Member-only story
Me vs. Money — A Love Story
I have a weird relationship with money.
All my life I had a weird relationship with money.
When I was 7, I asked my father — who just came back from his first trip to the U.S. — for a dollar. He gave me one.
Then I asked for another one. He refused to give me one, saying, “One is enough,” and put his dollars on the bookshelf.
I got angry.
So — when nobody was looking — I climbed up the bookshelf and stole that second dollar.
Two days later my father found out and punished me. I was grounded for seven days.
When I was at school, most people thought I was rich. They read about my father on the news, who was a big Russian entrepreneur at that time, and assumed that I had ‘all the money in the world’.
My family lived a class entrepreneurial life: one year — you go to Tenerife for a month, the next year — you don’t have enough money to buy a winter jacket.
But I never told anyone about that. I guess I was too ashamed to admit that we didn’t have enough money. And — whenever I had spare cash — I paid for my friends at McDonald’s, reinforcing the narrative that I had money.
