Life is Too Big for Categories
Two ways to move money through a life — one that fights against you, and one that moves with you.
For a period of my life, I was obsessed with getting things right. Not better. Not more enjoyable. Right.
I read nutritional studies, followed experts, and built elaborate rules around food, health, and daily routines. Every choice had a correct answer. Every decision could be optimized. The more precise the system became, the safer I felt.
Then one evening at a gathering, I found myself standing in a kitchen watching someone else make soup.
The pot sat on the stove, steam rising in slow curls. She reached for the salt container. My body tensed before my mind could stop it.
Not the pink Himalayan salt I had carefully selected. Not added at the end, as the nutritional guides prescribed — just poured with a heavy, unmeasured hand.
In one casual motion, she had broken every rule.
I said nothing, but inside, something clenched. The meal was ruined — not in taste, but in principle. I had followed the protocol: the right ingredients, the right timing, the right technique. Her careless act contaminated the entire effort.
I ate in silence, tasting only my own resentment.
Looking back, that moment revealed something I could not yet see. I had stopped asking whether any of these rules were actually improving my life. What mattered was not nourishment, but correctness.
The same pattern had quietly spread into how I handled money.
When Control Fights Life
I had built two machines that fed each other in an endless loop. The budget was a pre-approved list of what I was allowed to do. Restriction was the active enforcement of what I was not allowed to do. They never met in harmony, only in conflict.
Staying within budget brought hollow pride. Breaking a limit brought shame that drowned out any joy. Either I denied myself and called it discipline, or I gave permission and called it failure.
I never asked whether this month’s budget aligned with what my body needed or my spirit wanted to experience. The budget was written by a past version of me who could not know what this moment would ask for. Yet I treated it as law.
Money moved through my life like water through a damaged pipe — controlled, restricted, blocked where it needed to flow. Creation happened only within lines drawn months ago. Anything spontaneous became a violation.
The Lightness of Unplanned Lives
I would still be trapped in that machine if not for the people who drifted through my life without a plan. They moved with a strange, quiet aliveness, making choices without checking an internal ledger. They lived in a way that looked chaotic from the outside but felt strangely alive from the inside.
I remember one couple who packed their bags on a clear morning and drove toward a coastal town they had never visited. The weather looked good, and they wanted to experience the evening by the sea. They simply noticed the pull and followed it — no research, no booking, no budget category to consult.
Their lightness unsettled me. Looking at my own rigid rules, I had to ask what my perfect spreadsheet had actually bought me. I had never stopped to ask if my life had become fuller. They evaluated their days constantly, not with numbers, but by noticing what felt genuinely worth it.
Layers Instead of Limits
I began dismantling the machines by watching my actual spending patterns instead of fighting them. I noticed that my expenses didn’t arrive in a neat, flat monthly line. They had rhythms. Some happened every month, some seasonally, some completely unpredictably. These were not violations of a plan, but the natural pulse of a life being lived.
I started to see these rhythms as layers. The base layer held the monthly necessities, while seasonal and irregular costs rested on top of it. Instead of forcing them into rigid categories, I just observed how they stacked in reality.
Outside these layers existed everything else — spontaneous dinners, unexpected gifts, quiet afternoons costing nothing. I called this the life-force area. Here, spending was responsive.
Creation happened both within these layers and entirely outside them: rhythmic spending on the predictable, irregular spending that responded to the moment, and pure expression requiring no money at all — long walks, deep conversations, quiet stillness.
Money moved through this system like blood through a healthy body. It was sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always responsive and never forced.
Choose Beauty
At a gathering, a woman described how she navigates choices. When facing a decision — what to buy, where to go, what to wear — she already knows before choosing: beauty is the answer. The question becomes simply, “Which of these would be more beautiful?”
It was not a complex framework. Just a clear orientation toward what matters.
If someone asked me now what to choose, I could answer with all my heart: “Choose beauty.”
It is advice that holds regardless of the specific options in front of me. It leads toward lightness, toward trusting inner impulses rather than external limits, toward a life that breathes.
I still track my expenses. I still notice patterns. But I no longer let a past version of myself dictate what this moment can hold. It just feels better to move with life than against it. The budget and its restrictions were two poles that kept me frozen. The layers and the life-force area let me move.
Illustration by Valters Šverns
Your money will flow through your life one way or another. The question is not whether you will control it, but whether you will fight your own life in the process.