Thankfully, I have never been put in a place of financial crisis (although I have been a starving college student), so my attitudes towards money have never stringently been tested. With that being said, I believe I have a fairly healthy attitude towards money.

Both my wife and I are fairly high earners – so we have a nice amount of money – but here’s the thing: it’s not important. It’s transient. To be stewarded, sure, and spent/invested/given away responsibly – but the point is that it comes in at certain rates and we’re to responsibly make sure it goes out in reasonable directions. If we were to lose everything within our net worth, we could earn it back. The true value isn’t how much or little money we have, but the fact that we’re capable of earning money through hard work. That deep knowledge of an underlying intrinsic value makes all the questions normally pondered about money seem flighty and relatively meaningless.

For me personally, this attitude is easiest to explain with the money example above, but I find that it’s applicable to many other fields as well. There are times people have issued insults at me that I could have taken offense at, except for the personal knowledge of some core characteristic of myself makes the accusation irrelevant or a non-sequitur.