You know your friend’s relationship problems, their family drama, their deepest insecurities. But you have no idea what they earn. You could ask them about their sex life more easily than their salary.
Money is the last taboo. The thing we’ll talk around forever but never actually name. And that silence is doing more damage than we admit.
We lie constantly about money. Not big lies, usually. Small ones. Pretending the dinner bill doesn’t sting. Acting like the vacation was no big deal. Vaguely implying you’re doing “fine” when you’re drowning. Or the reverse: downplaying success, pretending money doesn’t matter, performing a casualness about wealth you don’t actually feel.
Everyone’s performing. And everyone’s watching everyone else’s performance, trying to decode what’s real.
The sociologist Georg Simmel wrote extensively about money at the turn of the 20th century. He noticed that money is uniquely impersonal. It has no smell, no memory, no loyalty. A dollar from honest work is identical to a dollar from crime. This impersonality should make money easy to discuss. Instead, it makes it strange. Money is everywhere and nowhere. It mediates almost everything but remains invisible, unmentionable.
We treat money like it says something about our souls. How much you have, how you got it, how you spend it. These feel like moral statements, not just financial ones. Poor feels like failure. Rich feels like success. And everything in between feels like a secret grade you’ve been given but shouldn’t reveal.
This is why we lie. Because telling the truth about money feels like exposing yourself completely. Your income reveals your market value. Your spending reveals your priorities. Your debt reveals your decisions, good and bad. Money is an X-ray of your life, and nobody wants to stand naked in front of friends.
The philosopher Michael Sandel argues that we’ve become a “market society,” where market values have invaded every domain of life. Health, education, relationships, self-worth, everything gets filtered through economic logic. Your salary becomes your score. In a world like this, admitting you earn less than someone else feels like admitting you’re worth less. So you stay vague. You deflect. You lie.
The lies go in both directions.
If you have less, you perform having more. You split checks you can’t afford. You buy things to signal stability you don’t have. You hide the anxiety that comes with financial precarity because admitting it feels shameful. You should have been smarter, worked harder, made better choices. At least that’s what the silence implies.
If you have more, you perform having less. You complain about prices like everyone else. You stay vague about the house, the car, the trip. You don’t want to seem out of touch, don’t want to invite judgment, don’t want friends to treat you differently. Wealth isolates, so you hide it to stay connected.
Either way, you’re alone with the truth.
The psychotherapist Bari Tessler talks about “money shame.” It’s the feeling that you’ve done something wrong, that your financial situation reflects a personal failing. Almost everyone has it. The broke person who feels like a failure. The rich person who feels guilty. The middle person who feels like a fraud. Money shame keeps us silent, and silence keeps us stuck.
Here’s what the silence costs.
First, it costs solidarity. When nobody knows what anyone earns, workers can’t organise, can’t compare, can’t demand fairness. Salary secrecy benefits employers enormously. It keeps employees isolated, uncertain, competing against an unknown standard. The taboo around discussing money is extremely convenient for those who have the most of it.
Second, it costs learning. If you can’t talk about money honestly, you can’t learn from others’ mistakes or strategies. Financial literacy stays low because financial honesty is taboo. You figure everything out alone, or you don’t figure it out at all.
Third, it costs intimacy. You can’t fully know someone whose financial life is invisible to you. Money shapes decisions, stress levels, possibilities, fears. When it’s hidden, a whole dimension of a person is hidden. Marriages struggle not because couples fight about money but because they can’t talk about it honestly in the first place.
Fourth, it costs your relationship with yourself. When you perform financial stability you don’t have, or hide success you do have, you create a gap between the real you and the presented you. That gap is exhausting to maintain. And it makes you feel unseen, because you are.
So why don’t we just talk about it?
Part of it is cultural. Some societies are more open about money than others. Northern European countries tend to be more transparent. American culture, despite its capitalist obsession with wealth, treats actual numbers as vulgar to discuss. You can flaunt the symbols of money but not name the amount.
Part of it is psychological. Money triggers primal fears. Survival, status, security. Talking about it means confronting those fears directly. Easier to avoid.
Part of it is structural. If you’re underpaid, you might not want your employer to know you know. If you’re overpaid relative to peers, admitting it could damage relationships. The system benefits from your silence, so the system encourages it.
The philosopher Axel Honneth writes about recognition as a fundamental human need. We need to be seen accurately for who we are. But when we hide our financial reality, we prevent recognition. People see a performance, not a person. They can’t support you because they don’t know you need support. They can’t celebrate you because they don’t know what you’ve actually achieved.
What would change if you told the truth?
Maybe nothing. Maybe some relationships would strain. Maybe some judgments would land. But maybe something else: relief. The exhaustion of pretending might lift. The people who really care about you would have the chance to actually know you. The isolation might crack.
Start small. One honest conversation with one trusted person. Name a number. Admit a fear. Ask a question you’ve been avoiding. See what happens.
You might discover that they’ve been lying too. That everyone’s been circling the same silence, waiting for someone else to go first.
The taboo survives because everyone observes it. But taboos break the moment people stop pretending. One honest conversation can give permission for another. And another.
Money doesn’t define your worth. But pretending money doesn’t exist, or that you have more or less than you do, keeps you performing instead of living.
The last taboo doesn’t have to stay that way.
Name the number. Tell the truth. See what opens up when you stop hiding the thing everyone’s been hiding.