The Stages of Money
From survival to liberation, a Mythogen inquiry into value
We talk about money as if it’s metal, or paper, or code.
But really, money is a mirror: one that reveals what we value, what we fear, and what we still believe we must trade to feel safe.
Money, as I have come to learn, isn’t really anything real. Not that it doesn’t have value, or that a lack of it doesn’t have consequential impacts in your life. It’s that money itself, in isolation, has little to no value.
Money doesn’t feed you, it gives you access to get food from someone. It doesn’t clothe you or shelter you; it enables you to access those comforts. It doesn’t love you, but it creates a hedge against the inevitable challenges in life that can fray love.
Money, more than anything is an idea: it’s a mirror of values – a tool.
Money, the Tool
Money is a symbol that mediates exchange, an abstraction that allows value to flow between people. This symbol that we call money is an abstracted representation of the value that money itself refers to. And depending upon the context, those values can truly be anything: food, a house, optionality, opportunity, or even art.
What we call a Dollar or Euro or Yen, represents yet another abstraction: not just a reference to those valuable things that we actually want, but a reference to the relationship between an instrument (such as a coin, gold, paper, stocks, bonds, bitcoin) and means to access the valuable thing itself.
The trust of that relationship being preserved over time – despite population growth, famines, production changes, war – keeps the money’s power over time.
The more stable or powerful the society that backs that instrument, the more we collectively reward that stability with our time, resources, and energy.
Unlike a hammer, whose utility is stable, money’s power is relative – its meaning bends according to how much of it you have, and how much it means to the person beside you.
A single dollar in the hands of a starving man is worth more than a thousand in the pocket of a king.
The Two Stages: Biological & Psychological
The values that money references are largely dependent on the amount of money one has, and the context they find themselves in.
Money’s power is conditional on the way other people immediately around you value it and use it.
It’s the difference between a Toyota and a Lexus, between access to a single room and multiple villas around the world. Between fast food and ceviche.
And while that context window has collapsed with social media – tribes can now watch billionaires in mega yachts go to Art Basel– still, I think money really has two progressions, the Biological Stages and the Psychological Stages.
The Biological Stages (1 – 4)
Money in our world, is a necessity.
Your biology understands this, and your life shortens until you have some of it. On this ladder you are driven to take more risks, breakdown more societal structures to access it. You move mountains, desperate to grasp the concept, and in the early stages of collecting it, risk sacrificing yourself for it.
Stage 1 — Survival
In this stage money buys food, water, shelter. Its existence and your access to it validate your need to exist. Having it at this level grants you the right to remain alive in the game. Here, it is life itself. Every decision is instinctual, every coin is sacred to survival. Not having it means death, your lineage ending with you, and in its worst form, starvation, imprisonment, disease, and suffering.
Stage 2 — Optionality
Once the body is secure, the psyche yearns for choice. Money now becomes a softer space. Here you get more groceries, better food, fewer emergencies. You buy yourself access into the privilege of bulk – you don’t have just food for today, you have food for tomorrow. Your children can start to understand the concept of the future, and so can you. You start buying time in its realest sense, from buying small comforts to small securities – to little breaths between needs.
Stage 3 — Opportunity
Here money begins to turn into leverage. It can buy education, mobility, or risk. You can learn a skill that provides value that few can do. You can move to a place where more people need you. You can take the risk to back an idea into something that gives you access to more: you can invest. This is where your capital starts to create more capital, and freedom begins as you trade necessity for possibility.
Stage 4 — Security
Finally money loses its bite. Your body starts to relax, your nervous system starts to regulate. You find time for leisure, for pleasure. Your mind starts to feel spacious, and your instincts start to allow you to choose. You can say no to what drains you.
You are no longer hustling for survival, you are selecting your labors with care. You start finding work that is meaningful to you. You make choices that prioritize the intangibles, the things that feel right.
It’s not that you don’t think about money. It’s just that money doesn’t drive you anymore. You may choose an opportunity that may offer less money because the money becomes a tradeoff against your life.
Money here becomes maintenance of the world you have built, not your source of meaning.
The Psychological Stages (5 – 8)
When the biological drive fades, stories take over. Money becomes mythology: an emblem of worth, status, or redemption.
In these stages the progression is less linear, less goal-oriented. You can mix and match your way through all of them, dropping in and out as your life ebbs and flows.
There is no internal drive to be here: it’s all learned, the stories that you carry – those taught by your family, your culture, your time, and your friends.
Here the stories can also trap: immigrants often carry ancestral memories of scarcity. Success becomes survival, even generations later. The lack of money feels like a lack of value. This is how wealth seeps into identity, quietly, invisibly, like smoke saturating every fabric it touches.
At this stage, we can begin to ask: What stories about money did I inherit? Which ones still govern me?
Stage 5 — Luxury
Luxury is not necessity, it is narrative. It refines your environment to reflect your self-image. It allows you to see yourself as different from others in small ways.
Business class instead of economy. A handmade jacket instead of a factory one. A second home instead of a hotel room.
It’s a sense of harmony between inner taste and outer expression. Your color palette adapts, your style becomes more prominent, internally and externally.
You start to uncover the stories of what you find valuable, what you find beautiful, and you start to craft a world where those things aren’t just what you get to see or experience, but things you get to create and patron.
Luxury, in its sacred form, is artful living. Luxury, in its shadow form, is emptiness disguised as gold foil, ebony bathrooms, caviar sandwiches, and large banners with your name on them.
Stage 6 — Influence
Here money becomes relational energy. Access, reputation, social capital. You can move rooms, open doors, shift currents of opportunity for yourself and others.
Influence is a networked form of power: it shapes through proximity. People give you money because of the person they trust you to be. You become a vessel for transformation. You build companies, start funds, amass followers, and create things that people talk about.
You are not just reliant on governments and societal stability to ensure your money preserves its value, you actively create that for yourself: for you and the people around you.
You start to become a gravitational well, and money falls in because you no longer need it. Because you become the social instrument for access to creation and value transformation itself.
Influence in its sacred form lifts everyone up with you through it’s power, and in its shadow form, pushes everyone down so that the ground that you stand on is higher.
Stage 7 — Power
Money now bends from representation to creation. It now has world-shaping capacity.
You can found nations of thought, the undercurrents of other people’s perception of the possible. You can shape how people think, act, and believe. You rewire industries, move history. You may not even be known, but the world feels your existence. The backdoor entrances, the hidden conversations, the investments that no one clocks, the institutions that people forget to question.
This is not just the world of politics, its the part of the world that most of us never have the time or insight to see, but can feel its existence in the deeper parts of us. It’s the culture and stories that are not transient fads or memes, they are the ones that form the basis of our existence even if we never register them overtly.
And it’s here that money can corrupt: blind power eats its own source of light, and in that dark place, revolutions happen and new values are born. In its sacred form it becomes hope, and a vision that people buy into, a dream that we can collectively dream.
Stage 8 — Exclusivity
This is the final mirage. The collector’s impulse: to own what no one else can.
The yacht bigger than anyone else’s, the car collection that rivals the companies that make them. You build space ships to go where no one else can go, you host summits in places that people can’t pronounce, and procure art from auctions worth more than some nations. Your legacy becomes an obsession, to be in a history book, to make your mark, to build a university or museum, to live as long as you can or erect something of you that will last for centuries after you.
This is not about need at all, but about myth: the myth of the only one. It is spiritual in a larger sense, an exhaustion of temporality, a grasping for the eternal and an escape from suffering that even money can’t solve.
Exclusivity is spirituality misdirected toward a material singularity. And when seen with awareness, it becomes its opposite: the quiet freedom to step outside of the game entirely.
Integration: Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha
The game of money outlives written history, and as older societies have sat with it, learned from it, I’ve found a helpful construct that has its relevance in how I understand my relationship to money.
In Sanskrit, these four stages act as dominos that fall into each other as your life progresses, just like how the seasons bleed into each other and require each other:
Dharma (Duty): The order of things by your design and the design of the society you find yourself in. It is your obligation to pursue your biological imperatives, to understand and fulfill your truest desires, and to develop the skills needed to build a life that is sustainable in the long term, in all the forms of wealth – financial, relational, physical, and mental. It’s the ability to do, regardless of how you feel. It’s the willingness to sacrifice yourself and your transient whims to your goals and to the meaning found outside of you.
Artha (Wealth): The means by which we sustain that order. It’s the comfort layer that insulates relationships, that gives optionality, and protects against rainy days. It’s the body that can survive an emergency, the mind that can withstand loss and pain, the bank account that can withstand global catastrophes, and the support of people that give life meaning. Wealth is sacred when it serves your duty, and sufficient wealth unlocks the ability to truly and honestly feel.
Kama (Pleasure): This is savoring of experience that tests the limits of desire. It’s the laughter and novel experiences. The good sex, fresh food, sunlight, mountains, and beaches. It’s the pursuit of pleasure and the learning from the pain that follows. Pleasure is sacred when it teaches limits: when to push the pedal for more, and when to reign it all in. It’s not just the fulfillment of desire, it is sovereignty over it.
Moksha (Liberation): The transcendence beyond attachment to the outcome. The ability to do without holding on to what happens at the end, to love without grasping, to pursue without burning out, to find meaning in beauty, and meaning in the sound of a bird call. To recognize the cliché of “it’s about the journey, not the destination” in an actualized way. Liberation can not be bypassed into, it is real only when both wealth and pleasure have been known and released.
The Real Work
Money is meant to solve your external problems, not your internal ones. It can build houses but not homes. It can buy comfort but not contentment.
In a poetic sense, money’s ultimate purpose is to stabilize your outer world so that your inner world can be still enough to listen.
To listen to the sound of your breath and the warmth of your loved ones. To the sound of the sea and the smell of the rain. To the sound of the inner landscape, and the fulfillment of the urges that are truly and wholly yours.
To find, that listening, as pastime itself, is completely enough to live a rewarding life.
With Mythogen, we look at our tools and build them up from the questions that keep us honest:
What part of my life does money still hold hostage?
What would it mean to be free through money, not from it?
How can I let money serve my purpose, not define my identity and worth?
Because the real currency was never money: it was our attention.
And the richest life is the one where we are fully awake and alive to spend it.