Is money a positive resource or a consciousness-lowering distraction?

Like most people I grew up with mixed associations about money. In some ways money was a good thing; in other ways it was a necessary evil or a distraction from what was really important.
On the one hand, I saw evidence that money was good. It’s not hard to recognize that money bestows certain advantages. Some problems can be solved by money very easily. Money can provide food, clothing, shelter, heat, transportation, education, technology, entertainment, medicine, and so on. Given the way our society currently functions, if you have a lot of money, you have a lot of solutions. Money surely won’t solve all your problems, and it can create new problems of its own, but on balance it’s safe to say that money is a powerful problem-solving tool.
I think Earl Nightingale said it best:
Nothing can take the place of money in the area in which money works.
On the other hand, there are some things I don’t like about money. I don’t like that it’s used as a gatekeeper for certain “privileges” like proper medical care, healthy food, or decent educational resources. I also don’t like how it induces people to behave dishonorably to attain it. While I admire many of achievements of today’s titans of wealth, many of them acquired their wealth through means I couldn’t stomach.
Conflicting beliefs about money
For most of my life, I’ve been stuck with incongruent attitudes towards money. Objectively, material wealth seemed like a great thing — I should definitely pursue it. Subjectively it seemed like a giant distraction — why should I need it? Intellectually, wealth seemed good. Intuitively, wealth felt irrelevant. I hadn’t yet figured out a way of thinking about money that was congruent across multiple perspectives.
Have you been struggling with a similar internal conflict? If so, you’re certainly not alone because this conflict is largely the result of social conditioning. We have some influences telling us that money is very important, while other influences tell us it’s not. Look at what happens during the holiday season. Advertisers tell us to spend, spend, spend. The more money we spend, the better our holidays will be. Buy your wife an (inherently worthless but nonetheless expensive) diamond necklace, and she’ll love you forever. On the other hand, we might watch a classic holiday movie like It’s a Wonderful Life that tells us we need to keep money in perspective and that relationships are far more important. Mixed signals abound.
This social conditioning affects our relationships too. What assumptions do you make about people based on their income or financial assets? If you know someone’s financial status, but you’ve never even met him/her, do you prejudge that person by assigning other qualities that may or may not be true? What assumptions would you make about a millionaire? About someone who’s totally broke? How would you feel dating someone who earned 10x as much as you? How about 1/10th as much as you?
I believe these mixed associations lead many conscious people to conclude that money itself is the problem. Maybe it’s better to find a way to live without money at all… at least cut its presence down to the bare minimum. If money is truly a distraction from conscious living, wouldn’t the most conscious choice be to shun money altogether? Maybe give up your worldly possessions and join a monastery?
Within the scope of religion, money often plays a confusing role as well. Supposedly Jesus wasn’t a particularly wealthy individual, but today’s Catholic Church is as wealthy as they come. According to United Nations World Magazine, the Church has several billion dollars in gold alone, and when you consider their massive worldwide real estate holdings, their artwork collection, and their tax exempt status, the amount of wealth controlled by the Catholic Church is staggering. While figures are hard to estimate due to the complexity and scope of the organization, some believe the Church is the world’s wealthiest entity, with the Pope controlling more financial assets than any corporation or government on earth. Whether that’s true or not, the Church’s wealth certainly makes for an interesting contrast with the life Jesus supposedly lived. When it comes to your financial future, should you model Jesus or the Pope? Or someone else entirely?
We could go deeper into the quagmire of confusing financial beliefs, but I don’t think that would be helpful, so let’s put the social models aside for now and take a fresh look at money to see what role we would have it play in our lives.