I felt fucking baller, I oozed confidence, and I didn’t really give a fuck about things. I had rapidly transitioned from “shit, I can’t join my friends on holiday because I can’t afford anything at all” to landing a position so great I could save up for 2-3 months of living every month. My inconsistent freelance life had pivoted into the promised oasis by landing a great deal as a visual designer.
Nothing about the deal felt scammy. It still doesn’t. Maybe my client will return out of the fog like nothing ever happened. But the last few weeks, he’s been nowhere to be found, leaving me with an ugly unpaid invoice and a gaping open broken agreement. I’ve worked with him on multiple projects, and he always paid, even pretty fast. He’s a good guy; I love him, I hope he’s okay and not in financial trouble. This blogpost is not about him, it’s about me– and what receiving such a golden ticket showed me about myself.
The sudden feeling of abundance triggered wonderful mechanisms. I asked myself, “what’s available for me now that wasn’t before?” and, for example, decided to take my already decent diet to the next tier by taking the rather expensive Athletic Greens supplementation every day. I bought it for my girlfriend as well because her health influences mine and I also love her. I decided to immediately start looking for a coach to help me accelerate leveling up my design skills to continue to impress my client and leave more capable than I started if the job would ever end. But mainly because I decided that if someone was going to pay me a shit ton of money to work for them each month, I wanted to do everything in my capabilities to be the healthiest, most skilled, and most peace of mind warrior version of myself I could be. Scarcity was lifted, and positive feedback loops showed up.
Because I felt so invincible, I didn’t really worry about how I spent my day. There wasn’t a nagging feeling of not having worked on something I should have worked on. In the morning, I did some freestyle whatever meditation, end of morning I went to BJJ to be choked on the mat and still feel like a winner, and in the afternoon, I took a long NSDR not-nap to chill down from my great day. And the best part was that whenever someone asked me what I did for a living, I could just say I’m a presentation designer and public speaking coach without feeling the self-destructive need to add a shameful “so yeah, it’s always a bit looking for work haha :) but it’s going better haha :(“ For once, I said it with a sense of pride instead of apology.
I started enjoying social gatherings or even just meeting with friends more, which would always have a certain edge of I’m-not-working-guilt for me, an artifact that apparently still was present from my grindset the years before. I went to a reunion with high school friends, and as the money-making dick I felt like, I was just constantly walking around with the phrase “I’m making 9k” in my head. I'm pretty nice, so I didn’t say this to anyone, but it was looping in my head. Okay I lied, I did tell it to some people and I acted completely chill about it and I felt like a winner so badly. Fuck it, I thought, why shouldn’t I talk about that, your shit is cool and I love to hear your success stories– it’s just that I also love mine.
Now, a lot of these things (socially-happy-confidency-etcy) were already going in a far better direction than they used to be, because of some revelations with meditation, MDMA, and feeling feelings (story for another time), but this fragile financial situation always caused some pain and holding back, mainly because it.. is so real?
Usually, I’m constantly doing the math on how much runway I still have if this and that happens, and when I take that burn rate and that expense, etc. etc. I seldom initiate that calculation myself and always find myself in the midst of it, activated by some scared part inside me. Threatening gaps in my future bank account that my anxiety tries to fill like a high-stakes game of tetris– a mental bandwidth drain induced by scarcity. But then, with this supposed income rolling in, it just.. stopped. Tetris wasn't a high priority anymore, it was a fun game again to run to see how fast I could fill buffers and have enough money to reach the end of the year and more wet freelance dreams like that. Mental bandwidth was cleared and could be allocated to enjoying whatever was going on.
Now, over the span of 3 weeks, since the last contact with my client, it's all slowly coming back again. Moneytetris started giving me a suffocating big hug, curling me up in its ugly blanket to signal I’m unworthy to the outside and to feel a warm shame on the inside. You’re the provider, dude; you’re not providing! You better not start talking too cool about your work, man.
It all felt like the backward version of a guru's story who gave a man peace for free: He first ran away with his bag of diamonds and the man chased him desperately throughout the village. When the man gave up and thought he had lost his wealth, the guru returned the diamonds: “feels good to have it back, no? Nothing changed and yet you feel so much peace!”
In the same way, nothing really changed for me after I needed to hand back my diamonds. But what is different is that I've seen what version of myself arises when the apologetic veil of shame around my financial situation is lifted. My guru-client showed me, look, dude, this is who you are! And what I saw was that making a lot more money wasn’t only about my ability to buy and do things: it boosted how I value myself as a person who matters in social contexts overall, in my relationship, and to myself. It put a hold on a type of worrying that was always blocking joy in some way. And it made me into a less needy business partner, open to prioritizing the long term. I faced that some of my confidence struggles were, in fact, money struggles.
I think the bottom line is that this was a crazy cool experiment that sucked very hard but showed me something valuable: I’ve never been and still am not a fan of the “If I finally get [Money, Abs, Followers], I will be happy” structure, and I certainly dislike sacrificing life and relationships to pursue financial wealth, but I also don’t want to neglect the reality of what money brought me and how much it improved my quality of well being and as a result that of those around me. Sure, I will meditate for hundreds of hours on gratitude and a mindset of abundance, I will cultivate humbleness and non-neediness, find humorous acceptance in shitty circumstances and sheer equanimity in shame and guilt, but what I will also do is spend a lot of effort in making a shit ton of money. Looking at the data, it’s simply one of the bigger acts of self-love I’ve encountered.
Hey Pimethy!
I just left college on a full-ride, and I relate to your money stress as I'm building my startup. I'm the poorest and richest I've ever been. My "guru" says that money doesn't bring happiness; every dying billionaire would switch spots with you; millions living on less than $2/day are happier than those earning one million times that (anecdotally); building towards your dreams does. I'm working on DAOHQ so people don't have to sacrifice life and relationships to pursue financial wealth, and instead can bring them all together if they want. DAOHQ would pay for presentation design help; drop me a line at https://t.me/lucas_chu