#031 - The Wealthy Spiritual Director
#031 - The Wealthy Spiritual Director
Lost in Thought on the Question: What is Wealth?
Don’t want to read? No problem! You can listen to me reading to you by clicking the play button above.
Welcome to the 31st edition of The Wealth Letters, a crowdsourced Anthology on how to find enough in a noisy world.
The manifesto is a great place to start to better understand the who, what, & why of The Wealth Letters before diving in to the collection.
Photo Credit to Douglas Tsoi via
The following is an excerpt of an open letter written by
to his readers at on February 23rd, 2023 about the intersection of money & meaning. The complete piece can be read here.About Douglas
Douglas is a spiritual director, founder of the School of Financial Freedom, and writes the
publication, where he explores the intersection of personal finance and spirituality.In Douglas’ words:
I grew up in an immigrant family who fled the Communists for the U.S.. Money was tight. When I was in college, my personal budget was $5,000. When I graduated, I got a job as a paralegal at the Justice Department and made $25,000 and spent $15,000. I felt rich! I was spending literally three times more than I was used to.
I decided then and there, philosophically, environmentally, financially, that that amount was **enough** to make me happy. So I decided that that was what I was going to spend annually from there on out. Since then, I've had jobs as a corporate lawyer at $150,000 and jobs as a Quaker schoolteacher at $30,000 and everything in between.
Excerpt from Douglas Tsoi’s Open Letter
February 23rd, 2023
I spent most of my life wanting to be “smart.” To do well in school. Get a “good job.” Now after financial freedom, I have a little distance, I see all those urges as part of running the rat race. The only reason you want to be smart, do well in school, and get a good job is a basic insecurity. If I don’t, I’ll be a failure, practically but also existentially.
I’ve realized something even more basic, something so simple that we don’t understand the implications of it: capitalism rewards thinking. In turn, it deemphasizes caring. As capitalism absorbs more and more of culture, and take up more and more of our personal time, it’s happening to us too.
Look at the salaries of thinking professions (finance, management, engineering) versus caring professions (teaching, nursing, elder care). Ever thought about who gets paid more, and why? The most “successful” people I know are in thinking jobs.
Are you a “successful” person? How much of your job is about thinking versus caring?
There are two dangers to this type of “success”: First, you’re spending your life hours in a disembodied experience. Most “successful” people I know are in their heads all day. They spend 8-10 hours at a desk engaged in mental activity. They might “get a workout in” at the end of day. During breaks, they’re on the phone, responding to texts, reading news, scrolling through social media and I suspect “successful” people spend more. The average human spends over 7 hours a day, almost half their waking life, in front of a screen. How is that not an addiction? To spend 35 years of waking life front of a TV, computer, or phone is a poverty of presence. And most of the time, we think we’re enjoying it. That is a loss of life.
Second, you’re being rewarded for reinforcing and reproducing capitalist thought. Remember that we’re only thinking culture’s thoughts. By thinking so much about how to make an impact, how to scale, how to be more effective, or be “better,” we’re just reproducing an industrial improvement worldview where nothing is good enough and everything has to be improved and made bigger. And the hamster wheel is infinite: if you do this well, you’ll be rewarded for it. Then you’ll simply create a world of this for yourself and others. And you'll think it's success.
Most people I know are exhausted by thinking. But they are actually afraid of getting off the treadmill, because, when they do, they encounter the difficult sensations they’ve been stamping down while staying in their heads.
But thinking is disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from God. It’s part of our addiction to our not-enoughness. Our dissatisfaction with ourselves is the root of trying so hard to be “effective,” for “measuring,” and for “improving.”
What is wealth?
Over the years, my students have never really written about wealth in terms of money. Some responses:
Wealth is a full practice of health, happiness, creativity, and mutual benefit.
Wealth is intimate self awareness and a state of flow.
Wealth is community— an abundance of people to remember their birthdays, sit with their wounds, and mirror back their beauty.
Wealth is the ability to get 8+ hours of sleep every night.
Wealth is the opposite of resentment.
Wealth is time. Time for naps, time for walks, time for cooking, time for laughing, time for stillness, time for nature.
Wealth is spacious in your schedule and time to just be human.
Wealth is the ability to be more in their bodies.
Lovely, isn’t it? Again, it’s never about money. Once you have enough money, all these other things open abundantly to you. You get to indulge in all these things that truly satisfy us. But in our society, we don’t really know what is wealth or what is enough. So we sacrifice wealth in order to get more money.
Remember the thoughts in our head are simply capitalist culture? Note that nothing my students describe wealth has anything to do with do with more thinking. Because you’re not forced to work, financial freedom is mental liberation as well. Not only can you think what you want, but you don’t have to think at all. It’s a chance to become more than just the thoughts in your head and become an embodied aliveness and presence in the world.
Further Resources
Douglas’ Newsletter:
Douglas’ Financial Freedom Class: School of Financial Freedom
If you enjoyed reading a letter from a spiritual director, you might like this past edition of The Wealth Letters too:
From Stress to Rest: A pastor’s sermon notes on how we handle money, and how money handles us.
Shout-Outs!
- - Thank you to Douglas for writing this piece and being part of The Wealth Letters collection of correspondence from people of all walks of life on finding a life of abundance in a noisy world.
- - Thank you to Jason for sharing a podcast episode I had the honor to be on with and his podcast Talking Billions with his audience. Jason shares a variety of insights on fatherhood, faith, and investing over on his Twitter (X) page.
Thank You for Your Support
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Reach out via email: support@thewealthletters.com or by commenting on this post.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Jordan
This letter shows just how in reach and available true wealth is. It's accessible to all if we can truly tame the pull to "keep up w/ the Jones'."
Douglas, thank you for being part of The Wealth Letters and for giving us perhaps a different perspective on a life of abundance!