TAIU

Tool 58 · Develop yourself

What is it for, now that it is not for survival?

This exercise does not assume money makes people empty. Sometimes the honest answer is that life is better and the freedom should be used.

A woman in a supermarket aisle reaching by habit towards the reduced shelf, basket in hand

A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.

  1. 01

    Copy

    Take the TAIU prompt.

  2. 02

    Paste

    Open ChatGPT.

  3. 03

    Talk

    One question at a time.

Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.

You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.

What do you still refuse to spend money on?

Whatever it is, it was decided by somebody in a harder position, and it has never been reviewed since.

Arriving can be flat without anything being wrong.

What you'll explore

  1. 01What changed
  2. 02What it solved
  3. 03The old habits
  4. 04What work is for

A note from Mark

Mark Eve, founder of TAIU

I would start by giving the money proper credit. It solved things. It is fashionable to skip past that on the way to a more interesting problem, and it is dishonest. Not being frightened about money is a significant improvement in a life.

Then I would look for the leftovers. Almost everybody who has been short of money keeps something from it. A refusal to spend on a particular thing, a habit of checking, a job held on to long after it was needed. Some of that is good judgement worth protecting. Some of it is a rule written by a person who no longer exists.

Read my full view ↓

The striving question is the real one. If somebody built themselves on getting there, arriving can be strangely flat, not because money is hollow but because the organising purpose has gone. That is a design problem, not a spiritual crisis, and it has practical answers.

And I would ask the people around you. Money changes rooms. Roles shift, expectations shift, and it is usually visible to everybody except the person who earned it.

What you'll get

You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.

  1. 01

    What it solved

  2. 02

    Old scarcity habits

  3. 03

    What work is for

  4. 04

    What to protect

  5. +

    Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.

See everything included ↓
  • 01What you came here with
  • 02What the money solved
  • 03What it did not solve
  • 04What is now actually possible
  • 05What still runs on scarcity
  • 06What work is for now
  • 07Who else is affected
  • 08The rival reading
  • 09What deserves protecting
  • 10What remains unresolved
  • 11Where this goes next

What now?

  1. 01 · Save it

    What the money solved, and what it did not.

  2. 02 · Test it

    Spend money once on the thing you still refuse to spend it on, and notice what happens.

Explore this further ↓

What I would do

  1. 01

    Say plainly what it solved. It is allowed to be a lot.

  2. 02

    Notice which scarcity habits are wisdom and which are simply out of date.

  3. 03

    Decide what the work is for now, rather than letting it default.

  4. 04

    Ask whether anything has changed for the people closest to you.

  5. 05

    Be willing to conclude that nothing needs fixing.

Test it

  1. 01

    What did the money actually solve?

  2. 02

    What do you still refuse to spend on?

  3. 03

    If it could not be lost, what would you stop doing?

The alternative

The expected reading is that success has left something missing. Two alternatives usually produce more. Nothing existential may need fixing at all, and the honest finding is greater freedom that has not yet been used. Or the opposite: continuing to optimise for money may no longer improve anything measurable, and the striving has become a habit rather than a decision, which is a real finding and quite different from emptiness.

Think about this

  • What the money genuinely solved.
  • What you still will not spend money on, and why.
  • What work is for now.
  • Who around you has adjusted, and who has not.
  • What you would do if none of it could be lost.

Take this to Ask Mark

You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.

Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A man in overalls handing workshop keys to a younger person at an open roller door, already turning to leave

Next tool

Generosity

If the question is what to do with the surplus

Continue →What am I actually for? →

Further thinking

  • Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved

    Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers

  • The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model

    Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky

  • Spending money on others promotes happiness

    Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton

Explore the thinking ↓

Article

Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved

Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers

Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.

Article

The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model

Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky

Why the best parts of a life stop registering. Adaptation is efficient and it is also why people trade away arrangements that were working, having quietly stopped noticing them. The prevention research is more useful than the treadmill headline: variety and continued attention slow it, and pure acquisition does not.

Article

Spending money on others promotes happiness

Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton

The effect depends far less on the amount than on whether the giving was chosen and whether you can see what it did. That is a useful design constraint. A small, specific, visible commitment does more for the person giving than a larger anonymous one, which is worth knowing before you set up something you will never think about again.

Book

The Psychology of Money

Morgan Housel

Housel's argument is that financial behaviour is mostly not a maths problem. People handle money according to what they lived through, what they saw at home, and what they are frightened of. Read it for the chapters on enough and on wealth being the money you do not spend, which are the two ideas this exercise keeps running into.