I was obsessed with money… then I found philosophy - Darius Foroux

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I was obsessed with money… then I found philosophy<br>June 15, 2026

Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years.<br>He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.”<br>I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then.<br>For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that.<br>The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another.<br>From cool-obsessed to money-obsessed<br>When I was at university, a friend of my father, a very successful businessman, asked me what I wanted to do after graduation.<br>“Work at a bank,” I said, “and eventually become CEO.”<br>I wasn’t joking. I was always obsessed with finance and had been reading about CEO compensation at major banks. The numbers were insane, and I thought: That’s the goal!<br>I had no idea what that actually required. Decades of grinding. Office politics, luck, compromise.<br>I just saw the number and decided that was what success looked like. Looking back, I find that pretty embarrassing. But that’s where my head was.<br>So I did everything I thought would make me rich. I started a business with my dad.<br>When that didn’t generate the money I wanted, I tried the corporate route. I moved to London. I worked hard. I chased the career.<br>And I was miserable.<br>Why do we narrow in on money like that?<br>Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, spent a lot of time thinking about why people lose their sense of purpose.<br>In his book The Will to Meaning, he described exactly what happens when money takes over:<br>“Once the will to money takes over, the pursuit of meaning is replaced by the pursuit of means. Money, instead of remaining a means, becomes an end. It ceases to serve a purpose.”

That’s it. That’s the trap. Money was always supposed to be a tool. But at some point, most people flip it.<br>The tool becomes the goal.<br>Frankl also noticed something about the kind of person this creates. He wrote:<br>“To those people who are anxious to have money as though it were an end in itself, “time is money.” They exhibit a need for speed.<br>To them, driving a fast car becomes an end in itself. This is a defense mechanism, an attempt to escape the confrontation with an existential vacuum.”

They rush through everything. Not because they need to, but because slowing down means confronting an emptiness they’ve been running from.<br>I recognized myself in that description.<br>It takes real work to become a person with depth. And I say that as someone who had to do that work myself. I wasn’t a reader. I didn’t journal. I didn’t reflect. I was, to be honest, a bit of a meathead.<br>In high school I wanted to be cool. At university I wanted to be rich. I was chasing external things my entire life without ever asking why.<br>Becoming aware of my money obsession<br>When the corporate career fell apart and I moved back in with my parents, I hit a wall. I didn’t know what to do. So I turned to books.<br>Not self-help books, but real philosophy. Books that challenge your ideas and not necessarily tell you what to do.<br>The Stoics. Schopenhauer. Viktor Frankl. Will Durant. Then Eastern philosophy. Krishnamurti. Anthony de Mello.<br>Bhante Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English, written by a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who has been meditating since he was twelve years old.<br>I read everything I could get my hands on, and something shifted in me. I became aware. That’s the only word for it.<br>I woke up to what I had been doing, and why, and where it was leading.<br>I gave up chasing money.<br>I started writing without any expectations, just because I loved ideas and wanted to think more clearly.<br>That decision changed the entire direction of my life.<br>What I actually learned<br>The Stoics didn’t tell me to want money less. They told me to look at where my wanting came from. And once you look at that honestly, the obsession loses its grip.<br>It stops feeling like ambition and starts feeling like fear wearing a suit.<br>One of the most profound and deepest ideas I’ve read comes from Epictetus. The following quote is from A Manual for Living:<br>“Open your eyes: See things for what they really are, thereby sparing yourself the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation.”<br>Let me break that down, because there’s a lot in it.<br>Open your eyes:  Most of us go through life following others without questioning it. We absorb the values of the culture around us and call them our own.<br>See things for what they really are:  Look underneath the surface. What actually drives people. What they want underneath what they say they want. What you find, if you look honestly, is that a lot of what we chase is...