You’re heard people talk about work as “time for money” exchange, where you sell your limited hours to an employer for a price that makes it worth it to do stuff they care more about than you. Some people talk about shifting to charging for outcomes, instead of hours. But that doesn’t change the fundamental assumption of trading scarce resources as opposing parties, it simply changes the units of exchange. My LLM tells me Marx called this alienation.
I’ll call it a “meaning for money” exchange. “This task doesn’t have enough meaning for me to do on my own, but since cash is meaningful to me, if you add enough, I’ll do it to compensate for my meaning-losses.”
It can work, but money-done-poorly drains meaning that was already there. When you pay people for what they do freely, many stop wanting to do it. Artists call this selling out to insulate themselves from the temptation. And the market already prices in meaning for teachers, NGOs, and conscious capitalists who happily take less pay for a better purpose.
There’s a paradox of living in presence: meaning isn’t fungible, but it does accumulate. This is why “saving for retirement” feels bad: the youth you give up can’t be bought back with beachside mai-tais. But if you do something hard like raise children, the meaning accumulates and each successive moment gets more meaningful.
Look, the meaning-for-money exchange makes sense in scarcity-mindset. But it seems like those of us who have the capacity to, should model coming from a different place, because meaning isn’t scarce. What seems scarce is the meaning-money overlap: the case where the work I would do anyway is the work you would pay for anyway. But I don’t think this is scarce, I think many of us have psycho-social blockers. For example, we learned to feel guilty getting paid for what we love, and that’s a mistake. When overlap exists, no exchange happens. I am not selling you meaning. You are not buying it. We are both already doing the thing.
So then what about money? Research shows that pay corrodes when it feels like control or a price, and doesn’t when it feels like support. The money is neutral, but what it means is not.
So here’s a new frame, money is a resource, not a reason. Resources are scarce, but meaning is not. Meaning already answers “why.” Money answers how does this keep going?
Money is like calories for the body: we need them but we don’t live to eat.
Now we’re playing a non-zero-sum game, a win-win-win where your capital multiplies my meaning, and my work multiplies your meaning. This requires alignment, which is a moment-to-moment exploration (since all there is is this moment). Parting well is a great expression of alignment. An employer/client who privileges meaning doesn’t want to employ someone in the meaning-for-money exchange; it’s caustic to the whole company’s ethos. I know, because I’ve done both as an employer and client, in multiple companies.
So a better option than “money for meaning” is to stop the mindset of one-or-another, the old “making the separation real” self-organizing system. Your soul is called to a unique purpose; when you find it, money’s job is to help keep it going.