What Money Was For

On fear, belonging, and learning what wealth actually means

The Outhouse

When I was a child, we had a system.

If you needed to use the outhouse — really use it, the kind that takes time — you turned on the electric heater five minutes before you went. Ten if you had the patience. The outhouse was cold, especially in winter, and the electricity cost money, so you didn't just leave the heater running all day. You planned. You waited for someone else to finish, then went immediately after, while the air was still warm.

I did not know we were poor. Children rarely do, at first.

We lived in an old building next to a dairy, in a section of a house shared between three families. Three rooms, one tap, a dry toilet in the yard. My mother and grandmother raised everything they could in the garden. Fried potatoes, vegetable soups, mashed potatoes with mince sauce, when things were good. I ate well enough. I just didn't know yet that what we had was less than what other people had.

You learn it slowly — and then one day you realise you have known it for years.

The Table

The moment I return to most often is not dramatic. It is ordinary. That is perhaps why it stayed.

My mother sitting at the kitchen table. A payslip in her hand. Sometimes I was playing in the other room and wandered in. Sometimes I was already sitting there, eating. What I remember is her face — the particular seriousness of it, the slight disappointment — and her voice, quiet, almost to herself: another worker got fifty more. I thought I'd get at least twenty-five.

Then the calculation. Electricity. Food. Firewood.

My grandmother would say: We'll manage. I have my pension too.

I didn't understand the numbers. I understood their weight. There was something in that room — some adult heaviness — that had nothing to do with monsters or darkness or the things children are supposed to fear. This was different. This was real. My mother was carrying something I couldn't name, something that made the world feel suddenly larger and more dangerous than I had known.

I absorbed it without knowing I was absorbing it. The way children do.

Fear of not having enough. Fear of the money running out. Fear of not managing. We'll get by. We'll manage somehow. These were the sounds of my childhood, settling into me like weather into old walls — invisibly, permanently, shaping everything from inside.

I had no father. He died before he even knew I existed.

What I was missing was not only money. I understand that now. I was missing the shape of a man who could show me how to be calm when things were hard. What I had was my mother's face, and the particular silence that followed when the numbers didn't add up.

I had to build that steadiness myself, mostly from mistakes.

But that is not the whole story.

My childhood was also warm. My mother and grandmother loved me with everything they had. It was more than enough. The garden in summer. The soups. The particular safety of small rooms with people who would do anything for you.

I think about this with great tenderness now. For my birthday, when I was thirteen or fourteen, they scraped together enough to buy me a cassette player. Light blue. It came with a cable that connected directly to the television. I would put in a blank tape, hook up the cable, wait for the MTV chart show to start, and record my favourite songs by pressing the button at exactly the right moment. I don't know what it cost them. I know it was the most perfect gift anyone has ever given me — not because of what it was, but because of what it said: we see you. We found a way.

The CD Player

My first real summer job, I spent almost the entire pay on a CD player.

I want to be honest about this: it was not about the music. I already knew that somewhere, even then. It was about having something new and beautiful that was mine. Something that announced I was the kind of person who had things.

I bought one CD to go with it. The worst kind of early-nineties Eurodance — the sort of thing that should not be remembered. I played it all summer because I couldn't afford another one. But I listened to that player with a pride that had nothing to do with the sound coming out of it.

I understand it now. The player was not a player. It was proof. Proof that I was not the boy from the old house next to the dairy, planning bathroom trips around the electricity bill.

The gap wasn't closing. But the player felt like progress.

The Education

I believed, with the particular certainty of someone who has never had enough, that being an adult would fix it.

Not consciously. It was more like a background assumption — that earning would bring calm, that the kitchen table arithmetic would stop mattering once it was my arithmetic to do. I wanted to grow up fast. I wanted to leave the outhouse behind.

For a while it worked. I worked my way into organising concerts for some of the biggest names in the world — like Metallica. It felt like real arrival, the kind that had nothing to do with a CD player. Then my ambition got ahead of me. I handed in my notice for a new opportunity, stepped on someone's toes without realising it, and found myself with nothing. No new job. No old one to return to. Then 2008 arrived, and I was without steady work for more than a year.

Car loan. Mortgage. No unemployment benefit, because I had resigned. I did side projects. I quietly rented out equipment that wasn't technically mine to rent. I survived, mostly through stubbornness and family.

I swore it would not happen again. And then, when things improved, I did almost everything wrong.

The Burning

When money came in — really came in — something in me loosened in the wrong direction.

I paid entry for entire groups at nightclubs. Eight, ten people. Half of them strangers. I put the money down and felt, for exactly as long as it took to hand it over, like someone who had more than enough. I bought an ex-girlfriend a red phone because she had admired it. An Apple TV because she had mentioned it once. I always paid at dinner. Always. Because paying meant I had arrived somewhere.

And then — I bought a Porsche.

Not a 911. Let's be clear. Nothing so obviously foolish. An old one, from the early eighties, the kind that required a certain amount of explanation when people asked. But still: a Porsche. I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it anyway. That is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about that period: I was not confused. I understood the logic perfectly. I just wanted the feeling more than I wanted to stop.

I had no savings. No investments. A good income and no cushion and a growing collection of symbols, each one whispering: you have arrived. You are not that boy anymore.

What I actually had was no reserve. No plan. No direction. And a Porsche that needed work.

The spending felt like confidence. It was fear in better clothes. It was the boy at the kitchen table, watching his mother count roubles, deciding, without knowing it, that he would never look like that. He would always look like he had enough. Even when he didn't.

Especially when he didn't.

The Reckoning

This change didn't come from a book. It came from exhaustion and uncertainty.

I started putting money aside. Quietly, into things I could understand — gold, mostly — without needing to become an analyst. And something unexpected happened.

The first time I transferred money to a separate account before paying a single bill — paying myself first — I felt something I hadn't anticipated. Not deprivation. Peace. A small, unfamiliar stillness. I sat with it for a moment, unsure what to do with it.

It grew. The more I set aside, the quieter something in me became. I started looking forward to payday not to spend but to save. To make that first transfer. To watch the number grow. It sounds like a cliché until it becomes a habit, and then it becomes the thing you protect most fiercely.

One book in particular helped me name what was happening. Not because it taught me new things — but because they put words around what I had already half-understood: that our relationship with money is formed before we know what money is. That what we do with it reveals what we are afraid of, what we are trying to prove, who we are still trying to become.

It was never about money. It was about the same thing the CD player was about. The same thing the Porsche was about.

I was still trying to close a gap that money was never going to close.

I am not anxious about money the way I was. There is a reserve in the bank — enough for a few months, possibly longer — and the existence of that reserve does something to the nervous system that no amount of spending ever did. The boy who watched his mother count roubles at the kitchen table is still in me somewhere, still a little afraid. The reserve is partly for him.

I am a saver now. Not perfectly. Not without the occasional twinge of irritation when my loan payment goes out. But I save first. I invest what I can. And I have noticed something: when my income grows and I manage to set aside a larger share of it — not just more money, but a higher percentage — something in me feels genuinely satisfied. Not the brittle satisfaction of buying something. A quieter kind. The kind that stays.

I am still becoming that man. But at least now I know what I am building.

What Wealth Actually Means

What I have most wanted is actually quite simple: to do work that I genuinely like, regardless of where and when, and to have enough money not to think about money.

I am almost living it now. Not entirely, not yet. But close enough that I can feel what it actually is.

And what it feels like is not what I expected.

It is quieter than I thought. Less triumphant. More like arriving somewhere after a long drive and finding the place is quite ordinary — and being surprised to discover that ordinary is exactly what you wanted.

I work from home, 130 kilometres from the office. I decide when I work. I take the dog for long walks in the middle of the day. I close the laptop when I want to write. I am not monitored. I am not managed by the clock.

That is what I was always buying. With the CD player, the nightclub entry fees, the red phone, the dinners, the Porsche. I was buying the feeling of being someone who had enough — enough that he didn't have to plan his bathroom trips around the electricity bill, enough that the world wasn't as large and frightening as it looked from that kitchen table.

The strange thing is that what I was trying to buy actually exists. It just isn't sold in shops.

The gap the money was always trying to close — the one shaped like a father, like a house with a bathroom, like a boy who belonged somewhere — that gap doesn't close with money. I know that now.

I used to picture it as a hammock. A quiet beach somewhere warm. My son next to me, not asking anything, just there. No schedule that owns me. No calculation running in the background.

But here is the uncomfortable truth I have been circling: even in the hammock, the mind invents new problems. The hammock could be bigger. Closer to the water. A small grill would be nice. Then a boat. Then somewhere else entirely. I know myself well enough to know that I would spend my way through that fantasy too — not in reality, perhaps, but in my head, which is where most of the damage has always been done.

The hammock is not a destination. It is a direction.

This is No-Mad Max. The author is still building. He is learning to enjoy the journey. I write about the things men carry but rarely say out loud. You can also find me on Substack and Medium