Wealth & Money Quote by Dalai Lama

The sting here is how calmly it indicts a whole value system. The Dalai Lama isn’t marveling at human complexity; he’s pointing out a self-made trap with the patience of someone who’s watched it repeat for decades. The structure is almost legalistic: a chain of trades and counter-trades that turn life into a bad bargain. Health becomes currency, money becomes medicine, the future becomes a bully, and the present becomes collateral damage.

As a spiritual leader, his intent isn’t just moral scolding. It’s diagnostic. The subtext is Buddhist in its mechanics: suffering comes from grasping, and modern life supercharges grasping by turning “enough” into an ever-receding horizon. Notice how “anxious about the future” functions as the pivot. Anxiety isn’t treated as an emotion; it’s a schedule, a regime that colonizes attention. That’s why the final image lands: living “as if he is never going to die” isn’t optimism, it’s denial dressed up as productivity.

Context matters. The Dalai Lama speaks from exile and from a tradition trained on impermanence; his authority comes less from power than from renunciation. That contrast sharpens the critique of capitalist tempo without naming it. He’s not arguing against earning money, he’s arguing against confusing accumulation with safety. The last clause is the rhetorical knife: death arrives not as tragedy but as accounting, exposing a life spent preparing to live.