On money, freedom, identity, and the lives we have been taught to desire.
“Owótóbátiníye àbùkù ti kan.”
My mother used to say this.
For years, I understood her words as a reminder that money is a number, and numbers have no end.
Recently, I came across a video discussing a similar thought attributed to Bob Marley: “if your happiness depends on money, you may never truly be happy, because numbers never end.”
But the more I reflected on those words, the more I began to question something.
What if some of us are not actually pursuing the lives we want, but the lives we have been taught to admire?
And what if we have become so accustomed to measuring happiness through visible success that we no longer recognise it when it arrives without the evidence of achievement?
From childhood, we begin learning what success should look like.
We are praised for coming first, encouraged to outperform others, and taught to aspire to certain professions, possessions and positions.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these expectations. They can inspire discipline, excellence and ambition.
But somewhere along the way, achievement can become more than something we pursue.
It can become the condition upon which we believe we deserve respect.
And gradually, we stop asking whether the life we are building makes us happy.
We begin asking whether it is impressive enough.
Whether others recognise it.
Whether it proves that we have finally arrived.
But before we romanticise simplicity, let me establish something.
Money is good. Very good.
Money gives us options. And options are not a small thing.
There are people who might still be alive today if their families had the financial resources to access timely, appropriate medical care.
Children whose futures might have unfolded differently if their parents could afford opportunities to develop their abilities.
People who remain trapped in difficult, sometimes dangerous circumstances because the financial independence required to leave is beyond their reach.
For them, money is not about luxury or social recognition.
It is about survival, dignity and the freedom to choose.
And we must be careful not to preach contentment to people whose immediate problem is deprivation.
There is a difference between encouraging someone to appreciate life and asking them to accept circumstances that deny them a fair chance at living it.
Yet money presents a curious contradiction.
It can give us the freedom to choose without necessarily giving us the freedom to disappoint other people’s expectations.
A person may have enough money to retire but fear becoming irrelevant.
Enough to live comfortably but feel compelled to maintain an expensive lifestyle because others have come to expect it.
Enough to stop competing but no longer know who they are without the competition.
And perhaps that is one of the least discussed costs of success.
The more publicly we become identified with our achievements, the harder it may become to imagine ourselves without them.
The successful entrepreneur must keep expanding.
The wealthy individual must remain visibly wealthy.
The accomplished professional must never appear to have slowed down.
Not necessarily because these things are required, but because we fear what people might conclude if we choose differently.
We may have acquired the resources to live freely, yet remain emotionally accountable to an audience that does not have to live with the consequences of our choices.
And I wonder whether some of what we call ambition is actually an inability to tolerate being ordinary in the eyes of others.
That is an uncomfortable thought.
Because not every pursuit of more comes from greed.
Sometimes it comes from fear.
Fear of returning to poverty.
Fear of dependence.
Fear of being forgotten.
Fear of becoming the person nobody notices when the money is gone.
For someone who has experienced deprivation or humiliation, financial success may become more than an achievement.
It may become evidence that the past has finally been defeated.
But can money settle every wound the past has left behind? Can public admiration repair private insecurity?
And if we have spent years believing that we must achieve something extraordinary to deserve respect, what happens when we finally achieve it and still feel the need to prove ourselves?
There is a difference between having enough and feeling that you are enough.
Money can help with the first.
It cannot guarantee the second.
And this brings me to another question.
We often assume that the more options we have, the freer we become.
But is that always true?
What happens when someone spends thirty years building wealth, influence and reputation, only to discover that they no longer want the life they have created?
What if they want to slow down?
What if they want to stop expanding?
What if they want a quieter life, away from the expectations that have come with their success?
Would they feel free to choose it?
Or would they interpret that choice as failure?
We pursue money to acquire freedom, but sometimes use that freedom to build lives from which we no longer feel free to walk away.
And perhaps there is something even more unsettling about having options.
When we have very few choices, circumstances make many decisions for us.
But when we have the resources to choose differently, we must confront what we genuinely value.
We can no longer explain every decision by saying, “I had no choice.”
Freedom begins to demand something of us.
Responsibility.
Self-awareness.
The courage to disappoint expectations.
And the willingness to admit that the life we once desperately wanted may no longer be the life we need.
Perhaps this is why some people find it easier to continue accumulating than to stop and examine what they are accumulating for.
Because making more money can be straightforward.
Deciding what constitutes enough requires a different kind of wisdom.
And I wonder whether enough is something we eventually discover or something we must consciously decide.
Because if we leave that decision to society, comparison or public recognition, the answer will always change.
There will always be someone wealthier.
Another milestone.
Another level of influence.
Another reason to believe we have not yet arrived.
Even Scripture recognises the practical power of money. Ecclesiastes 10:19 speaks of money answering all things, while 1 Timothy 6:10 warns about the love of money.
And in Mark 8:36, Jesus asks:
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
I do not read that as a rejection of prosperity.
I read it as an invitation to examine what we are exchanging for it.
Our time.
Our peace.
Our relationships.
Our integrity.
And sometimes, our freedom to become someone different from the person the world expects us to be.
I return to my mother’s words:
“Owótóbátiníye àbùkù ti kan.”
Money is a number. And numbers have no end.
But perhaps the endlessness of numbers is not simply a warning against greed.
Perhaps it is a reminder that some of life’s most important boundaries must be established by wisdom, because the world will never establish them for us.
There will always be more money to make. But there will not always be more time.
So yes, make money. Build wealth. Pursue excellence. Give yourself and your family options. Create opportunities for others.
But every so often, ask yourself a question that has nothing to do with your bank balance:
If nobody could see what I owned, knew what I earned, or applauded what I achieved, would I still want the life I am building?
And perhaps an even harder question:
If I finally had enough money to live entirely on my own terms, would I know what those terms were?
Because money can expand the number of lives available to us.
Wisdom helps us decide which one is worth living.
And perhaps the tragedy is not that we spend our lives chasing money.
Perhaps it is that we finally acquire enough money to live on our own terms, only to discover that we no longer know what those terms are.
