Money Isn't Fight Club

It can feel like we live in a world where the first and second rules of money are the same as Fight Club: you do not talk about money.

That rule is everywhere. At work. At family dinners. Among friends who will talk openly about relationships, health, or politics, just not finances. The silence is often framed as polite or private, but it is mostly fear and discomfort dressed up as manners.

Not talking about money does not make things healthier. It is more like refusing to massage scar tissue. Uncomfortable? Sure, but avoiding it just slows healing and limits your range of motion.

And we all have financial scars.

Some come from mistakes. Some from bad advice. Some from no advice at all. Some from watching our parents struggle, fight, or stress. Most of us carry these marks quietly, assuming everyone else has it figured out and we are the exception. Silence makes that illusion possible.

That is why the first rule of money should be the opposite of Fight Club: talk about money.

When money stays taboo, confusion thrives. We compare outcomes without understanding tradeoffs. We see surface level success without the context underneath. We internalize shame about things that are often structural, inherited, or simply human. And because we do not talk, we do not normalize learning.

If talking about money were more common, financial literacy would not feel like some niche skill reserved for experts. It would feel like what it actually is: a shared language for navigating limited resources.

Because money is not the only thing we are managing.

Money is just one of several scarce resources we are constantly allocating. We are also spending, earning, saving, and investing our time, energy, and attention. Every day, whether we are conscious of it or not, we are making tradeoffs among all four.

Money conversations almost always lead to conversations about the others. About jobs that pay well but drain energy. About time that feels abundant now but scarce later. About attention that gets consumed by urgency instead of intention.

That is where one of the biggest blind spots shows up: the belief that we just need more.

More money. More time. More energy. More focus.

More feels like the solution because it postpones harder questions. But more is a moving target. If you do not know how you want to allocate extra time, energy, attention, or money, accumulating it will not solve the problem. It just gives you more of the same decisions, often with higher stakes.

Most people do not actually need radically more resources. They need clearer priorities and better allocation. They need fewer default decisions and more intentional ones. That is incredibly hard to do in isolation.

Talking about money helps because it is rarely just about money. It is about values, tradeoffs, constraints, and timing. It is about how other people decide what is worth it and how those decisions change over time. Collective conversations make us better allocators.

Especially across time.

Humans are terrible at long term thinking. Our brains are optimized for short term survival, not decades long planning. The caveman brain just wants to reduce immediate discomfort and grab certainty where it can. When the future feels uncertain, it freaks out.

Silence makes this worse. When we do not talk, we default to short term coping strategies. Earning more. Spending to relieve stress. Ignoring problems we do not want to face yet. Conversation does not eliminate uncertainty, but it gives perspective.

Money is not Fight Club. It is not something you win by staying silent. It is one of the main ways we coordinate our lives across time. The less we talk about it, the more power it has over us. The more we talk about it, the more it becomes what it should be: a tool, not a taboo.