<aside> 🎩 I am writing this article to a friend and mentor/mentee through an epistemological tradition of letter writing, but it should serve as a Great Truth that inspires business with my friend and any reader alike.

</aside>

Dear @Matthew Cheney,

You put over $2000 on the number 33 after our business meeting last week.

That, and your investment in a vegan cereal brand got me asking “Can I ethically accept money?”

My answer is currently, “no,” but I will dive into an exegesis on my relationship with money before I write off your kind offer of help in pitching rich people for money.

Money is a means in my mind. Someone gives money to receive something.

Sometimes the donor’s gratification is delayed.

The person who gave me money without conditions ended up guilting me to edit their new age conspiracy theory film. Every time I walked away, they gave me a little more money to keep me working.

The conspiracy theory film turned into work for a company that claimed to read horse’s minds with crystals. I edited the mind-reading crystal propaganda for about $3000 when I was 15, then I spent all my money on fancy jeans and needed more work. I went back to the gig on a new age conspiracy theory film, which led to a new age “get rich quick” scheme, which led to a bird mascot in Washington Square park and a gig building the “daily flock” website, which was sold for lots of cash to a guy who brought me into another new age pyramid scheme, which led to a girlfriend who wouldn’t have sex with me unless I gave most of my cash to another pyramid scheme called “Landmark,” which led to me surfing New York’s Craigslist for other web design gigs, which led me to building a website for a diet modeled on how Auschwitz survivors coped with very little food, which gave me enough money to read lots of books in New Orleans before I decided I was a filmmaker and tried to live an expensive life in Italy, which led me back to New Orleans, working on PR websites for good ol’ boys, which led me to question my career. And then I was 33. And then I realized money shouldn’t be fought for. I met you, @Matthew Cheney, who make lots of money and also understood the valueless real value of a currency based on perceived value. And then you asked me to give away lots of money with him under the auspices of doing good. And then I read lots of Effective Altruist writing, a youth movement that purports to do good by giving away money. And then my friend @Sefira told me that she was questioning if rich people can ever be good.

One argument for why wealthy people can never be good can go like this: Every dollar a rich person gives away is, at the very least, given away to whitewash their sins. At least the poor person only has enough money to survive, the thinking goes. But even giving money to people who only use it to do good isn’t that good because it is still money given with the desire to do good - the charity is still “whitewashing” sins. So, the value of charity is like ‣: the true value can only be known as an afterthought. @Matilda Bathurst taught me that in a Chicago church. We had just seen Henry Darger’s naked little girls with penises.

I realized that this type of “outsider art” is celebrated by arts people like Matilda for the same reason that we are religious or love poetry: we celebrate the pleasure of ignorance, the innocence of pure bliss, the joy of being right without knowing you are right.

For a while, I could worship ignorance. I made an experimental film that purposed to “chase motion” and I worked with a famous Filipino filmmaker who said he made all his best cinema with a bamboo camera that a blind person carved.

Kidlat and me and another curator friend who was also chasing ignorance.

Working with art did not satisfy me. I never felt content with the creation. This wasn’t just because the creation wasn’t good, as my college poetry professor Peter Cooley suggested. Working with art, chasing any type of ignorance, meant working against doing anything.

I am fundamentally for doing work.

The Catholic Workers, through Dorothy Day’s “The Long Lonliness” gave me a logic that roots my fundamental belief: “If gd/God is a creator, and we were created in gd/God’s image than we must find a divine contentment in creating.”

That philosophy is something I’ve been fighting against throughout my life. I remember telling my grandmother that I read books to be more ignorant. “Lots of academics have told me that,” my grandmother, who worked a secretary for professors most of her life, told me. She had an answer for me: “I think you should go after the truth.”

Now, halfway through my 33rd year, I finally understand what my grandmother meant. I should do what I think matters, while also questioning what matters. Or, as Jim Kim, co-founder of Partners In Health says, “the key is to have a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will.”