Money is worthless when you're middle-class

When I was growing up, in a middle-class intellectual family, I got a lot of interesting messages about money.

I went to Quaker schools for a long time. Though modern Quakers vary in how well they do it, and it's not as explicit these days, Quaker ideology prizes poverty as the correct state, morally speaking. After all, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" . Though Quaker Universalism isn't explicitly Christian, it's still influenced and filtered through the ideology of Christianity's original teachings.

Anyway, through that and other sources -- books, movies, songs -- I got a few messages:

• Caring about money is passe and uncool.
• Caring about money will only lead you to ruin.
• Money can't buy happiness.
• Do what you love and the money will follow.

And a few contradictory ones:

• Don't try to get a career in art.

As I got older and was exposed to new messages about money, some of this changed:

• Money can buy happiness, but only if you use it right and in the right amounts.
• Caring about money leads you to ruin insofar as it's a status symbol.

But actually, I think the original messages were basically correct; they were just misdirected. I wasn't the person who needed to hear them.

I've pretty thoroughly bought into the idea of early retirement by now: if you have a moderately high middle-class income, you can retire early, and if you're particularly fortunate and strategic (say, a software engineer in San Francisco), you can do so early enough to quit before you start having kids.

In the range of incomes where such things are possible, money is extremely valuable because you can actually use it to buy nigh-unlimited (although substantially deferred) amounts of the most valuable and scarce resource there is: time.

But if you can't do that, and you're going to work for the next 40 years and accumulate an absurd quantity of money (which most middle-class incomes allow you to do at a relatively modest savings rate), there's not actually that much downside to spending some of the extra as you go.

(Of course, there are other important things you might consider spending it on instead.)