I was in Boston recently for a travel sports weekend and managed to steal away to one of my favorite personal luxuries: a solo walk through the Museum of Fine Arts. Wandering through quiet galleries always grounds me, offering a kind of creative and emotional reset.
This time, I was stopped in my tracks by a self-portrait from Ayana V. Jackson (@ayanavjackson), presented as an Afro-futurist response to the Atlantic slave trade. The image was haunting and beautiful, yet deeply unsettling. Jackson stands draped in a garment constructed from Ghanaian currency—a bold and painful commentary on how African lives were once bought, sold, and traded. Human beings reduced to economic transactions.
While I make no comparison to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the artwork jolted me into thinking about our modern relationship with money, worth, and materialism. It made me reflect on consumerism—how deeply it’s woven into the fabric of our lives.
We live in a culture that centers having over being, buying over building, and possessing over creating. We’re trained—almost unconsciously—to chase things: the next outfit, the next cell phone, the next lifestyle upgrade. Our identities can become entangled in what we own, rather than what we contribute, imagine, or make.
What do we value, and why? What drives our decisions—to consume or to create?
Financial literacy is often framed as a path to wealth, but at Financy, LLC., we also believe it’s a path to clarity. The more we understand our relationship with money, the more we can reclaim power over how we live—not just how we spend.
So the next time you’re tempted by a purchase, pause and ask:
Am I buying this to express who I am—or to fill the space where my creativity might live?
Let’s spend less time consumed by consumption, and more time investing in what we can build, share, and imagine.
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