If You’re Doing It for the Money, You’re Doing It Wrong.

The cash isn’t going to save you, no matter how much you make.

When I think about childhood, I think about hunger.

Not some metaphorical hunger for knowledge or growth. I mean the real thing. I grew up in a wealthy country, but we weren’t wealthy. Our cupboards were bare. Me and my brother ate only once a day all through our growing years.

It’s not the crushing poverty that’s still far too widespread in the world to this day. But a hunger like that can change the way you see the world.

Things didn’t get much better when I moved to Canada. Not immediately, anyway. Some days, my only meal was half a jar of peanut butter from the corner store. You can do that when you’re young.

You get used to being poor, just like you get used to everything else. We don’t see anything as clearly as the things we don’t have. When you’re poor, every problem looks like a money problem. With a little more cash, you start to think, everything else would fall into place.

It’s not totally untrue. Money opens a lot of doors in this world. If you have enough of it, you can literally get away with murder. But ultimately, money is only a stand-in. A placeholder. What used to be a promissory note for a quantity of gold is now a scrap of paper based solely on the confidence we have in it.

It’s an abstraction. And what it abstracts is the bottomless void of human desire.

Mike Alexander gets to the heart of it in this article.

We all want to make money. We need it. More correctly, we need the things we can exchange it for. But when we start to confuse our needs for our desires, we’re on the path to lasting unhappiness.

I get a lot of that successmanship stuff.

Overenthusiastic young men with undercuts are forever trying to sell me online courses. Smarmy suits are ready to tell me all about the next big opportunity. Shark-eyed scammers with lifts in their shoes promise me all the kingdoms of the earth.

I’m in that demographic, I suppose. My mid 30s are getting late, and many guys my age are looking for something outside the dreary slog of paid employment. Plus, I used to be entrepreneurial. I ran my own business. I’m self-employed. Who couldn’t use another income source?

But as Mike points out, more money will not make you happier. Sometimes, it will make things worse. By monetizing something you love, you push it into the world of commerce, and the weather there is not kind. Storms rage. A little bad luck, a bit of bad timing, will tear your wings to rags.

That’s the business of art, and I’m part of it. I hope this article earns me some money, even though I know it won’t. But I’ve made my choice. I might make more money if I wrote about making money. But as Kendrick Lamar puts it, if I have to brown nose for some gold, I’d rather be a bum than a baller.

If I wrote purely to make money, my words would wither and die. I’d betray something that, for want of a better word, I have to call sacred. Anxious birds may sing in cages. But their voices are never the same.

This is about more than just writing.

It’s about how you choose to live your life. Warren Buffett probably loves what he does. He certainly doesn’t need the money. And judging by the way he lives, he barely even seems to want it.

I know Mike Alexander a little. We’ve never met, but we’ve spoken online. Most of all, I know him through his writing. I know he lives in a beautiful town in France and supports himself through writing and crafts. I know that he lives a life he’s built for himself, based not on what makes money or on what society rewards, but on what he personally values.

It’s the most beautiful way there is to live.

And in my travels around the world, I’ve met others like him. Sometimes, you can spot them by sight. Something in the eyes, maybe. Some joyful gleam that gives the game away.

I have issues with Vancouver.

But there’s no denying it’s a beautiful city. One I’ve spent many years in, on and off. One I find myself back in now, bouncing off the glass like a fly seeking the light, unable to understand why I can’t seem to escape.

Once, I was sitting on the seawall in Stanley Park. The sun was shining. The sea was calm. Container ships floated in the bay, their massive bulk made weightless by buoyancy and distance and the blue fir-flanked mountains that loom over the ocean.

People passed by, in couples or in groups. Their voices would swell and recede as they moved past the way waves bunch under the moon, leaving me with tattered fragments of conversation. Without exception, the women I overheard talked about health — their own or that of their friends. Without exception, the men were talking about money.

The wind sang in the ancient trees behind me. And the sun went sailing silently by, marking off the minutes of this unique, precious, never-to-be-repeated life. Sea and ships and mountains and stars, all slipping away, fading under the shadowless glow of a lurid neon dollar sign.

Money won’t make you happy.

You shouldn’t need me to tell you that. I don’t need to describe the crushing hollowness I felt at my wealthiest. My company was booming. I was doing everything I had been told I wanted to do.

I don’t need to take you on those futile and solitary nighttime drives around an ugly city, using the sensation of movement to try to assuage the feeling of being trapped. As Vronsky found out in Anna Karenina, men make a mistake when they imagine happiness as the fulfilment of their desires. Jim Carrey will tell you that if everyone could be rich, they would see how little it has to do with happiness. If it takes money to be happy, Bob Marley said, your search for happiness will never end.

And if you look at the legal battles over his fortune that continue to this day, you can clearly see the danger of placing too much value in numbers that will never be enough.

But money is just one head of this Hydra.

When billionaires become richer than nations, they start to compete over philanthropy instead. Or else buy soccer teams to play against one another.

We need to compete. We need to win. Our monkey brains scream at us about shortages, and we keep piling up nuts and berries in preparation for a winter that will never come.

The same impulse has you snarling at yourself in the mirror because your waist isn’t as tiny as those 19-year-olds on Instagram. It has you buying jeans made by slaves in the humid hell of some impoverished nation, hoping your friends will admire you for it.

It has you going into debt for a car that does nothing better than the one it replaced, or buying a house you’ll spend the rest of your life keeping warm for the bank to take back and sell on to someone else.

This is a trick they are playing on all of us.

How do you make rich people keep buying things? Make them feel poor.

The crucial thing is that you never feel like you’re enough. There’s always someone richer, prettier, smarter, more admired. You can never be too thin or too rich.

And even while we watch the rich die, when we see again and again the destructive insanity of fame, we still buy the propaganda. Somehow, we still believe that everything will be better around the next corner. But only if you buy this aftershave.

I keep leaving Vancouver over and over again.

The glittering city has become a place for the global rich to park their money. To take advantage of Canadian stability while they suck cash out of the rest of the world. Every year, the margins grow narrower. Foreign money floods in faster than the coastal rain, and those towers that keep climbing ever higher are not meant for you.

I was cleaning my apartment, hauling bags of garbage down to the bin outside. On one trip, I found one of the city’s thousands of homeless or marginally housed residents inside the dumpster, knee-deep in other people’s garbage. He was tearing open the back of the bar fridge I had just thrown away.

“What do you want out of there?” I asked.

“Copper,” he answered. “I’ll get a few bucks for that.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah. This is the best job in the world.”

I blinked.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, man. No boss. No taxes. I work when I like. I’m out in the sunshine. It’s awesome.”

By the time I came back down with more garbage, he was gone. A pocketful of copper tubing and a few glass bottles richer. Even under the grotesque tower blocks, in the shadows cast by invisible stacks of paper, here and there, some happy man exists.