Perspectival knowing

psychology today
Perspectival knowing refers to knowing via embodied perception. It consists of seeing the world and one’s place in it via a specific point of view, and understanding (or not) the key aspects of a situation.

Money
This concerns awareness and perception in context. It is knowing what is relevant right now, in your current circumstances. Right now, these words are (hopefully) standing out for you, but the feel of your clothes on your skin is likely not (at least before you read that). In the world of money, perspectival knowing is about awareness of opportunity costs. Every time you do anything with money, you are not doing another thing. This is too-easily and too-often forgotten when we’re blinded by the shininess of short-term super-salient things thrust into our faces by sales tactics.

Intention is important here. Just as the same chat-up line can bomb if delivered from a place of desperation where it would successfully woo if delivered with confidence, so can the same purchase action work if the intention is to live aligned with a personal version of the Good Life, rather than one borrowed from an advert. Society will solve neither the opioid crisis nor its web of individual meaning crises when it thinks the solution is for sale.

Perspectival knowing is to know money by knowing what it is like to be a person that has some, to see it in the context of a universe of opportunity costs. It is the knowledge of what it is like to be something, i.e. a human in a particular time, place, and situation. This makes it closely linked to the next type of knowing. Because to be that human is a snapshot, but that human is also always becoming another human.