Lance's definition of money

01-20-2026

Money is a personality amplifier.

It doesn’t change who you are. It turns the volume up. If you’re disciplined, money gives you leverage. It lets you 10x your health because you suddenly have time, flexibility, and space to take care of yourself. If you’re a degen, it exposes that faster too. If you love doing drugs, money doesn’t fix that. It lets you do 10x more meth, coke, crack, and K. Money doesn’t create traits. It accelerates them.

Money acts like time travel because you can fly anywhere. It gives you optionality in everything. Side-quest coupons. Freedom points. Fun coupons. Access tokens, all at once. It buys health when things go wrong. It buys experiences and moments that turn into good memories. It buys time back. It even buys trust between friends, because shared experiences and reduced stress change how people relate to each other.

Money also feels like keeping score in a video game.

The higher your score, the more doors unlock. Nicer places. Better vacations. More luxury foods. More comfortable living. With enough points in the simulation, you can literally open any door. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want. To me, that’s real freedom.

At its core, money is a lever.

It gives you options. Where you live. How you spend your days. Who you spend time with. Who you never have to deal with again. With enough money, you gain the ability to say no. No to bad business ventures. No to deal flow that doesn’t feel right. No to rooms you don’t belong in. No to people who drain you.

Without money, or when you’re broke, the opposite happens. You depend on work you don’t control and people you don’t fully choose. You show up where you don’t want to be because you have to. If you don’t control money or learn how to manage it, money controls you instead through stress, scarcity, and dependency.

Money is also integrity points.

When you have enough money, you don’t have to scam people. You don’t have to act out of desperation. You don’t have to do things that go against your character just to survive. You don’t have to tell white lies to make a quick dollar or stay in shady situations because you “need” the money. You can just walk away.

A lot of people only have integrity as long as they can afford it. When pressure hits and bills stack up, values get negotiated. Lines blur. Decisions get rushed. Money removes that pressure. It lets you stay aligned with who you actually are, not who you become when you’re cornered.

Money doesn’t solve everything, but the lack of it magnifies everything.

Debt feels heavier. Stress never shuts off. Envy grows quietly. Health problems get postponed instead of handled. Relationships crack under pressure. When you don’t have money, it literally dictates how you spend all your waking hours, and when you really think about that, it’s insane. Poverty doesn’t just make life harder. It makes every problem louder.

If you never learn how to manage, multiply, and master money, life turns into a series of compromises. Small ones at first. Then bigger ones. Eventually, you’re negotiating against your own values just to stay afloat.

Here’s the part people push back on.

They’ll say money isn’t everything. That it won’t make you happy. That it can’t buy meaning, love, or fulfillment. And they’re right, technically. Money doesn’t give your life purpose. But pretending money doesn’t matter is usually something only people with enough of it can afford to say. Money doesn’t replace meaning. It removes the noise that makes meaning harder to hear.

Money isn’t the point of life.But it determines how much of your life you actually get to choose.

And freedom of choice is the real currency everyone is chasing, whether they admit it or not.