout but because they felt something.
In a world that trains us to believe worth is something granted by institutions, markets, and followers, your essay dares to ask: what if value is actually a matter of recognition? Of bearing witness?
You’ve critiqued the system—we’ve all read plenty of those—but made visible the psychic toll it takes, the moral compromises it demands, and the fragile places where we might still resist with reverence.
What an extraordinary response, Céline! I feel I’m reading your essay, not just a comment to mine.
Yes, Graeber’s line about myth as exoneration was a key anchor for me, and you’ve carried it further with brilliant precision. The barter fable isn’t benign; it’s laundering. It makes coercion look cooperative, like a smile on a velvet boot. And your expansion into abstraction as alienation is devastatingly perfect. The further money slips into intangible territory (coded, securitised, indexed) the harder it is to grieve what we have lost, because the wound has no coordinates. When eviction is triggered by a clause inside a server farm and executed by a subcontractor who doesn’t speak your language, cruelty becomes normalised AND invisible.
Your line about the coastal-breeze hedge fund name is genius. It perfectly captures the soft dissonance between naming and action, the way language is now used to cloak harm rather than clarify it.
And the phrase “money doesn’t just extract labour, it deforms aspiration”… I nearly exhaled a “yes” aloud. That’s the heart of the wound, what we do to survive, and what we abandon in the name of survival. When art becomes UX copy, when the poet invoices for thoughtless things that cost her the voice she once loved, money colonised her soul. Awful! But reality…
You are sooo right, we don’t need more romanticisations of the “starving artist”. What we need is a re-enchantment of cultural stewardship, as you so beautifully put it. Not as pity or prestige, but as recognition. As reverence. A kind of sacred witnessing that says: this moved me, and I want to keep it alive.
Thank you for reading with depth, range, and bright exactitude!
Your essay is an astonishing act of intellectual excavation, Tamara, unearthed from history books, from the psychological fault lines money leaves in all of us. It reads like a palimpsest: myth stripped back to its machinery, ethics laid bare beneath the scaffolding of capital. What struck me most was how you reframed currency not as a neutral instrument, but as a narrative engine—one we’ve mistaken for nature because we’ve forgotten who’s holding the pen.
The barter myth as bedtime story? That’s a sharp diagnosis of economic nostalgia. It reminded me of the way Silicon Valley often reinvents feudalism with UX polish—new apps, same power dynamics. Your writing dismantles the illusion without veering into cynicism, and that’s amazing because we are drowning in cynicism today.
And the photos—especially here—are brilliantly chosen. Tabard was a genius at exposing the surreal within the real, the strange choreography of modern life, and these three images echo the essay’s tone with eerie precision. Especially the one with the warped reflection—it feels like money itself: recognizable, distorted, and just out of reach. Truly a visual essay in its own right.
As a reader, I can’t help but ask: if money is both mirror and myth, how do we begin to reclaim authorship of the story it tells—before it edits us out of our own humanity?
This might be the most exquisitely rendered mirror the essay has found, a response that reflects its intentions and refines them at the same time.
You named it, currency as narrative engine. That’s exactly the wound and the warning. We mistake circulation for meaning, liquidity for value, and forget the most dangerous myths are the ones no longer recognised as stories. The barter tale survives because it flatters us with simplicity, just as Silicon Valley’s glossy feudalism flatters us with convenience. UX becomes the new veil; the hierarchy remains intact.
Your question feels like the heartbeat beneath the whole essay. Maybe we begin with rupture… in language, in imagination, in choosing to fund what cannot be scaled. Maybe we reauthor by refusing fluency in the language of metrics, and instead writing in the dialects of care, ambiguity, beauty, those messy, unmonetisable forms.
And I’m glad you liked the photos, especially when it comes from someone who works in the field. Tabard’s eye caught precisely what my essay hoped to trace: not the spectacle of wealth, but its distortion, its choreography, as you so perfectly put it.
Thank you for reading visually, philosophically, and with such depth, Alexander!
Tamara, I’m writing this curled beneath a quilt, fever raging, the kind of sick that makes the world feel a little sideways. But my heart’s clear on this. I’ve been thinking about patronage. Not in the historical, pedestal sense, but as a quiet gesture of alignment. A way of saying: what you make matters to me. When a few readers recently supported my own writing, I felt genuinely floored. Moved, yes, but also a little rattled. Was it a self-worth thing? Maybe. Or maybe I’d simply forgotten how beautiful it is to be held in that way.
Yet I’ve always been a patron of what I love. Buying shoes for ballet dancers. Giving quietly to charities each month, despite the freelance income rollercoaster, because while I know I’m not going to save the world with my small contributions, I make them nonetheless. Because I’d rather be a quiet force for good than a loud voice for nothing.
A local restaurant nearby has no prices on the menu. You pay what you are able to. Those with more give more, so those with less—or nothing—can still eat. Human beings nourishing one another. I’ve been working on a piece that circles around these thoughts, one that will now arrive a lot later than intended, thanks to the heaviness that’s taken up residence in my chest. But I didn’t want to wait to say this: your work truly nourishes. And I’m honoured to be a patron.
Even now, feverish & full of ginger tea, I wanted you to know: I’m here. Because you are.
This moved through me like a warm current under ice. Fever or not, your clarity burns clean, and what you have written here is the very embodiment of what I tried to name in my essay: that patronage, at its most sacred, is not transaction but testament. A silent offering that says, “I see you. Keep going.”
And yes, it rattles because we’ve been conditioned to believe that money is only ever cold, strategic, transactional. When it arrives with love folded inside, it disorients the part of us that was bracing for indifference. But that disorientation? It’s grace, breaking through.
Your story of the restaurant with no prices gave me chills. That kind of trust, deliberately built into the architecture of a place, is revolutionary. Not because it’s grand, but because it refuses the cynicism baked into so much of our economic imagination. It remembers that care is a form of currency too.
I’m humbled and honoured by your presence here, and by the depth of your own generosity, not just materially, but spiritually. You give like someone who knows what it costs to keep the flame lit. I’m holding your presence, your ginger tea, and your fever-laced clarity with tenderness. Thank you for this, Kim! Heal slowly, and write that piece when your breath returns. The world needs it.
The rich industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.
'Why aren't you out fishing?' asked the industrialist.
'Because I have caught enough fish for the day,'
'Why don't you catch some more?'
'What would I do with them?'
'You could earn more money. Then you could have a motor fitted to your boat to go into deeper waters and catch more fish. Then you would have enough money to buy nylon nets. These would bring you more fish and more money. Soon you would have enough money to own two boats... maybe even a fleet of boats.
Ah, the parable that punctures the myth of more with the elegance of enough. This story lingers because it cuts to the very contradiction at the heart of modern ambition: we sacrifice peace in the name of achieving the conditions for peace. And by the time we “earn” the right to rest, we have long forgotten how.
What’s so silently subversive about the fisherman isn’t that he rejects wealth,,it’s that he refuses the story. The industrialist offers him a lifetime of hustle in exchange for what he already has: presence. Contentment. A pipe, a sea, a moment.
And that’s the tragedy of our age: we’ve industrialised even happiness. Turned it into an endgame with spreadsheets and ROI projections. But the fisherman? He reminds us that value isn’t always found in scaling up. Sometimes it’s in staying still.
Thank you for bringing this into the conversation, Michael! It’s a perfect coda to a culture that keeps mistaking acceleration for evolution.
Superb! This whole concept of money and its imaginary underpinnings has long been a 'brainworm' with lots of rumination for me. Your writing has so well encapsulated a lot of what I've been thinking.
I like that you called it a brainworm - what a perfect word for the kind of idea that burrows in, refuses eviction, and keeps gnawing until it reshapes your worldview from the inside out!
Money is precisely that kind of concept, so omnipresent it vanishes into the background, yet so psychologically potent it infiltrates everything… our worth, our time, our trust, even our relationships. And once you start seeing its scaffolding, it’s hard to unsee it. It becomes less of a medium and more of a mirror.
I’m honoured my essay resonated with your own rumination. Maybe that’s the best we can do as writers, give shape to the murmurings others haven’t yet found language for or remind them they weren’t alone in thinking it. So thank you, Charles, for thinking it, and for letting me echo it back to you!
Several years ago, as tne cover photo for my facebook page, I used a photo of a penny that had been gifted to me and made the comment that if someone offered me $1,000 for it, I would not sell it. I have more than 100pennies of the same year, same condition, etc but this one is special. I have attributed to it a value far beyond what most rational people wold consider. just to make the point that the value of an object is arbitrary, and personal. while some objects (or concepts?) have values that are generally, across societies, considered to be widely accepted, such as one ounce of gold has a value of a certain number of dollars.
I have often commented that money is now meaningless..
Your essay has helped me to get some of my musings into better focus.
If i’m lost in a desert, dying of thirst, and someone offers me a pound of gold or a gallon of water and a map to safety, the water has far more value than the gold.
Exactly! Value isn’t fixed, it’s context on a leash. And in a world that worships gold, it’s the water that saves you. Ironic! What you’ve done with that penny is what we all do, whether we admit it or not, imbue meaning where markets see none. You declared it sacred, and in doing so, you made it real because value, at its core, is not economic, but symbolic.
The desert example is the perfect parable because it exposes the absurdity of absolute worth. Gold means nothing without survival, without story, without use. That’s the flaw in all hyper-rational economic thinking, it forgets that humans are not calculators, we are myth-makers.
I’m grateful my essay helped bring your musings into sharper focus. They were already clear in essence, what you just wrote is philosophy in lived form. That penny was a refusal. A little revolt against the tyranny of standardised value. We need more of that!
Thanks Tamara. Money is indeed all about power, about control. This is why many major nations are now buying gold. Gold underwrites wealth in a concrete & lasting way. It always has. Coins these days are not of gold or silver. And printed banknotes are merely promissory notes, of no value other than as legal contracts between the government & those who need/wish to engage with the world. No bank would have the wealth to honour them, if all of us were to simultaneously attempt to convert the numbers in our bank accounts to cash, let alone gold.
Those who favour cryptocurrencies insist that they circumvent the problem of quantitative easing, because only a finite number are issued. But the trouble with believing that, is that there is no guarantee that new forms of cryptocurrency will likely emerge as technologies race ahead, in particular with AI.
For all this, however, I still find it useful to explore the value wealth in my life, by imagining what I might do if I was to win or inherit say $/€/£100M. That helps me to calibrate my true priorities in life, so that once I return to reality, I can then pursue those aims, albeit on a more modest financial scale.
Your thought experiment reveals something crucial, that wealth, whether real or imagined, functions as a psychological lens. It clarifies not just what we want, but what we actually value when stripped of survival anxiety and scarcity thinking. In that sense, imagining what we would do with $100 million isn’t a fantasy, it’s a diagnostic. It tells us who we might be if money stopped being a leash.
You are right, too, to name the illusion of liquidity. Bank balances feel solid until you consider the collective impossibility of cashing out. The entire system operates on suspension of disbelief — trust, habit, compliance. Gold, for all its archaic glamour, at least nods to materiality. But even that is freighted with mythology. Its “value” is as much cultural as it is chemical.
And cryptocurrencies… well, they reveal our desperation for alternatives more than they offer resolution. Scarcity alone doesn’t confer stability, especially when the scarcity is digital and infinitely replicable in form. As you noted, AI could generate a thousand “finite” coins tomorrow. What we see is capitalism gamified, speculative, and speed-run.
But your final point is the one that lingers…. wealth as mirror. Not to reflect back our greed, but our longing. And maybe the trick is to pursue those longings now, as best we can, not waiting for the jackpot, but investing our limited currency (time, attention, care) into the life we want to recognise as our own.
A mirror, certainly. Perhaps the concept of imagined wealth can also be a microscope, & a telescope.
Is not “… to pursue those longings now, as best we can …”, what you do? What most writers do?
That is surely what those who have gained a genuine insight into what they wish to do with their lives, what they think is important, & what they commit themselves to doing.
And it’s what keeps me sane, and enjoying a richer, more interior life, since all my immediate family have died, & my career & financial circumstances changed over the last five years. I now read much history, think more, joined eg X, & interact with many I could never have known or taken the time to know earlier, throughout the world. I’ve learned more in this time than through any of my 5 degrees. Only as a child raised by good parents did I learn more, about both life philosophy & practical things.
Had I the resources to purchase say a champagne house in France, a villa on the Amalfi coast, an English castle with title, a private jet, & a Rolls Royce Cullinan, I’d lead a faster, more exciting life, & I’d meet more people, but I doubt I’d understand myself, & live as considered a life, as I do now. And though I’d hob nob with more of the glitterati & the aristocracy, I’d never know if they liked me or merely my wealth. Embracing such a distracted life would often be fun, but I doubt I’d be any happier, or live a life with as much integrity.
This is beautifully said, and yes, a mirror, but also a microscope and a telescope. Imagined wealth isn’t just fantasy; it’s a diagnostic tool, a philosophical instrument for seeing more closely what we long for, and more distantly what we might become if we are not careful. The richest kind of thought experiment, really… because it doesn’t flatter, it reveals.
And you’re right to pursue those longings now, as best we can, that’s the defiance of writers, readers, and anyone living a life that resists the metrics of spectacle. It’s not a performance of ambition, but a reclamation of meaning. You have carved space from loss, turned absence into attention. That’s wonderful.
What you’ve described, the interior richness forged in grief, the humility of not knowing who would stay if wealth entered the room first, the deliberate slowness of thought… is its own form of nobility. Not conferred by titles or trappings, but earned through clarity. A Rolls Royce can take you far. But your reflection here? It goes deeper. And lasts longer.
Thank you for sharing it! This is what considered life looks like in language.
Thanks Tamara, for your thoughts, which are encouraging for me. In many ways, I feel I have no choice but to pursue life the way I’m doing, at least for now.
And sometimes that “no choice” is actually the deepest kind of choice, the one made out of alignment, not preference. When the world offers a thousand ways to contort yourself for approval, choosing to live in truth, even quietly, is an act of courage. Especially when the path isn’t glamorous or guaranteed.
There’s a certain dignity in continuing, even without clarity, when you walk not because the way is lit, but because you know which direction you refuse to turn back toward.
And “for now” holds more power than it sounds. It’s a phrase that leaves room for both persistence and transformation. May that “now” carry you with steadiness until the next right moment finds you, Russell.
Tamara, I enjoyed your insightful and sobering explanation of money and its role in society and our lives. So many telling lines summarized by your “money today is not a thing – it is a promise, a claim, a delusion of liquidity propped up by trust in institutions that no longer seem trustworthy.” So much is mirage and illusion and yet as you pointed out, there are moments when money can be a pure gift. My thoughts about money run similar. I’ve always held that nothing costs anything. Money is a human transaction that goes into only one place—pockets. If I buy a car, that car gets not a cent; the money goes into the pockets of the raw material suppliers, foundries, assemblers, transporters, dealers, advertisers, salespersons, show rooms. People ask for a certain amount and if we are willing to pay it, that’s what we allow it to cost. But still, I can’t justify the cost of Lenmeldy, a gene therapy drug for children, which is the most expensive drug globally at $4.25 million for a single dose. Must this much be charged? Author Sydney Harris agrees with you: “Men make counterfeit money, in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.” Thanks again for your wise essay that made more than cents.
Thank you for this beautifully layered response, Michael, it reads like a meditation in itself, and that closing pun landed with just the right touch of wry clarity.
Your observation that nothing costs anything, that everything is ultimately a negotiation between human pockets, is such a vital reframe. It exposes the constructed nature of pricing, especially in cases like Lenmeldy, where the “cost” is less about materials or labour and more about what the market will tolerate, or what desperation will pay. When healing a child becomes a million-dollar proposition, we are no longer in the realm of medicine but mythology: where miracles are rationed by profit margins.
The Sydney Harris quote is a searing mirror. If money once symbolised trust, it now often forges personas built for accumulation rather than integrity. We spend so long shaping ourselves to be creditworthy, employable, “investable”, that we forget who we were before we internalised the ledger.
What you have added here is a reckoning. Thank you for reading with such philosophical generosity, and for reminding us that money’s truest cost is not in what we buy, but in what we agree to accept!
Thank you so much for this. It has sparked so many thoughts in me.
So often people speak of “good debt,” or debt “working for them.” Dave Ramsey has tried to teach people to avoid playing the game of “debt.”
Money has even influenced the way we understand faith, especially faith in God. Faith is cheapened by money; it turns faith in God into idol worship. Christians are taught to see intrinsic goodness in all people, even and especially their enemies. We tend to forget this, unfortunately, and we measure one’s value according to a meritocracy where someone is good if they have “worked hard” and “earned it.”
Thank you, Nathanael, for drawing the thread all the way into the sacred.
It’s striking how the language of finance has quietly infiltrated the vocabulary of faith: “prosperity gospel”, “investing in the kingdom”, even “spiritual debt”. Somewhere along the line, belief got brokered. Faith became performance. And God, once a mystery beyond measure, was quietly turned into a cosmic banker, blessing those with assets and withholding grace like credit for the unworthy.
You are right, meritocracy has crept not just into economics, but into morality. We have replaced compassion with calculation, and forgotten that grace, by definition, is not earned. It’s precisely that refusal to tally worth that made the original message so subversive.
What would it look like to practice faith without financial metaphor? To stop calculating who “deserves” help, love, forgiveness or success? Perhaps that’s the deeper résistance: to remember that value is not bestowed by effort or accumulation, but by being.
This is the most soulful expedition of money I've ever encountered! The barter story as a fable wounds and enlightens at once. It illuminates the fantasy/illusion that bartering will be the key to healing a fractured empire from capitalism to freedom. Thank you for this Tamara! Although the future looks bleak in changing the status quo, if we stop pretending that money is power, or that it is the root of all evil, can we radically reimagine money as pure energy, the energy of love? As you said so sublimely, "The spiritual cost is harder to name, but it shows up in our exhaustion, our disconnection, our emptiness masked as productivity. We worship the market as if it were omniscient and omnipotent, even as it cannibalises the very things we claim to value: rest, beauty, sincerity, generosity." Just like conversations on death or dying, talking about money is a topic that's kept to sound bites, hiding behind a deeper reality to avoid feelings of, as you reveal: "fear, longing, shame, trust, history..."
This to me is the heart and soul of money, "...sometimes, through patronage, through care, through the silent act of paying for something beautiful, we can choose whom we share the fruit with, and in doing so, nourish not just the artist, but the very possibility of a world where meaning is still allowed to matter." You are honored as you nourish the world of meaning Tamara.
What a generous reply, this is less a comment than a kind of blessing. You have named the very tension I was circling: that money, for all its violence and distortion, still carries the potential to be re-enchanted, not erased, not demonised, but reimagined as a conduit for something softer, more human, more intentional.
Your “the energy of love”’stopped me. It feels radical precisely because it’s so easy to dismiss as naïve. And yet, what else would a true economy be, if not the circulation of care? What else should “value” mean, if not: what nourishes us, what dignifies us, what helps us live more deeply into our shared aliveness?
You are right, talking about money is a lot like talking about death, it’s shrouded in euphemism, flattened into cliché, or deflected entirely. But both topics demand soul-language. And you have brought it here in abundance.
Thank you for seeing the piece so wholly, and for offering back a vision that expands it. To be read like this is to feel accompanied in the project, not just of writing, but of rethinking the world. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for your patronage. You are wonderful, Susan!
Lets reimagine the dollar bill! Instead of an image of a pyramid with the all-seeing eye atop, see a loaf of bread, an offering, changing hands. Not a barter image per se, rather an emphasis on value: what nourishes and sustains our fellowship as humans and our incarnate ensouled life. For me this is the dialectic: the pyramid of Pharaonic monetized control, and the life of the hearth. With the pair, Hestia and Hermes though, the hearth and the marketplace can be seen as a complimentary dance between both: the primacy of the nourishing fire of home around which we dwell, dream and return; and the abounding mercurial world to provide for our daily sustenance. Also, there was a viable moment in American history when the image of this new country was at a crossroads: a Jeffersonian democracy of small family farm holders, and a Hamilton federal banking system. The federal reserve version won but did it need to be either/or? And look at where its gotten us today: a debt driven feudalism 2.0 with a jargon-wielding "citadel of expertise" aka tower of babel brokering the deal. But it's nothing new, with Peter Kingsley's recently revised research into the matter in general, this is something that has co-evolved with the rise of western culture at the onset. The keen, disciplined magic of shamanic wisdom, capable of immense sacral energetics and medicine powers, was not allowed through the gates at the dawn of the contemporary world. We've been fumbling around ever since. The only recourse is for people like Kingsley and others to help each of us open the doors to our sacred source, by showing it's there and guiding us as well. In the midst of all the screaming banshees of business as usual, essay's like Museguided can bring the focus to articulate the issue and clarify the conversation. Merci.
This is a vision I could fold and carry in my pocket: a dollar bill no longer branded with the symbols of surveillance and sovereignty, but with the image of shared sustenance, hands passing bread, not hoarding gold. You have reframed currency not as control, but communion. And that shift, from the Pharaonic pyramid to the sacred hearth, is ontological.
Hestia and Hermes: yes. The dance between stillness and motion, home and trade, the sacred centre and the centrifugal spin of exchange. It’s a dialectic we have forgotten, collapsing everything into Hermes’ speed and cleverness while starving the hearth of our attention. And without Hestia, without reverence for place, time, silence, we spin into abstraction, jargon, Babel, as you so piercingly note.
Your evocation of the Jefferson-Hamilton crossroads is powerful, too… a moment where America could have chosen rootedness over rapidity, community over consolidation. That it didn’t is inheritance. We are now living in the shadow of that decision, wrapped in the language of debt and buffered by “expertise” that often speaks in incantations of opacity.
And Kingsley, yes. His insistence that the sacred never disappeared but was deliberately walled is perfect. We didn’t lose the mystery. We legislated it out. What essays, art, and visions like yours offer is critique, and also re-entry. Not escape, but homecoming.
Thank you for this comment! You have braided myth, memory, and political insight into a reminder that other meanings are always possible. We just have to learn to read the currency differently.
As spot-on a rejoinder as I could have asked for, OMG. Your "tracing the constellations" of ideas draped in the Museguided language of amplification truly does clarify the conversation, "dreaming the dream onward" toward edifications inaccessible without this kind of shared mentation of the issues confronting each of us where we live in this Planetary biosphere of whispering waters of language whose currents turn us through the shifting tides of day. Merci times two.
What a wonderful reply, this reads like a tide-chart of the soul. Shared mentation is exactly the phrase: not debate, not assertion, but the slow, reverent circling of ideas until something bright emerges between them.
Your “planetary biosphere of whispering waters of language” is the kind of phrase that could baptise a whole genre. It reminds me that language isn’t a simple tool, it’s an ecosystem. We don’t simply use words; we swim in them, breathe them, get caught in their undertow. And when the right ones arrive, attuned, tidal, they cohere, not only communicate.
So thank you for amplifying the amplification! This conversation enchants. Merci, multiplied.
This has both breadth and depth and it is quite an education for one who was never well-versed in finance and economics. As one who was a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, in the language of flower children (real and aspiring), money was a dirty word. As the daughter of an accountant, I was not allowed to say that, however as a Catholic I was allowed to use quotes about “the lilies of the field” as much as I wanted. When I took it literally and decided to trust God to provide for me I don’t think anyone realised how seriously I intended to live that way. I worked, but at non-profits and doing service-type jobs. Didn’t quite work out as expected, though you’d be surprised how long you can string yourself (and others) along when just enough money shows up here and there to keep the fiction going.
There were two factors in how I got into this and how I got away with it for so many years. The first: my parents taught finance to their three children according to gender and marital status. My brother got his education from my dad, the accountant, and learned his lessons well. My sister and her fiancé sat down with my dad who talked with them about finance and debt and how to handle joint accounts. I, with no spouse in the offing and being a girl, got my mother, who taught me how to write a check and how to open up credit cards and use them to get a good credit score. I believe she also told me my future husband would take care of paying the bills. They never noticed that I wasn’t especially interested in finding a husband for finance duty, and I stonewalled any questions about my finances from my mother as best I could.
The second factor was that women then and now, generally were paid less, though never expected to work less. Once in a while I was able to negotiate something good, like working at a university theatre department I knew I wouldn’t get more than a tiny cost-of-living raise, so I asked my boss for a travel budget for going to see theatre in New York and Canada. It paid off for both of us, as I got to see some great shows with great actors, and for the department, I was able to borrow for free a set of costumes for the Scottish play from the Stratford Festival in Canada, plus get a number of their actors to come and meet with students and/or do their one-person shows, which brought in money and audiences.
I’m still learning many of the things that would have been good to learn about a long time ago, while seeing my government whittling away at the money I am getting in retirement, until the point where they take that completely (that seems to be a matter of time).
At the same time, being on Substack, and especially reading your essays, Tamara, has helped me to step back and see the issues from a wider lens. The bigger picture, and this essay especially, reminded me of a small group of German immigrants who were religious rebels, the Harmony Society. It took them 10 years in a town north of Pittsburgh, then another 10 years in Indiana, until they came back to the town of Ambridge on the Ohio River, just a bit out of Pittsburgh and stayed for almost 100 years.
The Harmony Society had everyone pitch in their resources for the community, and everyone worked and had the right to get what they needed from their store without paying anything. They ended up owning cotton, wool, and grain mills, plus a saw mill, hotel, post office, brewery, distillery, and wine press. They were also the first to manufacture silk in the US. It was incredibly successful, and from the records, there were no disputes about who had what or how hard anyone worked.
The disputes that arose were because the Society wanted people to practice celibacy. That meant no children, so they adopted children to keep things going. However, about a third of the community (estimated at 250 of 750) did not care for the celibacy rule and left. Eventually, by 1905 there were only two or three people left, and the Harmony Society dissolved.
Much of it is still standing, and both school kids and adults go through the historic village every year. It’s a fascinating place, and after reading this essay I wondered if they’d been able to be flexible on the celibacy issue, could they have offered a different model for people to use? Would it have been workable on a larger scale?
Human nature tells me, probably not. But as an adult going through there, talking with people, seeing how it all worked, knowing that they also supported the arts, says to me they had something.
The notion of patronage is appealing, though I also wonder about the power differential providing opportunities for abuse. Or maybe I’ve watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s and American in Paris too many times!
Lots of food for thought, Tamara, and I’ve learned a lot from this one…
What a rich, generous, and layered reflection, Doc, this reads like an entire memoir-in-miniature, threaded with wit, cultural critique, and lived wisdom. Thank you for sharing it so fully!
Your story traces so many of the hidden forces that shaped our financial literacy, or illiteracy, not just through systems, but through gender, family myth, religion, and rebellion. The way you describe your financial “education” as gendered delegation, brother to the accountant, sister with fiancé, you with… checks and credit cards, speaks volumes. Not just about economic exclusion, but about how easily structural inequality masquerades as familial tradition. And yet you moved through it with subversive grace, stringing the fiction together with just enough magic to keep it breathing. That is a kind of artistry.
Your negotiation for a travel budget in lieu of a raise was brilliant, a barter of vision in a system that had already decided what your labor was “worth”. That kind of creative workaround is the real curriculum many women were never officially offered, but had to invent on the fly.
And the Harmony Society story is such a gem. Thank you for bringing it into this conversation, it’s a poignant reminder that alternate models have existed and thrived, however briefly. What unraveled them wasn’t greed, it was the attempt to legislate desire, to over-define the sacred. Perhaps that’s always the paradox…. utopias built on purity eventually break not from failure of labour, but from denial of longing.
You are also right to name the tension in patronage. It walks a fine line between support and surveillance, gift and control. But maybe what redeems it is intentionality, when patronage isn’t about bestowing favour from above, but recognising resonance from beside. Not noblesse oblige, but a mutual act of preservation.
And I can’t tell you how meaningful it is to know that my essays have offered a wider lens. The world is so good at narrowing us, making us feel behind or foolish for what we never had the tools to learn. But what you have shared here proves that insight doesn’t arrive on time, it arrives in layers. And you have clearly earned every one of them.
I hope you write more of this, it’s already teaching.
Thanks, Tamara. I don’t blame my parents. I did for a while, but they were teaching what they were taught and it’s hard to hold that against them.
The idea for the travel budget came from a book by Jane Trahey, On Women and Power: Who Has It and How to Get It. Hardly anyone knows who Jane Trahey is or was, although many know the film made from her book Life with Mother Superior - Trouble with Angels. Jane Trahey was in advertising and eventually had her own agency. She created an iconic ad campaign in 1968 for Blackglama Furs in which the tag line - What Becomes a Legend Most? - was all the ad said, accompanied by a b/w photo by Richard Avedon of a glamorous, famous person, including Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Bette Davis. The campaign ran until 1994, one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever, and was one of the many stories in the book. She wasn’t just a brilliant businesswoman, she was hilariously funny in that book and in Life with Mother Superior. I learned a lot from her stories, and still have my battered paperback copy of the book, and still occasionally reread it.
What a fantastic excavation of memory, of media history, and of a woman far too many have forgotten. I like that you’re keeping Jane Trahey alive by embodying her legacy: wit as strategy, humour as weapon, elegance as leverage.
And yes, the fact that the travel budget idea was sparked by “On Women and Power” makes the whole story even sharper. It’s a form of intergenerational whisper-networking: a woman in advertising planting an idea in a book, which another woman reads and later uses to bend institutional structure to her own shape. That sounds like lineage.
And your grace in releasing blame from your parents is inspirational for many. Most people are handed scripts about money, gender, ambition, and it takes a particular kind of clarity to recognise those scripts without staying trapped inside them. You rewrote the terms, and you turned the footnotes into a future.
Also, your battered paperback sounds like a relic worth archiving…. a personal artifact of resistance and reinvention. Thank you for bringing Trahey back into the conversation. What becomes a legend most, indeed? Apparently: you :)
What I’m saying is that money is not just an economic instrument, it is a narrative, a power structure, and a mirror of our most intimate contradictions. To talk about money is to talk about fear, longing, shame, trust, history, and the slippery algebra of who gets to live fully and who merely survives.
The main function of money is to buy people’s time
… and that’s the silent violence of it, isn’t it? Money doesn’t just buy things, it buys hours, days, lifetimes…. whole chapters of someone else’s existence parceled into billable units.
We speak so often of “saving time” or “spending time” without ever naming that the ledger behind those phrases is financial. The wealthy don’t just have more money, they own more tomorrows. More choices. More rest. More refusal.
Meanwhile, those with less are forced to auction off their minutes, often for tasks that sap the very energy required to dream of a different life.
So yes, money’s primary function might be the purchase of time, but what we rarely ask is: at what cost to the soul of the seller?
OK. That one sucks a bit. I’ve two boisterous 4 year olds at my feet, by way of excuse. I’d actually be a prolific artist if not for life intervening all the time.
Fair enough….. there’s definitely a manic excess here that feels intentional but teeters on the edge of cartoonish. The rhyme lands with bite, but the satire leans heavy, almost as if you are wearing your villainy too proudly, too loudly.
That said, the closing couplet still delivers a sting. It calls out not just systemic corruption, but the terrifying possibility of shared compromise. That line could be whispered instead of shouted and land even harder.
And as for the excuse… two four-year-olds underfoot is both a valid defence and a form of existential art in itself.
In truth I love them (these particular ones, anyway) unconditionally. Love of all varieties tends, more often than not, to overpower logic, as you well know.
Ahhhh now that’s a question worthy of a duel at dawn! Love or stupidity. Perhaps only in retrospect. One wears perfume, the other leaves bruises, but both have us making promises we can’t afford and paying interest in sleep, silence, and the decline of sanity.
And yes, children, often the living receipts of choices made in moments of either one. You don’t have to like them to recognise the strange, sublime hostage situation they represent: joy held at emotional gunpoint. Tiny anarchists of your attention.
So no, I didn’t assume you liked them. I assumed you understood the stakes. Which, clearly, you do…. with interest.
Yes, we need a way of reimagining the art of writing beyond a capitalist mode of extraction. We can imagine together a way of supporting each other in human-making community. Thanks for inviting us deeper.
Writing, at its best, is not a product but a pulse. And the act of reading becomes less consumption than communion. Reimagining writing outside capitalism’s extractive logic means reclaiming it as a site of reciprocity, not performance; of nourishment, not branding.
And yes to your beautiful phrasing, “human-making community”. That’s the real wealth: to create a space where minds meet without price tags, where stories aren’t trimmed to fit platforms, and where support is not transactional, but sacred.
If money must exist, let it be in service of that. Let it fund the unmarketable magic of becoming more human, together.
One of the most brilliant essays I have ever read on Substack. Thank you, Tamara, for redefining so many concepts for us, from eroticism, to desire, to change, to attraction, fear, love, the body, the smile, privacy, men, intimacy, likability, disagreement, freedom…. and now money.
For those who haven’t explored your work the past six months, please, do yourselves a favor and get ready for a formidable ride.
You are one of a kind.
That means more than I can say, thank you, Clara! And thank you for reading not just one essay, but the long thread that weaves through them all. Each theme you mention (desire, freedom, intimacy, money) is just another mask the human condition wears when it walks into the room. I keep trying to catch it in a different light.
Redefining is maybe too generous, I think of it more as re-seeing. Tilting the lens just enough to trouble the obvious and make it shimmer with ambiguity. Because beneath every familiar word is a fault line, and I’ve always been more interested in what trembles underneath than what stands firm on the surface.
Your comment feels like being truly seen, not only for my words, but for the obsessions behind them. And that kind of reading, that kind of reader, is rare. So thank you again, for riding the curve of thought with me! It’s the company that makes the road worth writing.
You are wonderful. I’ve learnt more from your essays than in school, and I went to an Ivy League one. Please, don’t ever stop writing!
I won’t :) Artists cannot stop creating.
I am so curious what you learned from this essay?
What I learned from this essay couldn’t be packaged into a syllabus or reduced to a lecture as you might think. It wasn’t a lesson per se, it was a reckoning. A pulling back of the curtain on how deeply money has infiltrated not just our systems, but our psyches.
I didn’t walk away with bullet points. I walked away with perspective, and in a world saturated with information, that is rarer than a degree of you know what I mean.
What this essay did was reframe things I’ve felt but couldn’t articulate: the moral tension of pricing your own work, the quiet shame of debt, the strange grief of watching art get monetized until it becomes content. It made me question how many of my decisions are actually mine—and how many are shaped by invisible economic scripts I never consented to but have internalized nonetheless.
In all honesty? I’ve sat in Ivy League seminars where complex ideas were reduced to jargon and ego games. This essay did something better: it told the truth, with clarity, wit, and the kind of courage no diploma can teach.
Clear enough for you?
Yes, thank you. It sounds like, in reading this, you really felt heard!
Tamara, this is excellent.
You managed to touch upon all of the misconceptions about money that most of us running the rat race haven't come close to gleaning: that all money is debt; that the barter system underpinning capitalist ideology is actually mythology; that money has become a means of measuring character; that the pursuit of money purely for its own sake is an endless treadmill; that the economic success we ascribe to hard work and an ascendency of character is, more often than not, merely the product of an inherited pole position, and ability to game the system; that nation building is as much about industriousness as it is about debt extraction from poorer nations forcibly backed into a geopolitical corner.
What's brilliant is that you take all of those insights, which are based on highly technical and often abstract evidence, and bring them into everyday life. Not merely to make them comprehensible, but relatable, and identifiable in everything from our choice to pay $4 extra for a cup of coffee, to the homes we choose to buy and the careers we pick to fund the entire mess.
Money isn't a harvest: it was invented precisely to solve the problems inherent to harvests; to create a store of excess value that wouldn't rot away uneaten and unused. As such, it creates two problems: that of abstraction, where money could be created separately from value, and that of exponential accrual, where certain circumstances allow for an owner or CEO to make a thousand times more than his employees, while convincing the world that he's bringing 1000 times the value.
None of this is to mention that you avoided the obvious pitfall of the capitalist/communist false dichotomy, and you make it clear that money is still important, still valuable, and, like any other instrument, can still be used for good. I could go on forever. A brilliant piece!
What an exquisite comment, especially coming from you, the one who inspired me to write this essay a long time ago when I read yours.
Thank you, Andrew! You’ve taken my scaffolding and built a second structure beside it, equally incisive.
Your point about money being invented to solve the problems inherent to harvests is sharp, and I love how it reframes the origin as not abundance, but the anxiety of excess. Rot avoidance. And from that anxiety emerged abstraction: tokens for grain, numbers for tokens, and eventually, faith-based systems where the true commodity is belief itself. That slippery slope from preservation to manipulation is at the heart of so many current distortions.
And yes, that exponential accrual isn’t only economic injustice, it’s a narrative coup. Convincing the world that 1000x value exists in a single human’s output is perhaps capitalism’s most seductive fable. It’s not just math; it’s myth dressed up in performance reviews.
And your mention of sidestepping the tired capitalist/communist dichotomy means a great deal. We are in desperate need of new metaphors, new models — not binary slogans, but layered truths that can hold both critique and care.
I’d be delighted to hear you go on forever… this kind of exchange is exactly the kind of economy I believe in: one of minds, generously engaged.
And for those who want to read your formidable piece, here, my inspiration was this one:
https://open.substack.com/pub/veneer/p/the-circular-logic-of-money?r=2ug7wg&utm_medium=ios
Thank you, Tamara! This kind of intellectual reproduction was exactly what I'd hoped for when joining Substack. I'm glad that we can inspire each other.
I admire you as a writer more than I can describe. Thank you!
This is one of the most incisive, unflinching, and eloquently mournful pieces I’ve read on the architecture of money, as an inheritance of control, a grammar of value, and a psychological regime.
Reading this, I was struck by how much the mythology of money, its narrative veneer of fairness, efficiency, and neutrality, is precisely what allows its violence to go unnoticed. It reminds me of David Graeber’s observation that the real function of economic myths isn’t explanation but exoneration. The barter story, in that sense, is a fable designed to launder power through the illusion of cooperation.
What I would add, perhaps as an extension of this already devastating critique, is the role of abstraction in our alienation. The further removed we become from the material consequences of money, through algorithms, indexes, ETFs, NFTs, DeFi, “buy now, pay later” schemes, the harder it is to even locate the point of injury. The debt isn’t owed to a village elder or temple scribe anymore, it’s owed to a cloud of code and clause, managed by a hedge fund whose name sounds like a coastal breeze. Trust me, I do know better than anyone else.
This abstraction allows cruelty to become automated. The eviction notice isn’t hand-delivered by someone who knows your name, it’s generated by software, rubber-stamped by policy, and carried out by a contractor whose job is insulated by layers of institutional plausible deniability. No one person is responsible, which is precisely how the machine continues. The debt becomes sacred, and the debtor becomes shameful.
But the most piercing section for me was the elegy for the poet. I think we all know someone like her. Hell, we are her. I’ve watched friends with rare voices take jobs writing UX copy for dating apps or running brand campaigns for “disruptive” pet food startups because poetry, though sacred, won’t cover a dental bill. And that’s the wound money leaves behind, it doesn’t just extract labor, it deforms aspiration. It turns vocation into “content”, and content into metrics.
I don’t think the answer lies in aestheticizing poverty or romanticizing precarity, no one wants to be the starving artist, despite the mythology, but rather in what you point toward at the end: a re-sacralizing of patronage not as noblesse oblige, but as mutual cultural stewardship. The quiet miracle of someone paying more than what was asked, not for clout but because they felt something.
In a world that trains us to believe worth is something granted by institutions, markets, and followers, your essay dares to ask: what if value is actually a matter of recognition? Of bearing witness?
You’ve critiqued the system—we’ve all read plenty of those—but made visible the psychic toll it takes, the moral compromises it demands, and the fragile places where we might still resist with reverence.
Thank you for writing this. Really, thank you.
What an extraordinary response, Céline! I feel I’m reading your essay, not just a comment to mine.
Yes, Graeber’s line about myth as exoneration was a key anchor for me, and you’ve carried it further with brilliant precision. The barter fable isn’t benign; it’s laundering. It makes coercion look cooperative, like a smile on a velvet boot. And your expansion into abstraction as alienation is devastatingly perfect. The further money slips into intangible territory (coded, securitised, indexed) the harder it is to grieve what we have lost, because the wound has no coordinates. When eviction is triggered by a clause inside a server farm and executed by a subcontractor who doesn’t speak your language, cruelty becomes normalised AND invisible.
Your line about the coastal-breeze hedge fund name is genius. It perfectly captures the soft dissonance between naming and action, the way language is now used to cloak harm rather than clarify it.
And the phrase “money doesn’t just extract labour, it deforms aspiration”… I nearly exhaled a “yes” aloud. That’s the heart of the wound, what we do to survive, and what we abandon in the name of survival. When art becomes UX copy, when the poet invoices for thoughtless things that cost her the voice she once loved, money colonised her soul. Awful! But reality…
You are sooo right, we don’t need more romanticisations of the “starving artist”. What we need is a re-enchantment of cultural stewardship, as you so beautifully put it. Not as pity or prestige, but as recognition. As reverence. A kind of sacred witnessing that says: this moved me, and I want to keep it alive.
Thank you for reading with depth, range, and bright exactitude!
When my role model writes and explains, I’m in.
Your essay is an astonishing act of intellectual excavation, Tamara, unearthed from history books, from the psychological fault lines money leaves in all of us. It reads like a palimpsest: myth stripped back to its machinery, ethics laid bare beneath the scaffolding of capital. What struck me most was how you reframed currency not as a neutral instrument, but as a narrative engine—one we’ve mistaken for nature because we’ve forgotten who’s holding the pen.
The barter myth as bedtime story? That’s a sharp diagnosis of economic nostalgia. It reminded me of the way Silicon Valley often reinvents feudalism with UX polish—new apps, same power dynamics. Your writing dismantles the illusion without veering into cynicism, and that’s amazing because we are drowning in cynicism today.
And the photos—especially here—are brilliantly chosen. Tabard was a genius at exposing the surreal within the real, the strange choreography of modern life, and these three images echo the essay’s tone with eerie precision. Especially the one with the warped reflection—it feels like money itself: recognizable, distorted, and just out of reach. Truly a visual essay in its own right.
As a reader, I can’t help but ask: if money is both mirror and myth, how do we begin to reclaim authorship of the story it tells—before it edits us out of our own humanity?
This might be the most exquisitely rendered mirror the essay has found, a response that reflects its intentions and refines them at the same time.
You named it, currency as narrative engine. That’s exactly the wound and the warning. We mistake circulation for meaning, liquidity for value, and forget the most dangerous myths are the ones no longer recognised as stories. The barter tale survives because it flatters us with simplicity, just as Silicon Valley’s glossy feudalism flatters us with convenience. UX becomes the new veil; the hierarchy remains intact.
Your question feels like the heartbeat beneath the whole essay. Maybe we begin with rupture… in language, in imagination, in choosing to fund what cannot be scaled. Maybe we reauthor by refusing fluency in the language of metrics, and instead writing in the dialects of care, ambiguity, beauty, those messy, unmonetisable forms.
And I’m glad you liked the photos, especially when it comes from someone who works in the field. Tabard’s eye caught precisely what my essay hoped to trace: not the spectacle of wealth, but its distortion, its choreography, as you so perfectly put it.
Thank you for reading visually, philosophically, and with such depth, Alexander!
All your replies are a treasure.
Tamara, I’m writing this curled beneath a quilt, fever raging, the kind of sick that makes the world feel a little sideways. But my heart’s clear on this. I’ve been thinking about patronage. Not in the historical, pedestal sense, but as a quiet gesture of alignment. A way of saying: what you make matters to me. When a few readers recently supported my own writing, I felt genuinely floored. Moved, yes, but also a little rattled. Was it a self-worth thing? Maybe. Or maybe I’d simply forgotten how beautiful it is to be held in that way.
Yet I’ve always been a patron of what I love. Buying shoes for ballet dancers. Giving quietly to charities each month, despite the freelance income rollercoaster, because while I know I’m not going to save the world with my small contributions, I make them nonetheless. Because I’d rather be a quiet force for good than a loud voice for nothing.
A local restaurant nearby has no prices on the menu. You pay what you are able to. Those with more give more, so those with less—or nothing—can still eat. Human beings nourishing one another. I’ve been working on a piece that circles around these thoughts, one that will now arrive a lot later than intended, thanks to the heaviness that’s taken up residence in my chest. But I didn’t want to wait to say this: your work truly nourishes. And I’m honoured to be a patron.
Even now, feverish & full of ginger tea, I wanted you to know: I’m here. Because you are.
This moved through me like a warm current under ice. Fever or not, your clarity burns clean, and what you have written here is the very embodiment of what I tried to name in my essay: that patronage, at its most sacred, is not transaction but testament. A silent offering that says, “I see you. Keep going.”
And yes, it rattles because we’ve been conditioned to believe that money is only ever cold, strategic, transactional. When it arrives with love folded inside, it disorients the part of us that was bracing for indifference. But that disorientation? It’s grace, breaking through.
Your story of the restaurant with no prices gave me chills. That kind of trust, deliberately built into the architecture of a place, is revolutionary. Not because it’s grand, but because it refuses the cynicism baked into so much of our economic imagination. It remembers that care is a form of currency too.
I’m humbled and honoured by your presence here, and by the depth of your own generosity, not just materially, but spiritually. You give like someone who knows what it costs to keep the flame lit. I’m holding your presence, your ginger tea, and your fever-laced clarity with tenderness. Thank you for this, Kim! Heal slowly, and write that piece when your breath returns. The world needs it.
The rich industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.
'Why aren't you out fishing?' asked the industrialist.
'Because I have caught enough fish for the day,'
'Why don't you catch some more?'
'What would I do with them?'
'You could earn more money. Then you could have a motor fitted to your boat to go into deeper waters and catch more fish. Then you would have enough money to buy nylon nets. These would bring you more fish and more money. Soon you would have enough money to own two boats... maybe even a fleet of boats.
Then you would be a rich man like me.
*What would I do then?'
'Then you could sit back and enjoy life.'
'What do you think I'm doing right now?'
From Timeless Simplicity by John Lane
J
Ah, the parable that punctures the myth of more with the elegance of enough. This story lingers because it cuts to the very contradiction at the heart of modern ambition: we sacrifice peace in the name of achieving the conditions for peace. And by the time we “earn” the right to rest, we have long forgotten how.
What’s so silently subversive about the fisherman isn’t that he rejects wealth,,it’s that he refuses the story. The industrialist offers him a lifetime of hustle in exchange for what he already has: presence. Contentment. A pipe, a sea, a moment.
And that’s the tragedy of our age: we’ve industrialised even happiness. Turned it into an endgame with spreadsheets and ROI projections. But the fisherman? He reminds us that value isn’t always found in scaling up. Sometimes it’s in staying still.
Thank you for bringing this into the conversation, Michael! It’s a perfect coda to a culture that keeps mistaking acceleration for evolution.
Superb! This whole concept of money and its imaginary underpinnings has long been a 'brainworm' with lots of rumination for me. Your writing has so well encapsulated a lot of what I've been thinking.
THANK YOU!
I like that you called it a brainworm - what a perfect word for the kind of idea that burrows in, refuses eviction, and keeps gnawing until it reshapes your worldview from the inside out!
Money is precisely that kind of concept, so omnipresent it vanishes into the background, yet so psychologically potent it infiltrates everything… our worth, our time, our trust, even our relationships. And once you start seeing its scaffolding, it’s hard to unsee it. It becomes less of a medium and more of a mirror.
I’m honoured my essay resonated with your own rumination. Maybe that’s the best we can do as writers, give shape to the murmurings others haven’t yet found language for or remind them they weren’t alone in thinking it. So thank you, Charles, for thinking it, and for letting me echo it back to you!
Several years ago, as tne cover photo for my facebook page, I used a photo of a penny that had been gifted to me and made the comment that if someone offered me $1,000 for it, I would not sell it. I have more than 100pennies of the same year, same condition, etc but this one is special. I have attributed to it a value far beyond what most rational people wold consider. just to make the point that the value of an object is arbitrary, and personal. while some objects (or concepts?) have values that are generally, across societies, considered to be widely accepted, such as one ounce of gold has a value of a certain number of dollars.
I have often commented that money is now meaningless..
Your essay has helped me to get some of my musings into better focus.
If i’m lost in a desert, dying of thirst, and someone offers me a pound of gold or a gallon of water and a map to safety, the water has far more value than the gold.
Exactly! Value isn’t fixed, it’s context on a leash. And in a world that worships gold, it’s the water that saves you. Ironic! What you’ve done with that penny is what we all do, whether we admit it or not, imbue meaning where markets see none. You declared it sacred, and in doing so, you made it real because value, at its core, is not economic, but symbolic.
The desert example is the perfect parable because it exposes the absurdity of absolute worth. Gold means nothing without survival, without story, without use. That’s the flaw in all hyper-rational economic thinking, it forgets that humans are not calculators, we are myth-makers.
I’m grateful my essay helped bring your musings into sharper focus. They were already clear in essence, what you just wrote is philosophy in lived form. That penny was a refusal. A little revolt against the tyranny of standardised value. We need more of that!
Thanks Tamara. Money is indeed all about power, about control. This is why many major nations are now buying gold. Gold underwrites wealth in a concrete & lasting way. It always has. Coins these days are not of gold or silver. And printed banknotes are merely promissory notes, of no value other than as legal contracts between the government & those who need/wish to engage with the world. No bank would have the wealth to honour them, if all of us were to simultaneously attempt to convert the numbers in our bank accounts to cash, let alone gold.
Those who favour cryptocurrencies insist that they circumvent the problem of quantitative easing, because only a finite number are issued. But the trouble with believing that, is that there is no guarantee that new forms of cryptocurrency will likely emerge as technologies race ahead, in particular with AI.
For all this, however, I still find it useful to explore the value wealth in my life, by imagining what I might do if I was to win or inherit say $/€/£100M. That helps me to calibrate my true priorities in life, so that once I return to reality, I can then pursue those aims, albeit on a more modest financial scale.
Your thought experiment reveals something crucial, that wealth, whether real or imagined, functions as a psychological lens. It clarifies not just what we want, but what we actually value when stripped of survival anxiety and scarcity thinking. In that sense, imagining what we would do with $100 million isn’t a fantasy, it’s a diagnostic. It tells us who we might be if money stopped being a leash.
You are right, too, to name the illusion of liquidity. Bank balances feel solid until you consider the collective impossibility of cashing out. The entire system operates on suspension of disbelief — trust, habit, compliance. Gold, for all its archaic glamour, at least nods to materiality. But even that is freighted with mythology. Its “value” is as much cultural as it is chemical.
And cryptocurrencies… well, they reveal our desperation for alternatives more than they offer resolution. Scarcity alone doesn’t confer stability, especially when the scarcity is digital and infinitely replicable in form. As you noted, AI could generate a thousand “finite” coins tomorrow. What we see is capitalism gamified, speculative, and speed-run.
But your final point is the one that lingers…. wealth as mirror. Not to reflect back our greed, but our longing. And maybe the trick is to pursue those longings now, as best we can, not waiting for the jackpot, but investing our limited currency (time, attention, care) into the life we want to recognise as our own.
A mirror, certainly. Perhaps the concept of imagined wealth can also be a microscope, & a telescope.
Is not “… to pursue those longings now, as best we can …”, what you do? What most writers do?
That is surely what those who have gained a genuine insight into what they wish to do with their lives, what they think is important, & what they commit themselves to doing.
And it’s what keeps me sane, and enjoying a richer, more interior life, since all my immediate family have died, & my career & financial circumstances changed over the last five years. I now read much history, think more, joined eg X, & interact with many I could never have known or taken the time to know earlier, throughout the world. I’ve learned more in this time than through any of my 5 degrees. Only as a child raised by good parents did I learn more, about both life philosophy & practical things.
Had I the resources to purchase say a champagne house in France, a villa on the Amalfi coast, an English castle with title, a private jet, & a Rolls Royce Cullinan, I’d lead a faster, more exciting life, & I’d meet more people, but I doubt I’d understand myself, & live as considered a life, as I do now. And though I’d hob nob with more of the glitterati & the aristocracy, I’d never know if they liked me or merely my wealth. Embracing such a distracted life would often be fun, but I doubt I’d be any happier, or live a life with as much integrity.
This is beautifully said, and yes, a mirror, but also a microscope and a telescope. Imagined wealth isn’t just fantasy; it’s a diagnostic tool, a philosophical instrument for seeing more closely what we long for, and more distantly what we might become if we are not careful. The richest kind of thought experiment, really… because it doesn’t flatter, it reveals.
And you’re right to pursue those longings now, as best we can, that’s the defiance of writers, readers, and anyone living a life that resists the metrics of spectacle. It’s not a performance of ambition, but a reclamation of meaning. You have carved space from loss, turned absence into attention. That’s wonderful.
What you’ve described, the interior richness forged in grief, the humility of not knowing who would stay if wealth entered the room first, the deliberate slowness of thought… is its own form of nobility. Not conferred by titles or trappings, but earned through clarity. A Rolls Royce can take you far. But your reflection here? It goes deeper. And lasts longer.
Thank you for sharing it! This is what considered life looks like in language.
I’m astonished at your generosity, taking the time to impart your wisdom to others, including me. This is rare.
Thanks Tamara, for your thoughts, which are encouraging for me. In many ways, I feel I have no choice but to pursue life the way I’m doing, at least for now.
And sometimes that “no choice” is actually the deepest kind of choice, the one made out of alignment, not preference. When the world offers a thousand ways to contort yourself for approval, choosing to live in truth, even quietly, is an act of courage. Especially when the path isn’t glamorous or guaranteed.
There’s a certain dignity in continuing, even without clarity, when you walk not because the way is lit, but because you know which direction you refuse to turn back toward.
And “for now” holds more power than it sounds. It’s a phrase that leaves room for both persistence and transformation. May that “now” carry you with steadiness until the next right moment finds you, Russell.
Tamara, I enjoyed your insightful and sobering explanation of money and its role in society and our lives. So many telling lines summarized by your “money today is not a thing – it is a promise, a claim, a delusion of liquidity propped up by trust in institutions that no longer seem trustworthy.” So much is mirage and illusion and yet as you pointed out, there are moments when money can be a pure gift. My thoughts about money run similar. I’ve always held that nothing costs anything. Money is a human transaction that goes into only one place—pockets. If I buy a car, that car gets not a cent; the money goes into the pockets of the raw material suppliers, foundries, assemblers, transporters, dealers, advertisers, salespersons, show rooms. People ask for a certain amount and if we are willing to pay it, that’s what we allow it to cost. But still, I can’t justify the cost of Lenmeldy, a gene therapy drug for children, which is the most expensive drug globally at $4.25 million for a single dose. Must this much be charged? Author Sydney Harris agrees with you: “Men make counterfeit money, in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.” Thanks again for your wise essay that made more than cents.
Thank you for this beautifully layered response, Michael, it reads like a meditation in itself, and that closing pun landed with just the right touch of wry clarity.
Your observation that nothing costs anything, that everything is ultimately a negotiation between human pockets, is such a vital reframe. It exposes the constructed nature of pricing, especially in cases like Lenmeldy, where the “cost” is less about materials or labour and more about what the market will tolerate, or what desperation will pay. When healing a child becomes a million-dollar proposition, we are no longer in the realm of medicine but mythology: where miracles are rationed by profit margins.
The Sydney Harris quote is a searing mirror. If money once symbolised trust, it now often forges personas built for accumulation rather than integrity. We spend so long shaping ourselves to be creditworthy, employable, “investable”, that we forget who we were before we internalised the ledger.
What you have added here is a reckoning. Thank you for reading with such philosophical generosity, and for reminding us that money’s truest cost is not in what we buy, but in what we agree to accept!
Thank you so much for this. It has sparked so many thoughts in me.
So often people speak of “good debt,” or debt “working for them.” Dave Ramsey has tried to teach people to avoid playing the game of “debt.”
Money has even influenced the way we understand faith, especially faith in God. Faith is cheapened by money; it turns faith in God into idol worship. Christians are taught to see intrinsic goodness in all people, even and especially their enemies. We tend to forget this, unfortunately, and we measure one’s value according to a meritocracy where someone is good if they have “worked hard” and “earned it.”
Again, thank you!
Thank you, Nathanael, for drawing the thread all the way into the sacred.
It’s striking how the language of finance has quietly infiltrated the vocabulary of faith: “prosperity gospel”, “investing in the kingdom”, even “spiritual debt”. Somewhere along the line, belief got brokered. Faith became performance. And God, once a mystery beyond measure, was quietly turned into a cosmic banker, blessing those with assets and withholding grace like credit for the unworthy.
You are right, meritocracy has crept not just into economics, but into morality. We have replaced compassion with calculation, and forgotten that grace, by definition, is not earned. It’s precisely that refusal to tally worth that made the original message so subversive.
What would it look like to practice faith without financial metaphor? To stop calculating who “deserves” help, love, forgiveness or success? Perhaps that’s the deeper résistance: to remember that value is not bestowed by effort or accumulation, but by being.
This is the most soulful expedition of money I've ever encountered! The barter story as a fable wounds and enlightens at once. It illuminates the fantasy/illusion that bartering will be the key to healing a fractured empire from capitalism to freedom. Thank you for this Tamara! Although the future looks bleak in changing the status quo, if we stop pretending that money is power, or that it is the root of all evil, can we radically reimagine money as pure energy, the energy of love? As you said so sublimely, "The spiritual cost is harder to name, but it shows up in our exhaustion, our disconnection, our emptiness masked as productivity. We worship the market as if it were omniscient and omnipotent, even as it cannibalises the very things we claim to value: rest, beauty, sincerity, generosity." Just like conversations on death or dying, talking about money is a topic that's kept to sound bites, hiding behind a deeper reality to avoid feelings of, as you reveal: "fear, longing, shame, trust, history..."
This to me is the heart and soul of money, "...sometimes, through patronage, through care, through the silent act of paying for something beautiful, we can choose whom we share the fruit with, and in doing so, nourish not just the artist, but the very possibility of a world where meaning is still allowed to matter." You are honored as you nourish the world of meaning Tamara.
What a generous reply, this is less a comment than a kind of blessing. You have named the very tension I was circling: that money, for all its violence and distortion, still carries the potential to be re-enchanted, not erased, not demonised, but reimagined as a conduit for something softer, more human, more intentional.
Your “the energy of love”’stopped me. It feels radical precisely because it’s so easy to dismiss as naïve. And yet, what else would a true economy be, if not the circulation of care? What else should “value” mean, if not: what nourishes us, what dignifies us, what helps us live more deeply into our shared aliveness?
You are right, talking about money is a lot like talking about death, it’s shrouded in euphemism, flattened into cliché, or deflected entirely. But both topics demand soul-language. And you have brought it here in abundance.
Thank you for seeing the piece so wholly, and for offering back a vision that expands it. To be read like this is to feel accompanied in the project, not just of writing, but of rethinking the world. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for your patronage. You are wonderful, Susan!
Lets reimagine the dollar bill! Instead of an image of a pyramid with the all-seeing eye atop, see a loaf of bread, an offering, changing hands. Not a barter image per se, rather an emphasis on value: what nourishes and sustains our fellowship as humans and our incarnate ensouled life. For me this is the dialectic: the pyramid of Pharaonic monetized control, and the life of the hearth. With the pair, Hestia and Hermes though, the hearth and the marketplace can be seen as a complimentary dance between both: the primacy of the nourishing fire of home around which we dwell, dream and return; and the abounding mercurial world to provide for our daily sustenance. Also, there was a viable moment in American history when the image of this new country was at a crossroads: a Jeffersonian democracy of small family farm holders, and a Hamilton federal banking system. The federal reserve version won but did it need to be either/or? And look at where its gotten us today: a debt driven feudalism 2.0 with a jargon-wielding "citadel of expertise" aka tower of babel brokering the deal. But it's nothing new, with Peter Kingsley's recently revised research into the matter in general, this is something that has co-evolved with the rise of western culture at the onset. The keen, disciplined magic of shamanic wisdom, capable of immense sacral energetics and medicine powers, was not allowed through the gates at the dawn of the contemporary world. We've been fumbling around ever since. The only recourse is for people like Kingsley and others to help each of us open the doors to our sacred source, by showing it's there and guiding us as well. In the midst of all the screaming banshees of business as usual, essay's like Museguided can bring the focus to articulate the issue and clarify the conversation. Merci.
This is a vision I could fold and carry in my pocket: a dollar bill no longer branded with the symbols of surveillance and sovereignty, but with the image of shared sustenance, hands passing bread, not hoarding gold. You have reframed currency not as control, but communion. And that shift, from the Pharaonic pyramid to the sacred hearth, is ontological.
Hestia and Hermes: yes. The dance between stillness and motion, home and trade, the sacred centre and the centrifugal spin of exchange. It’s a dialectic we have forgotten, collapsing everything into Hermes’ speed and cleverness while starving the hearth of our attention. And without Hestia, without reverence for place, time, silence, we spin into abstraction, jargon, Babel, as you so piercingly note.
Your evocation of the Jefferson-Hamilton crossroads is powerful, too… a moment where America could have chosen rootedness over rapidity, community over consolidation. That it didn’t is inheritance. We are now living in the shadow of that decision, wrapped in the language of debt and buffered by “expertise” that often speaks in incantations of opacity.
And Kingsley, yes. His insistence that the sacred never disappeared but was deliberately walled is perfect. We didn’t lose the mystery. We legislated it out. What essays, art, and visions like yours offer is critique, and also re-entry. Not escape, but homecoming.
Thank you for this comment! You have braided myth, memory, and political insight into a reminder that other meanings are always possible. We just have to learn to read the currency differently.
As spot-on a rejoinder as I could have asked for, OMG. Your "tracing the constellations" of ideas draped in the Museguided language of amplification truly does clarify the conversation, "dreaming the dream onward" toward edifications inaccessible without this kind of shared mentation of the issues confronting each of us where we live in this Planetary biosphere of whispering waters of language whose currents turn us through the shifting tides of day. Merci times two.
What a wonderful reply, this reads like a tide-chart of the soul. Shared mentation is exactly the phrase: not debate, not assertion, but the slow, reverent circling of ideas until something bright emerges between them.
Your “planetary biosphere of whispering waters of language” is the kind of phrase that could baptise a whole genre. It reminds me that language isn’t a simple tool, it’s an ecosystem. We don’t simply use words; we swim in them, breathe them, get caught in their undertow. And when the right ones arrive, attuned, tidal, they cohere, not only communicate.
So thank you for amplifying the amplification! This conversation enchants. Merci, multiplied.
Amen, Museguided one.
This has both breadth and depth and it is quite an education for one who was never well-versed in finance and economics. As one who was a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, in the language of flower children (real and aspiring), money was a dirty word. As the daughter of an accountant, I was not allowed to say that, however as a Catholic I was allowed to use quotes about “the lilies of the field” as much as I wanted. When I took it literally and decided to trust God to provide for me I don’t think anyone realised how seriously I intended to live that way. I worked, but at non-profits and doing service-type jobs. Didn’t quite work out as expected, though you’d be surprised how long you can string yourself (and others) along when just enough money shows up here and there to keep the fiction going.
There were two factors in how I got into this and how I got away with it for so many years. The first: my parents taught finance to their three children according to gender and marital status. My brother got his education from my dad, the accountant, and learned his lessons well. My sister and her fiancé sat down with my dad who talked with them about finance and debt and how to handle joint accounts. I, with no spouse in the offing and being a girl, got my mother, who taught me how to write a check and how to open up credit cards and use them to get a good credit score. I believe she also told me my future husband would take care of paying the bills. They never noticed that I wasn’t especially interested in finding a husband for finance duty, and I stonewalled any questions about my finances from my mother as best I could.
The second factor was that women then and now, generally were paid less, though never expected to work less. Once in a while I was able to negotiate something good, like working at a university theatre department I knew I wouldn’t get more than a tiny cost-of-living raise, so I asked my boss for a travel budget for going to see theatre in New York and Canada. It paid off for both of us, as I got to see some great shows with great actors, and for the department, I was able to borrow for free a set of costumes for the Scottish play from the Stratford Festival in Canada, plus get a number of their actors to come and meet with students and/or do their one-person shows, which brought in money and audiences.
I’m still learning many of the things that would have been good to learn about a long time ago, while seeing my government whittling away at the money I am getting in retirement, until the point where they take that completely (that seems to be a matter of time).
At the same time, being on Substack, and especially reading your essays, Tamara, has helped me to step back and see the issues from a wider lens. The bigger picture, and this essay especially, reminded me of a small group of German immigrants who were religious rebels, the Harmony Society. It took them 10 years in a town north of Pittsburgh, then another 10 years in Indiana, until they came back to the town of Ambridge on the Ohio River, just a bit out of Pittsburgh and stayed for almost 100 years.
The Harmony Society had everyone pitch in their resources for the community, and everyone worked and had the right to get what they needed from their store without paying anything. They ended up owning cotton, wool, and grain mills, plus a saw mill, hotel, post office, brewery, distillery, and wine press. They were also the first to manufacture silk in the US. It was incredibly successful, and from the records, there were no disputes about who had what or how hard anyone worked.
The disputes that arose were because the Society wanted people to practice celibacy. That meant no children, so they adopted children to keep things going. However, about a third of the community (estimated at 250 of 750) did not care for the celibacy rule and left. Eventually, by 1905 there were only two or three people left, and the Harmony Society dissolved.
Much of it is still standing, and both school kids and adults go through the historic village every year. It’s a fascinating place, and after reading this essay I wondered if they’d been able to be flexible on the celibacy issue, could they have offered a different model for people to use? Would it have been workable on a larger scale?
Human nature tells me, probably not. But as an adult going through there, talking with people, seeing how it all worked, knowing that they also supported the arts, says to me they had something.
The notion of patronage is appealing, though I also wonder about the power differential providing opportunities for abuse. Or maybe I’ve watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s and American in Paris too many times!
Lots of food for thought, Tamara, and I’ve learned a lot from this one…
What a rich, generous, and layered reflection, Doc, this reads like an entire memoir-in-miniature, threaded with wit, cultural critique, and lived wisdom. Thank you for sharing it so fully!
Your story traces so many of the hidden forces that shaped our financial literacy, or illiteracy, not just through systems, but through gender, family myth, religion, and rebellion. The way you describe your financial “education” as gendered delegation, brother to the accountant, sister with fiancé, you with… checks and credit cards, speaks volumes. Not just about economic exclusion, but about how easily structural inequality masquerades as familial tradition. And yet you moved through it with subversive grace, stringing the fiction together with just enough magic to keep it breathing. That is a kind of artistry.
Your negotiation for a travel budget in lieu of a raise was brilliant, a barter of vision in a system that had already decided what your labor was “worth”. That kind of creative workaround is the real curriculum many women were never officially offered, but had to invent on the fly.
And the Harmony Society story is such a gem. Thank you for bringing it into this conversation, it’s a poignant reminder that alternate models have existed and thrived, however briefly. What unraveled them wasn’t greed, it was the attempt to legislate desire, to over-define the sacred. Perhaps that’s always the paradox…. utopias built on purity eventually break not from failure of labour, but from denial of longing.
You are also right to name the tension in patronage. It walks a fine line between support and surveillance, gift and control. But maybe what redeems it is intentionality, when patronage isn’t about bestowing favour from above, but recognising resonance from beside. Not noblesse oblige, but a mutual act of preservation.
And I can’t tell you how meaningful it is to know that my essays have offered a wider lens. The world is so good at narrowing us, making us feel behind or foolish for what we never had the tools to learn. But what you have shared here proves that insight doesn’t arrive on time, it arrives in layers. And you have clearly earned every one of them.
I hope you write more of this, it’s already teaching.
Thanks, Tamara. I don’t blame my parents. I did for a while, but they were teaching what they were taught and it’s hard to hold that against them.
The idea for the travel budget came from a book by Jane Trahey, On Women and Power: Who Has It and How to Get It. Hardly anyone knows who Jane Trahey is or was, although many know the film made from her book Life with Mother Superior - Trouble with Angels. Jane Trahey was in advertising and eventually had her own agency. She created an iconic ad campaign in 1968 for Blackglama Furs in which the tag line - What Becomes a Legend Most? - was all the ad said, accompanied by a b/w photo by Richard Avedon of a glamorous, famous person, including Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Bette Davis. The campaign ran until 1994, one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever, and was one of the many stories in the book. She wasn’t just a brilliant businesswoman, she was hilariously funny in that book and in Life with Mother Superior. I learned a lot from her stories, and still have my battered paperback copy of the book, and still occasionally reread it.
What a fantastic excavation of memory, of media history, and of a woman far too many have forgotten. I like that you’re keeping Jane Trahey alive by embodying her legacy: wit as strategy, humour as weapon, elegance as leverage.
And yes, the fact that the travel budget idea was sparked by “On Women and Power” makes the whole story even sharper. It’s a form of intergenerational whisper-networking: a woman in advertising planting an idea in a book, which another woman reads and later uses to bend institutional structure to her own shape. That sounds like lineage.
And your grace in releasing blame from your parents is inspirational for many. Most people are handed scripts about money, gender, ambition, and it takes a particular kind of clarity to recognise those scripts without staying trapped inside them. You rewrote the terms, and you turned the footnotes into a future.
Also, your battered paperback sounds like a relic worth archiving…. a personal artifact of resistance and reinvention. Thank you for bringing Trahey back into the conversation. What becomes a legend most, indeed? Apparently: you :)
What I’m saying is that money is not just an economic instrument, it is a narrative, a power structure, and a mirror of our most intimate contradictions. To talk about money is to talk about fear, longing, shame, trust, history, and the slippery algebra of who gets to live fully and who merely survives.
The main function of money is to buy people’s time
… and that’s the silent violence of it, isn’t it? Money doesn’t just buy things, it buys hours, days, lifetimes…. whole chapters of someone else’s existence parceled into billable units.
We speak so often of “saving time” or “spending time” without ever naming that the ledger behind those phrases is financial. The wealthy don’t just have more money, they own more tomorrows. More choices. More rest. More refusal.
Meanwhile, those with less are forced to auction off their minutes, often for tasks that sap the very energy required to dream of a different life.
So yes, money’s primary function might be the purchase of time, but what we rarely ask is: at what cost to the soul of the seller?
Well I don’t know about that but I can spend money reading you and use your time 24/7 however , your soul will remain intact :)
And that is the highest compliment. Grateful, Juan Carlos!
I’ve so much love. Want the amount?
Then kindly check my bank account
The richest man for miles and miles
My photo in the Epstein files
The perfect man, the perfect mate
Portfolio in real estate
And shares in foreign oil wells
Lamborghinis. Whistles. Bells
I rape. Abuse. My power use
To offer things you can’t refuse
I lie, I cheat, I cook the book
Traits that you will overlook
‘Cause in the end, as you will see
You have a price. You’re just like me.
OK. That one sucks a bit. I’ve two boisterous 4 year olds at my feet, by way of excuse. I’d actually be a prolific artist if not for life intervening all the time.
Fair enough….. there’s definitely a manic excess here that feels intentional but teeters on the edge of cartoonish. The rhyme lands with bite, but the satire leans heavy, almost as if you are wearing your villainy too proudly, too loudly.
That said, the closing couplet still delivers a sting. It calls out not just systemic corruption, but the terrifying possibility of shared compromise. That line could be whispered instead of shouted and land even harder.
And as for the excuse… two four-year-olds underfoot is both a valid defence and a form of existential art in itself.
In truth I love them (these particular ones, anyway) unconditionally. Love of all varieties tends, more often than not, to overpower logic, as you well know.
Of course :)
Who suggested that I did? Sometimes it’s the price we pay for love. Or stupidity. Is there a difference?
Ahhhh now that’s a question worthy of a duel at dawn! Love or stupidity. Perhaps only in retrospect. One wears perfume, the other leaves bruises, but both have us making promises we can’t afford and paying interest in sleep, silence, and the decline of sanity.
And yes, children, often the living receipts of choices made in moments of either one. You don’t have to like them to recognise the strange, sublime hostage situation they represent: joy held at emotional gunpoint. Tiny anarchists of your attention.
So no, I didn’t assume you liked them. I assumed you understood the stakes. Which, clearly, you do…. with interest.
Well …. I trade in manic excess and four year olds. Want to buy one or two of them?
I’ll disappoint you, I don’t particularly like children.
Yes, we need a way of reimagining the art of writing beyond a capitalist mode of extraction. We can imagine together a way of supporting each other in human-making community. Thanks for inviting us deeper.
Writing, at its best, is not a product but a pulse. And the act of reading becomes less consumption than communion. Reimagining writing outside capitalism’s extractive logic means reclaiming it as a site of reciprocity, not performance; of nourishment, not branding.
And yes to your beautiful phrasing, “human-making community”. That’s the real wealth: to create a space where minds meet without price tags, where stories aren’t trimmed to fit platforms, and where support is not transactional, but sacred.
If money must exist, let it be in service of that. Let it fund the unmarketable magic of becoming more human, together.