Vitamin M Day 1: What Vitamin M Means, and What It Means to Us
- Christopher Han
- May 8
- 7 min read
Updated: May 13
We test for iron, B12, vitamin D and magnesium. We never test for the deficiency that wakes most of us at 3am. The opening essay in a seven-day series on money, the nutrient we refuse to name.
There is a quiet violence in the way we run blood tests.
We test for iron, B12, vitamin D, magnesium, the thyroid, the kidneys, the cholesterol panel that makes my GP cluck like a hen. We accept that the body is a chemistry set, and that low levels of one obscure compound can flatten our mood, our sleep, our judgment, our entire week. We treat this as ordinary medicine.
And yet the most common deficiency in modern life, the one that pulls people out of bed at 3am, ages them faster than alcohol, dictates the food they eat and the doctor they avoid, the school their child attends and the spouse they tolerate, is the one we never mention to the GP. There is no panel for it. There is no dietary recommendation. There is no NHS pamphlet. The closest thing we have is a financial adviser, and most people are more embarrassed to see one than a urologist.
I am talking about money.
Why I Call It Vitamin M
Call it Vitamin M. The metaphor is not original to me, and I want to be honest about that. People have used the term for decades, usually as a joke, sometimes in a self-help book that I would not recommend you read. But I think the joke was always smarter than the genre that picked it up. Money does behave like a nutrient. It is required for ordinary function, not optional. It is needed in roughly the right dose, not infinite quantities. Too little produces a recognisable cluster of symptoms. Too much produces a different but no less real cluster of symptoms. It interacts with everything else in your life: your sleep, your relationships, your sense of agency, your capacity for kindness. And the way you absorb it depends on the gut you bring to it, which is mostly inherited and partially trainable.
That is what this series is about. Seven days, one nutrient. Not a financial education programme, because I am not qualified to give you one and you are not, I suspect, here for that. More of an essay sequence on what money is, why it matters, what it costs us when we pretend it does not, and what it asks of us if we want a healthy supply.
A Quiet Confession
I want to start with a small confession. For most of my twenties I treated money the way a teenager treats sleep. I assumed the deficit could be carried indefinitely. I assumed there would always be a catch-up day. I assumed that the people who took it seriously were either anxious, boring, or both. I confused frugality with virtue and indifference with sophistication. The cost of that confusion took years to show up, and by the time it did, the damage was not financial. It was psychological. The deficiency had crept into the way I made decisions, the way I judged opportunities, the way I responded to risk. It was not that I had no money. It was that I had built a self that did not know how to think about money clearly. Which, it turns out, is worse.
Most of the people I respect have a similar story. They tell it differently, but the structure is the same. There was a long stretch in which they treated money as either a private shame or a civilisational embarrassment, neither, and then something happened. A medical bill. A redundancy. A parent who needed help. A child who needed school fees. A property in Singapore that doubled before they could close on it. The reality of money asserted itself, the way the reality of vitamin D asserts itself in winter, and they were forced to learn the chemistry from scratch as adults.
This is the first thing the series wants to say. There is no shame in not having been taught. There is no virtue in pretending you do not need it. We are most of us, in this domain, late starters, working with a vocabulary we never asked for, in a culture that has either over-glamorised or over-villainised the substance we are trying to think about clearly.
What Vitamin M Looks Like in a Real Day
What does Vitamin M mean to us, then. Not in the abstract, in the actual life.
It means the thirty seconds between checking the price of the kopi and ordering it. The flicker of calculation before booking the dentist. The mental tax you pay every time you pass a restaurant whose menu does not show prices. The ease or the wince when your friend suggests a holiday. The fight you do not have with your partner because the credit card bill came in. The fight you do have. The way you stand at the supermarket aisle and reach for the brand on offer, not because you prefer it, but because the maths is automatic now. The quiet relief of paying off a card. The quiet panic of seeing a number you did not expect.
It means, mostly, your relationship with time. People who say money cannot buy happiness are usually correct in their data and wrong in their wording. Money cannot buy happiness, no. But it can buy the absence of a particular kind of misery. It can buy hours. It can buy a Saturday in which you do not need to worry. It can buy the option to leave a job that is corroding you. It can buy a doctor's second opinion. It can buy your mother a quieter death, your child a calmer adolescence, yourself a Sunday morning with no email and no dread. None of that is happiness. All of it is the conditions in which happiness becomes possible.
That is what a vitamin does. It does not make you feel anything. It makes the feeling-of-being-well biochemically permitted.
The Middle Path
There is one more thing the metaphor gets right, and it is the part I find most useful for the rest of the week. A vitamin is not the food. It is what the food contains. Money is not the life. It is what the life contains, runs on, depends upon. To live as if money is the meal is the error of the rich man on his fourth yacht. To live as if money is irrelevant to nutrition is the error of the spiritual aspirant who keeps borrowing twenty quid from his sister. Both are deficient. Both are deceiving themselves. The middle path, which is the path most of us are walking on whether we know it or not, is to acknowledge that this nutrient exists, that it is necessary, that it is not the point, and that pretending otherwise is its own slow-acting poison.
By the end of this week I want us to have a more honest, more grown-up, more useful relationship with this thing. Not because the conversation is comfortable. It mostly is not. But because the alternative, which is a culture and a private life that runs on a deficiency it refuses to name, has a price too. And I think we have been paying it.
We do not have a money problem. We have a money relationship problem. The first is solvable. The second is the work of a life.
Tomorrow I want to talk about why we need this nutrient at all, and why the people who tell you that you do not are usually selling you something.
Key Takeaways
- Money behaves like a biological nutrient. Required, not optional, in roughly the right dose.
- A money deficiency does not just deplete the bank balance. It alters how you think, sleep, decide, and treat the people you love.
- The shame around the topic is the first cost of the deficiency. There is no virtue in pretending you do not need it.
- Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy the conditions in which happiness becomes possible.
- We do not have a money problem. We have a money relationship problem. The first is solvable. The second is the work of a life.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the term Vitamin M actually mean?
Vitamin M is a metaphor for money. It treats money as a biological-class nutrient that the modern life needs in a roughly correct dose, the absence of which produces a measurable cluster of symptoms in the mind and body, much like a deficiency in iron, B12 or vitamin D.
Why does the essay say money is a nutrient and not just a tool?
Because tools are optional and nutrients are not. You can refuse a hammer for a lifetime and remain healthy. You cannot refuse food, sleep or money for long without paying for it in the body, the relationships and the decisions that follow.
Can money buy happiness?
The honest answer is no, money cannot buy happiness. But money can buy the absence of a particular kind of misery, and it can buy hours, choices, agency and care. It is the precondition for the conditions in which happiness becomes biochemically permitted.
Why are we so embarrassed to talk about money?
Because the culture has either over-glamorised money or over-villainised it, and almost never trained us to discuss it honestly. The shame is itself a symptom of the deficiency the series is trying to name.
Is the Vitamin M series financial advice?
No. The Vitamin M series is an essay sequence on the relationship most of us have with money, written from a personal and observational standpoint. It is not a financial education programme and should not be read as financial advice.
Tomorrow, Day 2: Why We Need Vitamin M. A look at why the people who tell you money does not matter are almost always solvent.