Money is freedom. This only dawned on me when I had absolutely nothing. Without money, you can't really do anything, all your choices have been taken from you. As you start accumulating money, more and more doors open up, and you are increasingly free to do what you like. Money is, almost by definition, the abstraction of means.
There's probably an upper cap for this effect, but I'd argue that 99% of us will never reach that.
I wouldn't say that not middle-income means you have no freedom. It's more about perspective. If you view money as an enormous burden on your freedom to do whatever you want, then it becomes that. But you can do whatever you want, regardless. There's no requirement to have "fuck you money" to have a "fuck you, i'm not going to take your shit" attitude about life and relationships.
Sound advice. Even though my income has happily grown over the past year, I’m trying to keep my value perception of money as close as possible to where it was when I was a poor student, to maintain my sanity as much as anything else.
My outlook on life is unimaginably different now that I have a few thousand euro lying around my bank account than it was right after I burned my last startup and I was forced to borrow shampoo.
Money == freedom.
Poverty != Freedom
(Or rather, being dirt poor can get in the way of the good life.)
Most people in Western countries are not forced to borrow shampoo. If you are scraping around for basic needs than obviously your life choices are limited, but you don't need loads of money to move beyond this point.
I understand that a lot of people don't understand these feelings if you haven't been poor but they are real.
I think that you have diminishing returns on this as you earn more money... I don't think it's so much a hard cut off. The 'freedom' difference between being dependent on family for rent and being able to support yourself is larger, in my opinion, than the freedom difference between owning your home and owning a block of apartments.
In my mind, if you can make a programmers wage, and you feel like you can easily get another job if fired? you have a pretty large degree of freedom.
I also think that 'job security' or, perhaps 'perceived income security' has as much to do with this freedom as does the amount you earn. If you feel like your boss can fire you at any time, and if you feel like you can't easily get a new job? you... are going to feel rather less free than someone who either thinks they can get another job fairly easily or who feels that they can't be fired.
I think it is very obvious that no, it shouldn't. Implicit in the statement that money == freedom is !money == !freedom. Without money you are not free.
I want to be very clear here: This. Is. Wrong.
Do I have a solution? No. Not a palatable one. But I urge you to at least think about it. There are not enough people of means giving this fundamental question any thought.
The world will go on regardless of whether or not we end this immoral game of money. But I am willing to bet that the future will look back at us and be disgusted and sickened.
Can't we at least try?
I keep hearing how money is "freedom" or buys you fearlessness. I don't buy it.
Freedom and fearlessness happen inside. And, when you have those things inside, amazing things happen on the outside. With or without money - it doesn't matter.
I've seen that picture and story referenced many times as an example of a pure drive that isn't influenced by money. That it was "all you need".
At the time Steve Jobs was already a multi, multi-millionaire (from the IPO of Apple in 1980 he was worth some $200 million). He had the freedom to never worry about basic needs, could travel the world at his leisure, could do essentially what he wanted, etc. He had the sort of freedom that such wealth provides.
It is convenient to be in that position and no longer worry about money, because you're already there.