The phrase “make a living” was always infuriating to me. What kind of society would require people to do a bullshit job to earn their right to be alive? I felt trapped by the cruel machine of capitalism so I decided to study business instead of philosophy. If you can’t beat them, join them. But I’d only join to get free of the system, to buy my way out. I was going to make as much money as quickly as possible. My search algorithm zeroed in from business to tech to startups to crypto until I was speculating on NFTs with leverage. I thought I needed the financial freedom of “Fuck You Money”. Ten years later, I realized that what I needed all along was Fuck You Love.
Sugar daddy
It’s not like I didn’t hear the warnings about making money a goal. “Beware of the moving goal post.” and “Money has diminishing returns on happiness”. That’s why I wanted to just get the bag and be done with it, to be able to spend my life with more meaningful things. I wanted to write, travel, and do weird retreats. All I needed for it was three million dollars. At around 5% APR, that would give me a 100k income to live off of while having another million in a diversified portfolio to compound my wealth.
From the outside, it looked like I was running money worship, one of Klontz’s four money scripts. I was convinced that I was not going to move the goal post but actually free myself from the shackles of wagecuckery. I will never know, because my self-sabotage made sure I wasn’t going to hit the number. I had so much urgency around making it that I kept seeking excessive risk. I got liquidated and lost most of my capital three times. Three million is a reachable FIRE target on a boring schedule. I kept blowing up because a realistic timeline was unbearable.
The penny dropped for me in a therapy session processing the third liquidation. The feeling of being caged by having to work smelled like teen spirit. My face made a surprise emoji at my therapist as I recognized the flavor of teenage me wanting to break out of mom’s curfew. And right after: part of me hoped that being rich would get my dad to finally accept me, making up for my lack of soccer talent. I was mommy and daddy projecting onto money. Embarrassing.
Money is a Rorschach test because it has no content of its own. It is pure optionality, and it is also how we get our basic needs met, which ties right into the social patterns we first built with our parents. Adult relationality grows out of parent-child relationships, which is why attachment styles are sticky and Freudian clichés annoyingly accurate. I paid real money for that realization. If the nervous system does not feel safe, it either pushes (avoidant attachment) or pulls (anxious attachment) at reality. Money scripts are attachment patterns disguised as financial problems.
Are you clenching?
I’m not saying that no problems are financial. Sometimes, getting some cash for a new car will fix a commute. However, most financial problems are secretly about attachment. You can tell when the situation doesn’t change despite getting more money. The conclusion most people reach is that it probably just wasn’t enough, so they move the goal post. If I had reached the three million, I would have probably decided that Fuck You Money starts at ten and yeet my assets after that while grinding my teeth. I would never have said “fuck you” to my company because I was afraid to be rejected without a cool job title. Instead, I would have kept pursuing more money because I was confused about what created that lack of safety.
I now recognize the somatic signature of the must-have-now. It’s the same whether it’s about money or food: a clenching in the throat, tension in the jaw, shallow breath. Fuck You Love, in contrast, feels like a baseline of full-body relaxation. Existentially unbothered. The secret to full enlightenment and fixing all of your problems is to simply drop that tension all the way. If you can’t, you might need to establish your emotional independence more systematically.
Net worth
I was getting my self-worth from my job title. Your salary is the most available proxy for importance, so it’s not surprising that you are running the money status script (or maybe you switched reference frames too). This is the culture that has produced the phrase “net worth” for how much money someone has and people use it unironically.
The problem is not that the market prices the relative demand for labor but that we clench around those numbers as external validation. Emotional independence frees work up to orient towards your values directly, instead of through the proxy of money. I can trust that my efforts are contributing to something worthwhile, even if it is not obvious how, even if others don’t think so. My obsession with metaphorical demonology feels important even if it raises eyebrows and not funds. Which is the opposite of doing a bullshit job that I know is useless but gets external validation because I get paid well and “Chief Innovation Officer” sounds rad.
Concentrated portfolios
Hip hop music videos brainwashed me into believing that getting rich would get me bitches. I wanted sex because that was the only way I learned to be intimate with others. Underneath was teenage me in the closet of my subconscious, wanting to be worthy of love.
Disney had gotten there even earlier, etching the soulmate into my psyche, the mythical being who would be my best friend, my passionate lover, my caregiver, my emergency contact, and hell, why not throw in my tax advisor. Eros pulled off a coup to subsume the other three classical forms of love: Philia (friendship), Storge (familial love), and Agape (spiritual love). The soulmate view of love makes being in a relationship and single both terrifying. Without a partner, you are cut off from the only source of love in your life, practically only half human. If you are in a relationship, you are all in, and the thought of it not working out is terrifying. Did you make the right choice? Is this really your person? Do you feel the clench? Canine teeth about to break from the tension in the jaw.
You don’t need to be polyamorous to diversify your love portfolio. All that is required is to notice what nourishes you in relationships, and to orient towards that. Here is the good news: You can love your friends. I cuddle my friends whenever they let me, including hairy men. I have a friendship that made the term “platonic love” make sense for me (I previously thought it was just cope). We are attracted to each other and we both know nothing will happen. Freud called it sublimation: the charge that doesn’t get released in the way nature intended comes out as describing the texture of our love to each other. I wouldn’t exchange that for a harem of willing supermodels.
At some point, enough of my friendships provided the depth of connection that I had previously been looking for only in my romantic partner. My nervous system relaxed as I achieved relational diversification. With Sharpe-ratio optimized allocations across Philia, Agape, and Storge, I was no longer dependant on Eros.
Wind in your back
The quest for Fuck You Money was trying to solve a nervous system issue with economic means. Fuck You Love actually solves it by providing care across a relational web. When I felt sad the other night, I decided to call a friend like it’s the nineties and the second person I tried picked up. Sharing my blues was all I needed to get over it. That basic availability of care is what soothes the system into relaxation: I could be confident that I was going to reach somebody with the capacity to listen without trying to change me that night. Which does not mean that the relationships are replaceable. To the contrary, they can only be nourishing if they are utterly specific. Some of them are poetic, some emotional, others tactile.
Only once my relational web had enough love density was my nervous system ready to settle. Without that, seeing through the projections would not have been sufficient to dissolve the money complex. Periodically crying and beating the shit out of a pillow probably also helped. That basic trust that I’m ok and things will be ok is secure attachment to reality.
Fuck You Love doesn’t feel like watching a balance go up. It’s incredibly light, like wind in your back. There is a sense of abundance without accounting where it comes from. Love becomes like the air we breathe: we would die without it and yet we trust that there will be enough of it for the next breath. Having given and received love in so many different forms, it started to flow between parts of myself, even with mental images and body sensations. I literally hugged a tree the other day.
With this wind in your back, you can stop gripping onto your loved ones because you are not reliant on them for your sense of safety. If we all get to say “Fuck you”, we can leave each other be. I no longer feel any resentment if a friend ghosts me for months. I get to write, travel, and do weird retreats. Yes, savings are necessary for this life, but the numbers get easier when the plan includes working, even in ways that aren’t glamorous. The thought of getting a job doesn’t feel like torture any longer.
Ink trails:
The soulmate and the dream job are the same bad bet
Under the money scripts are desires not about money
Buddhists call the clench that spoils desire “tanha”
Thanks to Maeby for not buying it the first time
> This is the culture that has produced the phrase “net worth” for how much money someone has and people use it unironically
Man I've always been struck by the craziness of that phrase
Lovely essay btw
Banging 🧨