Dancing With Money

 Money is a strange object. Everyone needs it, everyone talks about it, and almost everyone feels uneasy around it. We chase it, fear losing it,

imagine what life would look like with a little more of it, and quietly blame ourselves when it slips through our fingers. In business especially, money stops being just a tool. It becomes a mirror, a judge, sometimes even a verdict on our own worth.

Psychoanalysis offers a useful lens here. In Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud explains that melancholy appears when a person loses an object that carried libidinal investment. Not just something owned, but something psychically charged. The loss is not merely external; it wounds the self. The libido, no longer able to attach itself to the lost object, turns inward, eroding self-esteem and vitality. Melancholy, in this sense, is not sadness alone, but a quiet collapse of meaning.

Later, Karl Abraham, in his work on Mania and Melancholia, extends this idea and explicitly names money as one of those libidinal objects. And the insight feels uncomfortably accurate. Money is difficult to earn, easy to lose, and endlessly projected into the future. It is never just money. It is safety, recognition, freedom, possibility. It condenses desire and fear into a single volatile symbol.

For business owners, this creates a peculiar psychological climate. You are not only managing cash flow; you are managing hope, anticipation, anxiety. Even money not yet earned can weigh heavily, because it already exists in the imagination. A contract that did not close, a project delayed, a month that underperformed—each can feel like a loss before any real loss has occurred. The psyche reacts as if something essential has been taken away.

This may explain why so many entrepreneurs oscillate between intense excitement and deep exhaustion. One good month feels euphoric, almost manic. One bad month feels personal, heavy, humiliating. The object has become too central. The psyche is exposed to every fluctuation. Over time, this produces what could be called the melancholy of lost money—a diffuse, chronic state where effort is constant but inner joy quietly erodes.

And yet, there is an old and often ignored truth: people do not create well in sadness. They may endure, they may survive, but they do not flourish. There is a reason why so many philosophical and ethical traditions insist that work must be carried by a certain joy. Joy is not a luxury or a reward. It is a condition of fertility.

This is where Friedrich Nietzsche enters the conversation with The Gay Science and the image of the dancing god. Nietzsche does not deny difficulty, uncertainty, or risk. He refuses resentment toward them. The dancer does not eliminate gravity; he responds to it. He does not dominate chaos; he moves within it. Dancing is not the absence of weight, but a relationship to weight.

Applied to money, this metaphor becomes quietly radical. What if the problem is not money itself, but the way we cling to it? What if the real danger lies in making money the central object of our psychic life? When money becomes the measure of worth, every fluctuation becomes a personal verdict. When it remains a tool, fluctuations remain events—sometimes painful, but not identity-shattering.

Dancing with money means refusing to let it govern your inner life. It means working seriously without working fearfully. Planning without obsessing. Measuring without identifying. It means accepting that money will come and go, sometimes unfairly, sometimes mysteriously, and that your task is not to fuse your sense of self with its movements.

This is not a call to irresponsibility or naïve optimism. On the contrary, distance creates clarity. A person who is not psychically fused with money can make better decisions about it. They see patterns instead of panic. They adjust instead of freezing. They preserve energy instead of burning it in silent anxiety.

Paradoxically, this attitude often produces better economic outcomes. Not because joy magically attracts money, but because clarity attracts better decisions. Calm enables consistency. Rhythm outperforms agitation. A business run under constant inner tension eventually exhausts its owner. A business guided by rhythm has room to breathe, to correct, to grow.

Perhaps this is what modern work culture forgets. Money responds poorly to desperation. It circulates more freely around those who are grounded, attentive, and mentally available. Not rushed. Not haunted. Present.

Dancing with money, then, is not about loving it or rejecting it. It is about refusing to kneel before it. Let it circulate. Let it play its role. But do not ask it to give meaning to your life. Meaning comes from coherence, from craft, from the feeling of being aligned with what you do.

In the end, money is like music. You can march to it rigidly and grow tired, or you can listen, adjust, and move. Those who learn to dance do not eliminate risk. They simply stop being crushed by it.