Money and the Good Life
I had the following exchange the other day with a thoughtful student who is currently in the process of working out how to orient her life in ways that involve the least spiritual compromise. I reproduce it here with only minor cosmetic editing.
Do you like money?
I like it as much as I don’t like living on a park bench. But I would give up a lot of money to live a purer life. I have given up a lot for that in fact.
How can that work? Giving up some amount of money can help you live a purer life. Is it like rejecting higher paying jobs for having your free time?
Well, it includes something like that, but also more than that.
Of course, in order to get the highest paying jobs, I would have to devote a lot of time and energy to that effort: trying to “climb the ladder,” to get promoted and build a big reputation in my company or field of work, and so on. And devoting that much time and energy to gaining a higher income would necessarily require giving up a lot of time and energy with which I could have been reading books, thinking alone, talking about ideas with thoughtful friends, and so on. In other words, we all have limited time on this earth, and limited energy to spend during our lives. The more time and energy we spend on matters that are not related to the most important things (thinking about the true, the good, and the beautiful), the less time and energy we will have for those most important things, obviously. So in that simple and obvious sense, to live the best life we certainly have to be willing to prioritize the highest things we can do, above the ordinary “successes” of earning more money, getting promoted to a more socially respected position, etc. To become wise and good, I do not need more money. I need more thought and understanding.
However, there is more to the story than that. If I actually devote more and more of my time and energy to pursuing a higher income or a “better job,” then my thinking life is not merely losing that time and energy. This full-time focus on material success is also changing my soul. By giving so much to my pursuit of unnecessary material success at the expense of my thinking life, I am actually training myself to see money as more important than thinking; I am rationalizing a change of priorities, placing material gain above spiritual growth; and I am developing new, stronger desires for practical advantage which will gradually subordinate and suffocate my previous desire for knowledge and a serious life. In other words, I am gradually turning myself into a different person with lower goals. My character is changing. I am developing the habit of choosing opportunities for social success or wealth, rather than choosing opportunities to escape from society’s standards and focus on improving my soul.
I won’t bother explaining my personal examples at the moment, but we can talk about those later, if you wish. For now, I will just say that there have been a few situations in my life when I had to make a choice between pursuing a more “respectable” and financially rewarding path or choosing to give up the material benefits for the sake of staying more fully focused on my thinking life, my private reading and writing, and my spiritual goals. In each case, I chose the spiritual goals over the material opportunities, because, (a) I did not want to give up years of time and energy for material success when I should care more about my soul, and (b) I did not want to fall into a lower spiritual condition of prioritizing and rationalizing social success and money above learning and wisdom.
When I said about money that “I like it as much as I don’t like living on a park bench,” what I meant was that there is a natural place for money and material goods in our life, but we must never lose the proper understanding of what that natural place is. Working to gain the material goods that can be rationally justified as the means to living a fuller spiritual life is useful to us. Working to gain material goods that are unnecessary and a distraction from the spiritual life — making money itself a priority of life above thinking and learning — is not useful, and typically becomes harmful, for the reasons explained above.
Can’t I care about wealth?
You can care about it, but remember that the more you care about it, the less you will care about everything else. That’s why I said that my standard is always to ask myself whether the money I am seeking or getting is truly going to help me live a more serious life, or rather harm my seriousness. If the former, then it can be beneficial, at least if I use it in the right way. If the latter, then I don’t want that money, because pursuing it would be like intentionally drinking poison because it tastes good.
