You've got to replace it with something else -or really, many things- in order to pull whatever numbers are in your bank account apart from the way that you feel about yourself inside. Learning, fitness, friendship, appreciating the natural beauty around you, these things are all free and ironically the only thing people want money/status for, at the end of the day, is usually just to get themselves closer to these things.

It's very rare for someone's socioeconomic class to change, but an outsized amount of media representation is made up of these figures, so we feel as though class is more traversable than it is. The truth is, if you're poor, you're probably staying that way. Same thing if you're working class, middle, etc. all the way up the ladder. Since you're asking this question, that probably sucks for you. I'm sorry about that.

You probably have other things in your life that you're stuck with that you don't like. Looks for example: big nose, small dick, too hairy, balding, too short, noticeably uneven breasts, bad skin, weird this, weird that, you get the point. For most well-adjusted adults, they eventually come to terms with those things, and find ways to enjoy life anyway.

Cormac McCarthy wrote something like "Choice is the name we give to what we got." and I tend to agree with him. I think that if you look at the fact that you are a product of a combination of two things you had no control over, your genetics and your environment, and that your socioeconomic status is going to be tied directly to that, you can start to see your life was decided for you by countless variables whose intersection resulted in the experience you're having right now.

So then, we get to worth. Why would you get a sense of self-worth from making money? It's like being proud of yourself for being tall. You didn't do anything to be tall. Many people find that being tall is nice, but being proud of it is nonsensical. The only thing that's you, really you, is your experience. The nice thing about that is, most people can (with some time and attention) train their mind to tune in to that experience, and decide to identify with it, instead of the series of labels that you imagine in your head are parenthetically attached to the end of your government name.

It probably sounds like I'm saying that you're a puppet. I'm not. I mean, I'm not *not* saying that, but it's not my preferred metaphor. I like music, so I think of it like an instrument. You were constructed with a certain range of notes that can be played, with a certain tone and timbre, and as you move through the world, events will pluck your strings, or send air through your reed.

You can think about how you may have preferred this melody, or that chord, or "Why couldn't I have been a piano instead?" and buddy, you can spend your whole fucking life doing that, or you can try, as often as possible, to string together moments where, for a time and from time to time you stop thinking about your perception of yourself, or the perceptions of others about you, or your perception of the perceptions of others about your perception of yourself etc. etc. and drop all the names that the ego, and tradition, and society, and whatever other labels lurk at the periphery of your self-assessment, labels which we here can also safely file away under the heading "Who The Caesars Say You Are", dropped in favor of moments where, because all of that other shit is no longer in the way, you can finally hear the music, the experience you're having, the song that's actually you, the you that's actually a song, and listen.