When asked about keeping my heart open during financial hardship, my first reaction is visceral and honest: "Closing my heart wasn't ever really an option." The question itself reveals our cultural programming—that scarcity should naturally lead to emotional contraction, that poverty justifies spiritual withdrawal. But what if that equation is fundamentally backward?

During my six-year journey through financial drought, social abandonment, and what felt like systemic conspiracy against my progress, I discovered something counterintuitive: the conditions that most justified closing my heart were precisely the conditions that demanded it stay open.

The Pressure Cooker: What Really Happened

Let me be clear about what "no money" actually looked like: complete financial desolation while maintaining a website that generated no sales for six years. Living in my mother's house at 41. Watching systems randomly stop working without explanation. Experiencing abandonment from virtually everyone in my support network.

The experience wasn't just financially devastating—it was existentially disorienting. When nothing you touch seems to work, when every effort meets inexplicable resistance, you begin to question reality itself. Was I being punished? Was I delusional? Was I fundamentally broken in some way others weren't?

"It was insane," as I put it in the raw moment. "Just short of being driven insane. Just short of it."

The False Binary: Love or Survival

Society presents us with a false choice during times of extreme pressure: protect yourself or remain open-hearted. Close down to survive or stay vulnerable and perish. This binary thinking is perhaps civilization's most dangerous delusion.

When I say, "I don't know what the hell closing my heart means," I'm rejecting this premise entirely. The assumption that heart-closure is the natural response to hardship reveals how deeply we've internalized transactional approaches to love and connection.

In my darkest moments, I certainly felt rage—"I was hateful. I was pissed off." People were being what felt like deliberately cruel, systems were failing me without explanation, and isolation was becoming my permanent condition. Yet even then, something in me recognized that contracting further wasn't the solution—it was precisely what would ensure my complete destruction.

The Counter-Intuitive Move: Service Instead of Self-Protection

"I dedicated myself in service to the best good of all beings everywhere."

This sounds noble written out like this, but in practice, it was a raw survival mechanism. When everything is falling apart, when you're abandoned and broke, the instinct to turn inward and protect what little remains is powerful. Yet that instinct is precisely what completes your spiritual bankruptcy.

Instead, I made what seemed like the irrational choice: to create anyway. To serve anyway. To remain committed to something larger than my immediate suffering. Not because I'm specially virtuous, but because I recognized the spiritual poverty that comes from self-protection as the ultimate response to life.

"I figured if people were completely incoherently awful, then it had to be something that I needed to understand and be part of the solution of."

This wasn't martyrdom. It was clarity. Humanity's potential remains vast, but our capacity to love well is catastrophically underdeveloped. When you witness this firsthand—when you experience the casual cruelty, the abandonment, the systems that fail without accountability—you have two options: join the dysfunction or transcend it.

The Species-Level Recognition

What began as personal suffering evolved into species-level observation. Looking around at how people protected themselves from discomfort, how they prioritized security over connection, how they abandoned what wasn't immediately profitable, I recognized a pattern threatening our collective survival:

"Great God, if we keep loving this shittily as we do around here, we're all gonna die."

This wasn't hyperbole. Our transactional approach to love—giving only when we get, staying open only when it's safe, creating only when reward is guaranteed—is a species-level limitation that makes us fundamentally unequipped for the challenges ahead. Climate crisis. Social collapse. Technological disruption. These tests require precisely what we're worst at: loving through uncertainty, creating without guarantee, serving without immediate return.

The True Poverty We Face

The most profound realization through my six years of material poverty was witnessing the epidemic of spiritual poverty around me:

"You realize you have nothing going on inside of you, right? Like, just even the nature of transactional love makes you completely susceptible to all forms of suffering that you'll never even be aware of, and completely impoverished in the truest sense."

This observation isn't judgment—it's diagnosis. When we optimize for self-protection, we create the conditions for our deepest suffering. The person who withdraws to avoid pain becomes incapable of connection. The creator who works only for guaranteed reward never makes anything truly innovative. The lover who gives only when it's safe never experiences love's transformative power.

The Practice: What Actually Happened Inside

How do you maintain an open heart when every circumstance justifies closure? It wasn't through affirmations or forced positivity. It wasn't through denying the reality of my circumstances or the legitimate pain they caused.

Instead, it came through a fundamental recognition: that being "better than the common denominator" wasn't optional if I wanted to remain human through this process. "Of course, it never crossed my mind to become worse," I explain. "If I wound up like everyone else, we'd all be in trouble now, wouldn't we?"

The practice involved:

Recognizing transactional love as spiritual poverty, not self-protection
Continuing to create even when nothing external validated that creation
Choosing to see the dysfunction around me as something to understand, not merely endure
Maintaining service as orientation even when abandoned by those I had served
Holding the paradox that material poverty and spiritual wealth can coexist

The Paradox of Saving Others While Drowning

One of the most striking paradoxes in my experience was continuing to help others while my own circumstances deteriorated:

"I routinely saved other people's lives in the midst of crises. No training, just because I don't want them to die. So I make sure they don't."

This wasn't martyrdom—it was alignment. The same impulse that kept me creating through six years of zero financial return kept me extending myself to others even when I had every justification to focus exclusively on my own survival.

What most people miss is that these aren't separate capacities. The ability to remain creative during financial drought and the ability to help others during personal crisis stem from the same fundamental orientation: the recognition that contraction is death, that self-protection ultimately self-destructs.

The Civilization-Level Stakes

My individual experience points to a civilization-level challenge. We've built systems that incentivize closure, that reward transaction over transformation, that make heart-opening seem naive rather than necessary.

"I saw a very impoverished species. It's terrifying."

The terror isn't just for myself—it's for all of us. When our default response to pressure is closure, when our reflex during scarcity is withdrawal, we become collectively incapable of facing our greatest challenges, which will require unprecedented cooperation, creativity, and care.

The distinction between "broke" and "impoverished" in my closing words captures this perfectly. Material poverty ("broke") is circumstantial and temporary. Spiritual poverty ("impoverished") is a state that no amount of money can fix—a fundamental orientation toward life that makes genuine abundance impossible regardless of external conditions.

Beyond Self-Help: What This Actually Means

This isn't about positive thinking. It's not about manifesting abundance or attracting prosperity. Those approaches often reinforce the very transactional mindset that creates spiritual poverty in the first place.

Instead, this is about the revolutionary act of refusing closure even when—especially when—everything justifies it. It's about recognizing that the pressure that feels like it will destroy you is actually forming you into something unprecedented. It's about understanding that the capacity to create and love without guarantee isn't weakness—it's the only strength that matters in a world of increasing uncertainty.

When I say I chose to keep creating instead of closing my heart, I'm not describing a moment of heroic sacrifice. I'm describing the only viable path through impossible conditions—the recognition that closure, while tempting, is actually surrender to the very forces that created those conditions in the first place.

The real question isn't how to avoid hardship—it's how to become the kind of being who can remain creative, open, and generative through hardship. Not because it's virtuous, but because it's the only way to remain fully human in a world that incentivizes becoming less.

Choosing Creation Over Closure: Maintaining an Open Heart in Financial Drought