You Don’t Want More Money. You Want More Time.
On redefining wealth through freedom, headspace, the quiet confidence of enough, and what your relationship with money reveals about you.
Decaf espresso in my hand, smooth and intentional. No buzz, just taste.
One day of work at a café, one day at home, another day at the bouldering hall after a morning session, or during a hike through nature.
I’m taking a moment to reflect and notice something odd: I feel wealthier than ever, even though my belongings fit into one suitcase.
I have found more abundance in life through meaningful relationships, autonomy, freedom, headspace, and control over my time.
I’m far from rich, but I’ve become resourceful. I’ve worked on my psychology of money and have been nurturing a healthy, balanced, and grounded relationship with it.
Always a work in progress.
The dividend I’m cashing isn’t numerical. It’s the hours I get back and the presence they allow.
It’s the ability to choose what I do on Monday morning, or any day of the week.
Sundays become Wednesdays, Fridays become Mondays.
I’ve redefined the meaning of weekdays. For me, they’ve simply become days. A continuous flow of time I’ve gained control over.
If money pays any dividend worth caring about, it’s this: control over your time.
Everything else is noise.
“Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.” - Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
What if wealth isn’t about having more money, but about having more of yourself?
The Inheritance of False Beliefs
I grew up with my father after my parents divorced. It was a good middle-class upbringing.
I never really had to worry about money or ask myself what it actually does.
The only association I had with money was being able to buy stuff. You earn money so that you can buy stuff.
That was my understanding of its purpose.
I didn’t grow up “bad with money.” I grew up not thinking about money.
I worked during my studies, my dad helped when things got tight, and I never built a mature relationship with it.
Dependence feels safe, until it isn’t.
In my circles, investing was seen as risky, greedy, or morally questionable. “Don’t do it, you’ll lose everything.”
For a long time, money felt heavy, shame-based, something for “other people,” or for Wall Street bros obsessed with numbers. In spiritual circles, money was almost dirty.
It isn’t. It’s a tool.
Things changed when I lived in Finland for more than seven years, surrounded by friends with a healthier, more grounded relationship to money.
People talked openly about investing, real estate, saving, and patience.
Over time, I got curious, asked more questions, and started to educate myself about it.
The book that influenced me the most was “The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness” by Morgan Housel.
Unlike most books on financing, investing, or money, this book focused on the soft skills.
Because money is more about psychology than investment strategies or mathematics.
It is about your own psychology, your identity, and your relationship to money.
“The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.” - Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
Redefining Wealth: From Possession to Presence
In his book “30 Lessons for Living”, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote:
“No one—not a single person out of a thousand—said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.
No one—not a single person—said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do, it’s real success.
No one—not a single person—said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.”
The same pattern appears in “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware.
The people who have lived the longest and seen the most say the same thing: we’ve been measuring life with the wrong ruler.
In a world where capitalism has quietly replaced religion, money has become the new faith. The biggest religion by far.
You can be an atheist and still pray to the god of productivity: every swipe, every invoice, every upgrade is a small act of worship. Earn to spend.
We’ve been trained to believe that the material is more important than the human. That a career matters more than community.
That owning things matters more than owning our time.
But wealth, real wealth, is none of that.
Real wealth = Freedom + Autonomy + Time.
Money is a tool. It solves money problems, and that’s no small thing.
But when we turn it into meaning itself, we begin to lose control of the very resource it was meant to protect: our time.
“Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them.” - Karl Pillemer, 30 Lessons for Living
That line landed hard. Because in the end, the highest dividend money pays is time; the ability to choose how you spend your hours, with whom, and doing what.
For me, that redefinition changed everything. I now own less than ever; everything I care about fits into one luggage, and yet I’ve never felt richer.
Because I can wake up and decide what to do with my day. I can choose what kind of art I make and when. I can close the laptop and walk.
That, to me, is wealth. It is presence, not possession.
Money, Status, and the Mirror
There’s a strange phenomenon that becomes obvious once you start looking honestly at your relationship with money: we are all status-driven.
Often, subconsciously.
We often buy things not because we need them, but because they help us signal who we think we are, or who we want to be seen as.
That’s uncomfortable to admit. But once you see it, something liberating happens: you start to desire less. And when you desire less, you spend less.
When you spend less, you save more. And when you save more, you regain autonomy: the ability to choose how you use your time.
Desire less → save more → care less about status → reclaim freedom.
Money always mirrors who you are. Your financial choices reveal your level of self-worth, patience, and peace of mind.
For years, I outsourced my stability to others, especially to my father’s support. Grateful, yes, but dependent.
It took me a long time to realize that financial maturity isn’t about income; it’s about emotional independence.
And this independence should be for everyone. My sister reminded me that for generations, money was treated as a man’s language: taught to sons, withheld from daughters.
The result: too many women left unprepared when life inevitably changed course.
Money has no gender. Understanding it simply means having agency over your life.
When you start relating to money as a mirror rather than a scoreboard, something softens.
You no longer chase symbols of success, but you build systems that serve your peace of mind.
You learn to make money work for you, not through constant hustle, but through patience, creativity, and leverage.
Build or invest in things that earn while you rest: whether it’s code, content, or small compounding investments.
If your work is tied to your time, price it high. If it can scale, let it run.
Because the real return isn’t status, it’s freedom, calm, and the quiet confidence of someone who no longer needs to prove anything.
The Real Dividend: Peace of Mind
When I lived in London, I stumbled upon an old book at a flea market titled “How to Be Poor” by George Mikes.
It is a satirical and humorous guide that ironically advises readers on how to avoid wealth and embrace poverty. It is not about suffering, but about the hidden, compounding costs of owning things.
It made a simple point that stuck with me:
Everything you own owns a piece of you.
A car doesn’t just cost money: it costs insurance, fuel, repairs, and mental space.
The same with a house, or many houses. Maintenance, redecorating, renovating… and always the quiet hum of something that needs fixing.
We underestimate this: the headspace tax of ownership. Every possession demands a little bit of your attention, a small portion of your calm.
More stuff means more friction. More friction means less presence.
The older I get, the more I see that peace of mind is the real luxury good.
Money, when used consciously, should do one thing:
Maximize how well you sleep at night, and minimize future regret.
That’s it. Not more status, not more things, just more room in your head and heart.
Because the less I own, the more I can think. The less I chase, the more I can create.
Money, then, becomes an enabler of calm and creative freedom, not the goal, but the quiet infrastructure that allows good work, good rest, and good relationships.
My compass now is simple:
Behavior. Humility. Long-term patience.
That’s all wealth really is: space, inside and out.
True wealth isn’t in the numbers you own, but in the hours you reclaim.
Now, back to sipping my decaf espresso.
Thanks for reading!
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AI has been used to refine structure, grammar, and flow, but every idea, sentence, and story originates from human experience and intuition.