What Does Right Relationship with Money Look Like? A Campfire Conversation with Tom Haslett
After weeks of researching the history of money and capitalism, I needed to talk with someone who thinks about money for a living but doesn’t think about it the way most people do.
Tom Haslett is an investment manager. He’s also someone who went on a Vipassana silent meditation retreat and came back with a fundamentally different relationship to wealth. His line that has stayed with me: “Money is boring. Relationship is wealth.”
This Campfire Conversation started with me naming the tension I felt. I come from privilege. I’ve benefited from systems I’m now questioning. Having a conversation about the problems with money while sitting comfortably is its own kind of contradiction. Tom didn’t let me off the hook, and I didn’t want him to.
We talked about what he called the Faustian bargain of investing. You put money into systems that may not align with your values because the returns allow you to do work that does. It’s a tension with no clean resolution.
Tom reframed risk and return through the love and fear lens in a way I hadn’t considered: “Risk is fear. Return is love.” The willingness to take risk is really the willingness to move through fear toward something you believe in.
He also shared three questions of enough. How much is enough? How will I know when I get there? And what am I willing to give up to find out? Those questions cut through the noise of financial planning and get to something deeper. What does right relationship with money actually look like?
Read the full piece on Substack
Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org
