Part of my college tuition at Harvard College was paid from a scholarship dedicated to helping "poor but deserving boys" achieve the summum bonum of being a Harvard alumnus. Part of the deal with the scholarship was that I had to compose a letter of thanks each year to the fund's managers thanking them for their support and giving a brief but pungent update of what I'd been doing. I don't recall the text of anything I wrote, but I do remember the brief but pungent humiliation of having to abase myself for the sake of money. I was thankful and resentful all in the same moment. This is a feeling about money that I have never lost. I did manage to make it through Harvard and several other schools, but I've never been able to shed the dislike of having to work for a living, of being at the mercy of money. I don't mind working hard—working hard is the only way to get to know the world and transform it through the body—but always being a slave to a wage, to be "poor but deserving," is terrible. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body and have never been able to pull together gigs, side hustles and so on to supplement what I earn in my salary. I just don't seem to have the talent or ingenuity to do this, so in a sense I have only myself to blame for my dilemma. And blame myself I do, often, turning myself into a miser who can't see money as a means to an end (pleasure, safety, compassion) but only as an end itself, the end being the ability to discard the feeling of being at the mercy. I don't want to be rich in the usual sense; what I want is enough money as a cushion again the vile buffets of the world so that I don't have to think about it. I want enough money to be amnesiac about money. It's the thinking about it all the time that is most wearing on me: constricting me, pinch-mouthing me, turning me sober and calculating and killjoying and wetblanketing everything. I hate myself for it and can't seem to get out of my own way. I am such a bad capitalist. The threat of, the feeling of, poverty does not spur me to change my state or innovate my fate—I want a different system, with different incentives and obligations, "from each…" I had always planned to die broke. I just hate being broke along the way.