The Wealth That Cannot Be Spent
The highest form of wealth cannot be spent on yourself. Money transforms from possession to power only when it flows toward something larger than the person who holds it.
True wealth reveals itself through a paradox: the more tightly you grasp it, the poorer you become. What we mistake for security—accumulation, hoarding, the endless pursuit of more—creates the very scarcity it claims to solve. Meanwhile, the money that moves toward repair and meaning multiplies in ways that compound interest never could.
We live backwards with money, treating the currency as the treasure and the flow as the threat. But wealth was never meant to be possessed; it was meant to circulate, like blood through a body or water through a watershed. When it stops moving, it begins to poison the very thing it was supposed to nourish.
The ancient gift economies understood what we've forgotten: wealth is not what you can keep, but what you can afford to give away. The chief who distributed his riches gained more power than the miser who hoarded gold. This isn't sentiment—it's physics. Resources that flow create networks of reciprocity that endure longer than any individual fortune.