Money has no value unless you spend it. You can spend it now, or save it now and spend it later. But at the end of the day, you still have to spend it, use it, donate it or bequest it in order for it to do anything for you. If you need further reminding about the abstract value of those bills in your wallet, there are always those hyperinflation stories of economic collapse where people need a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a turnip. Let’s examine some other apocryphal stories about the use and misuse of money.

1. The homeless millionaire

How the story goes: There’s this guy who pandhandles on the corner of [insert major financial district] and asks for money every day. Then one day he dies and people find out he was a millionaire who stashed it all away while he lived for free.

Why this story exists: Makes us think about how much value we place on appearances and that things are not as they seem, another variant of the idea that “all strangers and beggars come from Zeus” (Odyssey 6.207- 8). Also, we can have little fantasies about the various ways we could easily have put his fortune to better use. As a bonus, it lets us off the hook when we pretend we’ve got no spare change.

The reality: This story is probably true somewhere in the world, but not because homeless people are millionaires. It’s more like there are mentally ill and socially isolated millionaires who become homeless. Every so often I’ll read a newspaper story about someone who appeared impoverished to everyone around him (and it always seems to be a man, for some reason) who actually had a large amount of money stashed away. This is really a testimony to the impact of mental illness on our personal well-being. Money is a part of a healthy life. Being completely irrational about it is a form of mental illness, not frugal superiority.

I’m not talking the many spiritual traditions that rejects material concerns. Traditional crucifixion statues show an emaciated Christ figure who appears to have shed all worldly concerns to the point of starvation, and the hanging earlobes of many statues of Buddha are conspicuously empty of the heavy gold earrings that used to hang there before Enlightenment became a more pressing concern. But no religious leader would advocate amassing wealth and not using it for any purpose, not even the relief of the poor, care for the ill or the promotion of enlightenment. Money has no value in stasis. When it’s unspent, all its potential is locked up. It’s nonsensical to acquire it with no plans to ever spend it on anything – after all, if you have no plans to use it, why bother acquiring it?

People who amass large amounts of useless things are actually hoarders. Some people collect newspapers, books, animals and so on. I think there are people who collect money far beyond any normal or useful purpose. Sure, some of those people are business people who enjoy the thrill of the game, of mergers and acquisitions that amass more money that any sensible person would have time to enjoy. But that’s really about the acquisition of money as a hobby. To amass wealth like a dragon’s hoard and gain no pleasure from it is to demonstrate a distorted reality on value and possessions.

2. The innocent/wise native

How the story goes: A rich westerner goes on vacation to some rustic seaside locale. He tries to convince a fisherman to work harder and capitalize his equipment so he can make more money and then start saving for his retirement. When asked why he’d want to retire, the businessman replies that he can move to this beach permanently and enjoy a life of leisure, upon which the fisherman says ‘œbut that’s what I’m doing right now.’

Why this story exists: This story continues because it makes us uneasy. It uses traditional racist tropes to distance ourselves from both the pursuit of money and all innocence of it. This story is told to remind people not to be the businessman, it’s already assumed that we have no identification with the simple fisherman. Actually, it raises our suspicions of manual labourers as having it easy while we toil in industry to pursue sophisticated and ephemeral goals.

The reality: There is a pervasive racist myth of the innocent savage who is closer to nature. Parables using this trope often seem to admire the childlike simplicity, but that’s not actually a compliment to anyone over 10. If this concept confuses you, head over to Racialicious to learn more about the ongoing reinvention of racism in popular culture. At any rate, this parable is about our lives as we live in the middle of ambition (the businessman) and innocence (the fisherman). Obviously, we’d be completely ignorant of the realities of hard manual labour to imagine that a fisherman’s life resembles leisure, but the story does make us remember than sunsets and beaches, leisure and please are still free. We might laugh grimly at the knowledge that we are working hard to pay off needs we didn’t know existed (hello? $150 a month for cell, cable, internet and phone access?) but we also know better than to imagine that a hunter-gatherer economy can create, say for example, medical technology and long-term care facilities needed to extend our lifespans. We dismiss the fisherman’s views as naïve and simplistic, and laugh at the businessman’s perpetual ambitions. Our own situation is, longingly and uneasily, somewhere in between.

A less extreme story of compulsive acquisition, and perhaps more common story about leisure and ambition, would be my parents’ relationship with food. They both grew up in hard times of the Great Depression and World War 2. On a farm, my dad always had food and shelter, but no cash or any goods they couldn’t produce themselves. My mother grew up in an urban context where living space was a premium and food never guaranteed. Both of them took up the cultivation of food, whatever their incomes. My dad had a small orchard in our suburban lot and my mother kept her Victory Garden running throughout my childhood. They also dedicated an entire room in the basement to a pantry. I grew up with the habit of stocking that pantry. If six cans of beans were coming into the house ‘“ that was four for the kitchen and two for the pantry. We didn’t, however, actually use the food in the pantry and yet week after week, year after year, I put food into it. To me, an exotic fruit was a banana or orange. Anything you had to buy and couldn’t grow yourself was a luxury. Our backyard was acreage to be tilled like any other, and when I roamed by myself in the woods I’d spend all day picking berries. To this day I find it hard to pay for apples and berries after having plucked them for free.

What part of these habits are the prudent reminders of hard times, and when does it teeter on the edge of neuroticism? Their lifestyle redefined leisure into something that was also productive instead of a consumer habit. Was this freeing for them? Is it a valuable lesson for me? Or was it an additional burden for them to pile one more chore onto many others?

I’m grateful for the skills passed on to me, but I feel sad that some of these behaviours were driven by early trauma and a lifelong fear that never quite went away. I do think, overall, it was a positive thing for them to find solace and inspiration in creating useful things. Useless was worthless in my formative economy, and I hold that value to this day.

When my parents separated, we lived off the food in the cellar for the better part of a year. That’s a lot of food. Then again, money was pretty tight for a while. Maybe we were putting food away all those years for just those rainy days.