What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Money?

“When we reach out to life, life expands.”
—Michelle Masters, Wired for Money

What are we talking about when we talk about money?

The most obvious answer is money. We are talking about the rent or mortgage, the groceries, the medical bills, the cost of educating our children, and the savings we hope will carry us through old age. We are talking about the capacity to care for ourselves and the people we love. To pretend otherwise, to suggest that money is merely an idea or that material insecurity can be solved by changing one’s attitude, is foolish, inadequate, and potentially cruel.

And yet money is rarely only money.

When we speak of wanting more, we may be speaking of freedom. When we fear losing what we have, we may be speaking of safety. When we compare our earnings with someone else’s, we may be asking whether we matter, whether we belong. When we cannot bring ourselves to spend what we have earned, we may be protecting ourselves from a future disaster only we can see. When we work past exhaustion, sacrifice our relationships, or defer the life we claim we are working to create, we may be trying to prove that we are worthy of love.

Money becomes the carrier of fears and longings that began long before we understood what a dollar was.

When I was a boy, my grandparents, Dominic and Nicoletta Guido, lived a few blocks from our home. Their house was a refuge from the uncertainty that shaped much of my childhood. My mother struggled with severe mental illness. My father struggled with alcoholism and depression. The world around me could become unpredictable without warning.

Just outside my grandparents’ kitchen was a pantry with a green door. Inside the pantry was a tin. And inside that tin was what seemed an inexhaustible supply of lemon drops.

My grandfather always appeared to have enough. Unlike my home, there was an inexhaustible supply of food in the house. Food and lemon drops. He owned his home and, in fact, the house in which my family lived. I didn’t have the language to explain what I felt when I opened that green door. I only knew that here, unlike at home, the world seemed ordered. Here, the grown-ups could be relied upon. Here, there was enough.

The lemon drops tasted like safety.

Decades later, I was a venture capitalist, flying back and forth across the country, working with the relentlessness of someone being chased. On one such trip, I flew from New York to California, fired the CEO of a company in which I had invested, and immediately boarded another plane home.

As I entered the house, my daughter stood at the top of the stairs. She watched as I spun around and collapsed to the floor. The last thing I heard before losing consciousness was her calling for her mother: “Mommy, Mommy, Daddy’s dying.” A few days later, I was back in psychoanalysis with my late analyst, Dr. Avivah Sayres. With the directness of a Brooklyn analyst who’d known me for years, she asked, “What’s it going to take, Jerry?”

“Bill Gates,” I answered.

What I meant was: enough lemon drops. Enough money and I would be safe. Enough success and the chaos could not reach me. Enough wealth and I would never again be the frightened boy trying to anticipate which version of the adults would appear. I had transformed an old childhood association into an operating plan for my adult life, and that plan was killing me.

In a recent conversation with my old friend Michelle Masters, author of Wired for Money: Change the Patterns That Block You from Thriving, she offered a useful metaphor for why such patterns persist even after we can explain them. Imagine the mind as a building, she said. The conscious, analytical mind occupies the penthouse. The old beliefs and patterns live in the basement. If the wiring is faulty downstairs, sending a team of electricians to discuss the problem in the penthouse will not repair it.

We may know how much we have in the bank. We may understand that wealth cannot protect us from grief, loneliness, illness, or death. We may even recognize the childhood experiences that shaped us. Yet the body still tightens when the market falls. The mind begins rehearsing catastrophe. We work through another vacation, postpone another conversation, and tell ourselves that after the next milestone, we will finally rest.

“We don’t change ages,” Michelle told me. “We just collect them.”

The adult may be studying a spreadsheet, but the child is standing before the green pantry door.

This is where radical self-inquiry becomes essential. The question is no longer simply, “How much money do I need?” For me, it became Dr. Sayres’s question: “What’s it
going to take, Jerry?”

For you, it might be blunter still: What are you asking money to do for you?

Do you believe that being useful is the price of belonging? Do you ever experience rest as dangerous, as though stopping might allow the world to catch up with you? Did you conclude somewhere along the way that love, safety, and belonging had to be earned?

When we cannot distinguish the legitimate needs of our present lives from the terrors of an earlier time, no amount will ever feel sufficient. Michelle has worked with people who possess more money than they could reasonably spend and yet remain unable to stop, rest, or feel safe. The number may rise, but the fear simply adjusts its demands.

Money may provide comfort, opportunity, and freedom of movement. It can help us care for those we love, create choices, and meet the real demands of living.

But it cannot return us to childhood and place more capable parents in charge. It cannot prove that we are lovable or guarantee that those we love will never leave. It cannot protect us from old age, sickness, betrayal, or loss. It cannot make the world predictable.

Nor are all these patterns ours alone. Some are inherited from the families and communities to which we belong. We may carry the memory of poverty, forced migration, dispossession, unemployment, hunger, or a fortune lost before we were born. The circumstances that gave rise to the stories may have changed, but the lessons about the fragility of safety and the ephemeral nature of wealth remain.

Michelle described a man who repeatedly said that his money was “frozen.” Through their work together, he discovered the history beneath that word: his grandparents had fled the German advance during the Second World War, escaping their Russian village in winter while others froze to death. Generations later, the circumstances had disappeared, but the image remained embedded in his relationship with money.

Such patterns may burden us, but they often began as expressions of love. Save everything. Never relax. Do not trust prosperity. Do not draw attention to yourself. Stay close to the people who suffered. Do not live more freely than they were allowed to live.

Seen in this way, the work is not to reject or shame the frightened parts of ourselves. It is to recognize what they were trying to do. The boy who pursued lemon drops was not greedy. He was ingenious. He found a symbol for safety and built a life around acquiring it. That strategy carried me a long way.

It also carried me to the floor beneath my daughter’s frightened gaze.

With time, psychoanalysis, love, and the practice of radical self-inquiry, I have learned to respond to the kid in me differently. When fear arises, I remind him that the circumstances have changed. I thank him for his vigilance without allowing him to control every decision. The memories remain, but they no longer have to dictate what comes next.

And I can open the green pantry door again.

I can see the tin and taste the lemon drops. But now I understand that the gift my grandparents gave me was never an endless supply of candy. It was the experience of being welcomed into a home where I could exhale, where food was offered, where the adults were dependable, and where, for a time, I did not have to save anyone.

When we stop asking money to heal what it cannot heal, we become freer to receive what it can offer. We may begin to want without shame, to rest without fearing collapse, and to make choices guided not only by old threats but by the life that is actually before us. In Michelle’s words, when we reach out to life, life expands.

You, too, are allowed to lay down the strategies that once kept you safe. You do not betray the frightened child you were, or the people whose lives made yours possible, by living with greater freedom. You can honor their struggle without reenacting it. You can receive what money makes possible without asking it to determine what you are worth.

What are we talking about when we talk about money?

We are talking about safety and freedom. We are talking about worth and belonging. We are talking about the people we came from, the lives they survived, and the bargains we made before we were old enough to know we were making them. We are talking about our desire to live and our fear that life may not hold us.

The work isn’t to stop wanting the lemon drops. It’s to stop asking them to guarantee that we’ll be all right.