This question has been recently asked to me by a high school student, and I was really surprised. I didn't expect that a teenager would be more intrigued by money than by surreal living conditions, the risks, and the interpersonal problems of the most isolated people in the world. Now that I'm in New Zealand, waiting to leave for Antarctica, I have time to respond to everyone. Before giving you a number, however, I ask you to wait just a minute in order to reflect on the next few lines.

The prestigious journal Science has published an article entitled The Psychological Consequences of Money. The authors of the paper wondered what happens to the minds of people who think about money. To do this, they carried out experiments in which a group of people were stimulated to think unconsciously about money. For example, in one case they placed Monopoly bills on the table in front of the subjects, without them knowing why. In another case, they placed a screen near the subjects, and the screensaver showed images of banknotes floating in the water. The subjects, unaware that they were unconsciously stimulated to think about money, had performed a task set by the authors of the article. The same task was assigned to other subjects who were not stimulated by money.

Here is the result: subjects unconsciously stimulated by money behaved, in the tasks assigned to them, in a more selfish way. They have been less willing to devote their time to helping those around them. In other words: thinking about money fosters individualism, and makes people reluctant to bond with others.

Is it a trivial matter to be more selfish? I'll try to answer with another question: what does it involve being selfish? Selfishness, acting for our own sake rather than for a broader, collective vision, leads us to be possessive, and it is easy to realize that possessiveness is the main cause of our problems, of our social and individual malaise. It is the source of our jealousies, and attachments to material objects, people, and ideas. It is possessiveness that makes us feel bad when we desire the superfluous that we do not have when we think about our partner's betrayal when others get recognition instead of us when we want to convince someone that our ideas are the best. Children, because of possessiveness, at the first manifestations of the ego can snatch toys from the hands of other children. Possessiveness begins this way and then it evolves with us, children who have become adults, who divide the planet by marking borders, and then commit atrocities driven by the lust for new possessions. So, if we really want to live in a better world, we need to take concrete action guided by the vision of global well-being. For example, taking sides when it comes to a war as if it were a football match, serves no purpose except to make us waste energy and further fuel conflicts. Instead, we can use those energies, our time, to really do something useful and concrete, also in order to avoid future planetary conflicts.

For example, since selfishness is the root cause of our problems, let us strive to be less selfish and spread the values of a peaceful and collaborative culture. We can do this by thinking as little as possible about money since it has been shown that thinking about money makes us more selfish. I invite you to keep me company in putting the following resolution into practice: whenever we think about money, we replace it with the question, "What can I do today to help others?"

Well, now I'm confident that we can take up the issue of Antarctic compensation and banish it from the mind shortly thereafter, replacing it with the thought of altruism. At the end of the annual expedition to Concordia, I found an additional amount in the bill between €70,000 and €90,000 (including everything, i.e. my salary and per diem Antarctica compensation). I didn't write down an exact amount because I don't really know it, mainly because of the following two reasons: 1) A large part of the compensation is calculated in dollars and therefore the amount paid in euros varies from year to year because it depends on the exchange rate; 2) I don't care exactly how much I earn in Antarctica, not because I'm rich (in fact I am not) but because of the reasons explained about, i.e. I do not want to think about money.

That said, I hope you are already banishing the thought of money and replacing it with the idea of doing something useful for others, and therefore also for yourself because helping others gives huge rewards.

Tags: life , money