Money

According to Cambridge, money represents:
• coins or notes (= special pieces of paper) that are used to buy things, or an amount of these that a person has
• the value of what a person or organization owns, keeps in a bank, has in investments, or spends

What was that saying? Money makes the world go round. A simple phrase, yet it reveals how much importance we place on money. Sometimes it’s what gets us out of bed, eager to start a new day. Other times, it’s what keeps us up at night.

From Barter to Code

For most of human history, there was no money. People bartered. They traded what they had for what they needed—grain for cloth, labor for livestock, firewood for a basket of fruit. It was simple but limited. Barter required what economists call a “double coincidence of wants”: I needed to want what you had, and you needed to want what I had, at the same time. If not, the exchange broke down.

So humanity experimented. In some places, shells, beads, or salt became early currencies—portable, recognizable, scarce enough to hold value. Later came precious metals: gold and silver coins stamped with rulers’ faces. These carried the authority of a kingdom and the weight of trust. People didn’t trade the metal itself as much as the belief that it was worth something.

In the modern era, money detached almost entirely from the physical. Nations abandoned the gold standard. Governments and central banks began issuing currency backed only by trust in the system. Then came credit cards—plastic rectangles representing not even money, but debt. With the internet came digital transactions. More recently, cryptocurrencies tried to reinvent money altogether, offering systems without banks, based on code and consensus.

Each step made money lighter, faster, easier to move—but also stranger, further removed from the tangible world. The more abstract it became, the more power it seemed to hold over us.

First Encounters

We attribute a lot of power to money—and for good reason. One of my earliest memories is visiting my godparents and receiving money from them. I loved their apartment; it felt so different from ours. I was three years old, curious, free to explore while my parents were caught up in conversation. My godparents had a cat. They had two bedrooms, not just one like at home. Each room had a different shape; the furniture and carpets were different. Even the smells were new. It was magical.

When it came time to leave, my parents would help me get dressed, pick me up, and then my godfather would give me a bill. I didn’t know if it was a small or large amount—I only knew I liked receiving it. In this memory, as we exited the apartment, I asked out loud: “What about the money?” Everyone laughed, and my godfather indulged me with a wrinkled bill. I remember this one clearly: blue-gray, with the portrait of a man on it. One hundred lei.

Money in Transition

Growing up in 1990s Romania was, in some ways, similar to the West. I spent most of my free time outside with friends or inside reading, watching TV, or playing video games. Our apartment block sat on the outskirts of a small industrial town. Next to it stretched a wild, unattended area—grass, trees, rocks, grasshoppers, lizards, and a big open field for football. Everything was free. We could turn anything into play.

I still remember a cold autumn sunset when we grilled corn that some kids had taken from a nearby field. Someone brought potatoes, and I learned you could bury them in embers until they came out soft and delicious.

Like everywhere in the world, Romanian money has its own story. For decades under communism, people had jobs, a steady salary, and some savings. But money was often disconnected from what you could actually buy. Shelves were empty, food and goods rationed. Many families relied on personal networks or bartering behind the scenes. Value was measured less in banknotes and more in connections, access, or a neighbor willing to trade a kilogram of flour for a service.

After the 1989 revolution, the curtain lifted—and with it came a flood of capitalism. Imported products filled the shops, but inflation quickly eroded the value of the leu. Prices rose almost daily. A 100-lei bill that once felt secure turned into little more than paper. Within a few years, people carried thick stacks of banknotes for basic groceries. To buy bread, you might hand over 10,000 lei. To pay the rent, millions. Everyone was a millionaire—yet most were poor.

Romania later restructured its currency, cutting four zeros from the leu. What had been 10,000 lei became 1 new leu. Daily transactions became simpler, but the memory of hyperinflation stayed in people’s bones.

Scarcity at Home

In our household, most fights between my parents were about money. There was never enough. Recently, flipping through old photos, I noticed pictures of myself taken four or five years apart wearing the same pair of jeans. I suddenly remembered them. My mother used to fold the fabric at the bottom inside, sew it, then release a little more each year as I grew taller. She patched them too, turning the patches into badge-like decorations. I loved those jeans. I loved everything. I couldn’t understand why my parents were always arguing.

As an adult, I began to see why money so easily sparks conflict. What comes to your mind when you hear the word value? Do you think of numbers, or something more personal, more intrinsic?

We often confuse value with price. We’re so used to measuring life in monetary terms that we miss what money itself is: an invention. A tool created to solve a problem.

A City Without End

In the manga BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei, the main character Killy searches for “Net Terminal Genes”—a key that would allow humans to access the “Netsphere,” a control network for the City. Without human interaction, the City expanded endlessly, chaotically, until it reached the size of Jupiter’s orbit.

Sometimes I feel we’ve built something similar around money: a system that grows and grows, almost without control. But unlike Nihei’s story, we don’t need a special gene to understand it. What we need is realignment with values.

Inherited Convictions

Values are the bedrock of how we interact with the world. As children we borrow values first from family, then from society. We learn the ways of the world from our surroundings. As we watch life unfold, we create definitions of what the world is—and what it is not. We test these definitions. Some fail and we drop them. Others harden into convictions. Gradually we lose curiosity, our capacity to feel, assess, and realign. As adults, we tend to trade courage for certainty. Value becomes fixed.

My memory of my godfather’s gift carries a deeper weight. I learned that money was something someone else had to give me. It wasn’t mine—it belonged to others. I was allowed to receive some of it, if I behaved. As my parents argued, I came to see myself as a consumer of money, part of what caused their unhappiness. My solution was simple: if only I could consume less—close to nothing—there would be more money and, maybe, peace. So I became less. I prioritized others’ needs over my own. Like any conviction, it hid well, surfacing subtly in my interactions, my relationships, my work. Two beliefs shaped my young adult life: I must be small, and I must give of myself. Only then would I get a little of what I need.

On my father’s side of the family lives a deep fear. The house he grew up in was taken by the communist regime to make room for block neighborhoods. It was the last house on the street to be torn down; next to where it stood, other houses still remain. There was nothing they could do. They were simply informed. My father received an apartment, my grandmother and aunt small studios. But the feeling of having no control, of having your life in other people’s hands, settled into us. You cannot fight the system. The system always wins.

I understand this truth. I’ve carried it. As a teenager and young adult, I fought it. And still—what if the point is not to fight the system at all? Most systems began as solutions to old problems. They are reflections of the past. What if we acknowledge them for what they are? Not destiny, not identity. Soil.

The Trap of Competition

At one point in my life, I imagined a threshold for income. I thought that when I reached it, I could rest, finally live. I was broke at the time; I told myself this was something to fight for. Years passed and I ended up earning twice that amount. Still, rest never came. I had built a trap: trying to beat the system; trying to be small enough to get what I needed, then becoming slightly bigger the more I received; comparing myself with colleagues, convinced I should earn more; competing with everyone. It was exhausting.

Competition is a big part of our lives. We see it everywhere. We were born under the shadow of scarcity, a feeling that likely stretches back to the beginning of time. Seeing others suffer, living with the horror of their pain, taught us to adapt to survive. Even now we strive to be better, to earn more. When we look at money through these filters, it’s never just about numbers. It becomes about safety, belonging, self-worth. That’s why money arguments in families are rarely about money itself. They are about fear, control, and love.

Realignment

The filters we developed in youth are still shaping us. But no challenge comes without reward if we’re willing to work through it. Realigning with values means remembering that money was never meant to be the goal—it was a tool. A system we built to make exchange easier. When money becomes the measure of worth, it traps us in cycles of fear and competition. But when we step back and ask what we truly value—things like connection, creativity, contribution, freedom, the joy of being alive—we loosen money’s grip. We see it for what it is: a mirror of our priorities, not the substance of our lives.

To work with money is to learn its rhythm, not to fear its weight. It is not a master to obey, but a current to join. Money can become a channel for our intentions: we can direct it toward experiences that nourish us, projects that express us, and communities that sustain us. Instead of being only about scarcity or fear, money can flow as an extension of our values, supporting clarity, creativity, and change. When we approach it this way, earning and spending both become acts of alignment—small choices that keep us connected to what really matters. When money flows in tune with our values, it nourishes us, it nourishes others, and it returns, changed yet familiar, like water moving through the earth.

Flow

And what better example than water to understand flow? We all need to drink water to survive. Our organs use it for cleansing and we release it back into the world. Nature filters it and returns it to us clean. Water can’t stay still for too long or it becomes stale. The sun lifts it; vapor forms clouds. Rain feeds rivers, lakes, and oceans. Sometimes water is hidden beneath the surface, but finding the right spot to dig a well can keep an entire village alive. Lastly, water takes the shape of its container, so give it a shape worth filling.

Questions for Reflection

1. What is your earliest memory of money, and what did it teach you?

2. Where does money flow easily in your life, and where does it feel blocked?

3. What kind of container are you offering for the flow of money in your life?