Letter 35: Money, Death and Living
“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”
— Epictetus
Dear Future Human,
I once sat with a man surrounded by paintings worth more than most people earn in a lifetime. The markets had fallen. He still had hundreds of millions of dollars. Nothing about his survival was threatened. Yet he spoke about his losses as if he were in grave danger.
That moment stayed with me because I realized I was not looking at a financial crisis. I was looking at something much older, and much more personal.
The numbers in his accounts had changed. And with them, something inside him shifted. What once felt steady no longer had. Money, which had quietly come to represent stability and permanence, was no longer there in the same way.
Most of us never notice continuity until something breaks it — that quiet sense that we are the same person we were yesterday, that the ground beneath us is solid, that our life has a thread running through it. When it loosens, even slightly, everything that seemed stable begins to feel uncertain.
That is when I understood what gives money its psychological power.
Money is not merely a tool used to purchase things. It becomes something the nervous system organizes around. It maintains the feeling that you are anchored, that your existence has measurable weight, that you are not going to vanish.
In other words, it becomes a substitute for continuity.1
In our culture, the amount of money you have often determines whether you are a success or a failure. The pursuit of money has become so all-consuming that it often replaces relationship, truth, and love. What began as a tool of exchange, built on trust, has become tied to survival.
It offers more than comfort. It offers a way to feel steady in a world that does not promise stability. It can buy solutions where you feel trapped, and it builds walls, so you don’t have to depend on other people.
Because it can be counted and held onto, it becomes something the nervous system can orient itself around—a way to simulate continuity. It often feels more reliable than relationship, and less vulnerable than love.2
If you listen closely, you can begin to hear the Flailing Child in this.
The child who learned early how people can be inconsistent or unavailable. The one who had to leave the body and attach to ideas, roles, or structures to feel stable and to belong. The one who reached for anything that felt solid enough to hold onto.
Money became one of those anchors.
When continuity is broken in relationship, something in you adapts. Money begins to take the place of what once felt unreliable.
People stop seeing people as people, and begin seeing them instead as sources of safety, approval, opportunity, or threat. Relationships gradually become transactional, often without anyone intending for that to happen.3
What’s most revealing is that no matter how much money people accumulate, it never seems like enough—showing us that money is not what we are really after.
Because what we are actually seeking is not money, but what it gives us—the feeling of continuity.4
This is where money and identity become the same story.
Your stability arises from the roles you have taken on, the beliefs you hold, and the ways you’ve come to see and understand yourself. They allow you to wake up every morning, recognizing yourself as the same person moving through the world with coherence and safety.
Identity, too, is a structure that maintains continuity.5
When those structures begin to shift, even slightly, your nervous system reacts instantly. It gropes for stability, for something familiar. It tries to restore what’s been disrupted.
If you’ve ever gone through a divorce, the loss of a job, or some betrayal, you know how unnerving this can feel—as if your whole world has turned upside down. The internal shift in which something you once believed, no longer feels true can temporarily shatter your sense of reality.
This is the beginning of what people call ego death.6 You are not in physical danger, but the structure that has allowed you to experience yourself as continuous has been shaken to its roots.
As that structure becomes unsteady, something deeper begins to come into view. The realization that nothing you have built—no role, no identity, no relationship—can remain forever.
Not even your body.
At the deepest level, what you begin to confront is not just the loss of identity, but the impossibility of holding onto continuity itself.
A part of you has always known this and has worked hard to avoid looking there.
But if you allow yourself to remain present, loosen your grip, and let go a little, something remarkable begins to happen.
At first, your body reacts intensely, your mind becomes overwhelmed, and your sense of reality begins to fracture. It can feel as though you are plummeting toward certain death.
But if you stay, if you allow yourself to surrender fully rather than pull away, something else begins to emerge.
You slowly begin to disidentify from the old constructs and roles you have been performing, returning to the awareness that was present before those structures formed.
Remember that Signal we talked about earlier? That clearer awareness underneath all the noise? As you clear the noise, the Signal becomes more available, easier to perceive.
What begins to reveal itself is a different kind of continuity—a sense of vastness, as if the walls of the room you had been living in suddenly fell away, revealing that the space was always there. The structures hadn’t been protecting you. They had been constricting you.
Each time this happens, your perceptual field widens. There is more clarity. More steadiness. A sense of vitality begins to move through you, and deep gratitude follows.
Then something becomes clear.
You are still here.
Your relationship with everything begins to change. Your perspective around money returns to its practical role instead of serving as psychological ground.
You experience life from within, rather than managing it from a distance. You are able to feel the colors, the aliveness, the quiet beauty that was always there.
And yet, this is also a vulnerable moment.
Because as we discussed in previous letters, without support, the nervous system will snap back to its old, efficient neural networks—to what’s familiar. It will try to restore the old forms of continuity it has learned to maintain.
Rooting a new way of being requires the presence of others—people who can help you see when the old continuity is reasserting itself, and who know how to sit with you in the spaciousness without rushing to fill it.
Not as a replacement for continuity, but as a way of stabilizing a different kind of it.
This is how a new foundation forms—not built on what you hold onto, but on what remains when you let go.
This is how the Signal becomes something you can live from.
This is why you cannot do this alone.
Next, we will explore why transformation requires community, and how being held in relationship allows this new way to take root and stabilize.
In love we trust,
Ronit
Tim Kasser and Kennon M. Sheldon, “Of Wealth and Death: Materialism, Mortality Salience, and Consumption Behavior,” Psychological Science 11, no. 4, 2000.
D. E. Ward, L. E. Park, K. N. Gainey, A. V. Whillans, and H.Y. Jung, “Can’t Buy Me Love (or Friendship): Social Consequences of Financially Contingent Self-Worth,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 46, no. 12, 2020.
Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver, ““Can’t Buy Me Love”: An Attachment Perspective on Social Support and Money as Psychological Buffers,” Psychological Inquiry 19, no. 3, 2008.
A. Gasiorowska, T. Zaleskiewicz, and P. Kesebir, “Money as an existential anxiety buffer: Exposure to money prevents mortality reminders from leading to increased death thoughts,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 79, 2018.
Constantine Sedikides, Emily K. Hong, and Tim Wildschut, “Self-Continuity,” Annual Review of Psychology 74, 2023.
Mark Travers, “Have You Experienced An ‘Ego Death’? A Psychologist Explains,” Forbes, April, 2024.
Thank you