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.

I wake up in the morning, sometimes with the alarm or the sun. Sometimes in a cortisol-induced urgency to start the day. Sometimes I awake with a slow exhale, a smile, and the warm invitation of excitement for the plans I can’t wait to live through.

And sometimes, I wake up in a kind of existential numbness, not knowing where I am anymore. Where my bed feels like a pylon holding my life together. Where I am numbingly unaware of where I stand in my life: in my relationships, in my work, or even in my body.

But mostly, I find: every day, I wake up as one of two men. The one who chooses, and the one who just waits.

I used to think this was some sort of predetermined thing - that each night I’d drift off, and the morning would reliably come, carrying the invisible sorting hat of fate and luck, and together they would determine what kind of day I’d have. How much energy. What kind of mood. How close or far I’d feel from myself.

I got really comfortable with this not choosing. With waking up as the version of me who never really steps forward. The one who is very, very good at making that option feel entirely reasonable. Preferable, even.

That version of me? That’s my shadow self.

On “The Shadow”

The phrase shadow self has taken on a kind of pop-psych notoriety. It’s been meme-ified, coached, and sold. You’ve heard the language: “inner child,” “shadow work,” “integration,” “healing your triggers,” “meeting the repressed parts.”

And while it points to something real, I’ve often found that narrative equally confusing and daunting. Shadow work sounded like spelunking headfirst into emotional darkness, a thing I should probably do, but am never quite ready for.

A good idea in practice, sure, but who has the time for it?

But the shadow, as I’ve come to understand it, isn’t just trauma, shame, or darkness. It’s not just your exiled rage or forgotten creativity.

It’s the version of you who never chooses.

It’s the self who waits. Who performs coherence, but never really feels at home. The one who scrolls more than he writes. Who cancels more than he shows up. Who keeps potential alive by never putting potentiality at risk.

It’s not dramatic. It’s subtle. And that’s what makes it dangerous.

“What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.”

– Carl Jung

The Hallway of Almost

The Shadow timeline. This is the drift path. The life that happens when you don’t return to yourself.

It looks fine on the outside.

You’re functioning.

Maybe even successful. You’re present..ish. But inside? You’re tired. Not from effort, from avoidance. You feel like you’re always catching up, vaguely apologizing for something, even if no one’s asked you to.

You feel like a ghost in your own schedule. You cancel plans with people you love. You move cities or apps or habits hoping something clicks. You say “next week” a lot.

You forget how to hold yourself through discomfort, so you numb. Or distract. Or delay. You light a candle but don’t sit with it. You cook a meal and eat it with the company of the new show that came out on Apple TV+. You write thoughts you don’t send. You speak in insights you haven’t lived.

You’re not in crisis. But you’re leaking.

Your mornings are loose. Your body feels like a negotiation. Your creative projects hover just out of reach.

You spend more time looking at others’ lives than shaping your own.

You feel unmoored, like you’re living without narrative gravity. The days blend. The body dulls. The purpose fades. Your drive putters into a vacuum.

You’re…rehearsing. Avoiding. Surviving. Drifting.

And you can drift a long time before anyone notices, even you.

But the most dangerous part? It feels tolerable. Reasonable. Even deserved.

“I just need a few days.”

“I’ll start fresh next week.”

“It’s just a season.”

You call it a lull. But it’s a loop. And loops, left unbroken, become lives.

This is not the path of collapse. It’s the suffocating hallway of almost.

It looks functional. You’re showing up. You answer some messages. You’re in a relationship. You even have a few good ideas. But something’s off. There’s no center to your day. No music to your movement. No fire in your decision-making.

You think about the people you miss. You romanticize the person you were. You believe you just need a bit more time to feel like yourself again.

You scroll. You perform habitual ritual without letting it touch you. You wait for clarity like it’s going to arrive fully formed.

You’re not failing. But you’re not authoring.

The Authoring Timeline

The aligned timeline is not about control. It’s not about optimization. It’s about returning.

To the part of you that still believes. To the calendar that reflects your actual values. To the conversation that moves something in your soul.

It’s about rhythm. About playing the beat to your own time.

The authoring timeline is not perfection. It’s not hustle or getting your shit together.

It is the path of friction that leads to fire. The mornings you don’t negotiate. The rituals you can keep even when you feel lost.

The boundaries you hold even when you feel lonely. The creations you finish even when no one is watching or waiting at the other end.

It’s the world where you do because it’s the doing that matters, not the having done.

The authoring timeline doesn’t feel perfect. But it feels alive.

You wake with reverence. You move your body. You light the candle and stay with it. You do the thing before you’re ready. You put work into the world, even when it’s unfinished. Especially when it’s unsure.

You love. You ship. You tell the truth. You rest with intention. You shape the hours. You protect your mornings. You follow through. You forgive. But you also finish.

You risk being seen.

You begin to feel authored. Like who you are is a series of choices, not a set of labels betrothed to you by others.

Self-determined. Not by circumstance. Not by pressure. But by presence.

You don’t walk it because you feel ready. You walk it because you’ve decided to come back to yourself.

Because you are tired of dancing to the rhythm of someone else’s drum.

You forgive yesterday, but you don’t hand it today’s pen.

This path isn’t easy. But it’s actually coherent. The narrative starts to build on itself. The past, the present, the future, don’t feel so vast, complex, and unknown.

Your life hums. You hum.

You energy still oscillates, but it builds up, instead of leaking out.

This path is made of self-structure: rhythms and rituals you author for yourself. Patterns that don’t confine you, but set you free. Anchors that hold even when the sky is grey.

You remember that your time is not something to manage, it is something to guide.

And this path only asks of you one thing: begin again. When you wake up and you feel off, and you feel like you deserve a break, a freedom from your life, and the comforting numbness of someone else choosing your path for you sounds amazing, you still, even then, begin again.

No summit to reach, or destination to end up in. Just the baby steps of daily movement into the direction of your choosing.

And soon.

You start to feel…authored.

Not by fate. Not by someone else’s design.

But by the part of you that still believes this life matters - to you.

The Cost of Drift

You won’t wake up one day and arrive in the authored life. There’s no end goal. There’s only practice, and the devotion to it. It doesn’t really ever stop, and that’s a good thing - it means you are alive.

You won’t wake up one day in full authorship. No one delivers you “The Authored Life™” in a 50 step program or a $599 coaching program.

It’s a slow awareness of all your daily moments, and an ever slower reorientation towards you.

You begin to make sense of your life story.

Patterns reveal themselves. You choose whether they repeat.

You stop exiling the parts of you that were messy, or inconsistent, or even hidden.

You use them, in your writing, your relationships, your rituals, your being.

People see your personality. People see you.

Some relationships drift away, some get tighter, but your life isn’t driven by that outcome. It’s not driven by the baggage of other people’s worldview imposed on you.

It’s not an excuse for narcissism, or self justifying sociopathy, it’s the choice to choose a life story that brings you alive, despite the consequences.

But if you don’t choose? You drift. And the longer you drift, the more the shadow feels like home. Every day you drift, the muscles of agency atrophy. The longer you stay in shadow, the more convincing it becomes. The more you forget that another way is possible.

The shadow timeline whispers, “You’re just in a season.”

The author timeline reminds you, “You are the season.”

I’ve lived both timelines. And most good days, I touch both before noon.

But I’m learning how to return. Slowly, in inklings. In baby steps that don’t feel like a whole lot of movement at all.

To light the candle and sit with it.

To remember my own agency.

To start writing the story instead of waiting to feel like the main character.

Welcome to Mythogen

We were told that modern technology would give us better lives, more clarity, more drive, more freedom, more joy.

Instead, it gave us apps that teach us to scroll before we even stand. It made waking up and flittering through micro-entertainment masquerade as living. It gave us love, sex, and relationship as a swipeable shopping cart. Health as a dashboard. Meaning as an algorithm. Attention as currency to arbitrage.

We moved from wonder to nihilism. From dreaming what AI could build, to fearing what it might erase: our work, our meaning, even our will to choose.

I know, because I helped build the old system. And I watched it fail us. I saw the crushing power of the status quo.

This was never the dream.

We don’t dismiss what tech has given us. But we know it can do more than distract and extract.

Mythogen is our attempt to begin again.

We ask:

• What if the apps you use didn’t hijack your mind, but helped you return to it?

• What if the systems we use helped us build a life we aspire to wake up and live, not hold us accountable to ones that we barely find tolerable?

• What if your money told the story of your generosity to yourself and to others and helped you understand the things that brought you alive?

• What if our goals didn’t need to be hacked, tricked, or gamified - because they actually mattered to us?

• What if boredom wasn’t something we outsourced to a screen to fill with entertainment, but a moment to be listened to like a signal?

• What if your productivity wasn’t just a grid of tasks to endlessly reschedule until the final-final deadline, but were systems that helped you structure a life you actually wanted to live?

• What if technology was designed to be used less, as a means to an end, rather than as an end in of itself?

It’s not a simple product. You are not just a consumer.

It’s a perspective. One where technology serves the soul, not just the market.

And where systems are designed around your narrative instead of optimizing your productivity.

Mythogen isn’t optimized for engagement. It’s not gamified. It’s not built with the same coercive tricks we’re trying to escape.

It’s slow. It’s human. It’s sacred.

And we’re building it, for those of us ready to live a little mythically again.

• To author identity.

• To cultivate meaning.

• To live with intention.

Join us, as we build this slowly. Not for mass adoption.

But for those who are ready to begin again.