The money you can take without flinching

You've said money doesn't matter. You also stop scrolling for three seconds on every post about someone's salary.

That split is expensive. It means the subject can never be discussed properly, so it gets handled underground, where it turns into either shame or comparison.

Confucius said something people quote for one half and forget the other. With coarse grain to eat, water to drink, and my arm for a pillow, there's joy in that too. Wealth and rank obtained unjustly are to me like floating clouds.

Everyone remembers the floating clouds. Not many remember the coarse grain.

He wasn't saying prosperity is bad. He was drawing a line around a specific kind of it, the kind that comes from the thing you'd rather not describe at a dinner table. And he put a floor under it: the simple version, he could live with.

That's an accounting exercise, not a moral one. Which part of what I earn could I explain to my own kid without changing the subject.

That isn't easy to answer, and I'm the person least sure of it. Other people have harder constraints than mine.

The first step isn't renouncing anything. It's separating the income you can hold from the income that holds you.

MOJOWAY is where I look at that honestly. Growth includes earning in a way that doesn't cost you your own respect, and that's a design problem, not a virtue.