You know, if you are kind of rich, the best thing is that you don't have to think about money. The best thing you can buy with money is freedom, time. I don't know how much I earn a year. I have no idea. I don't know how much I pay in taxes.

Money buys attention, not things

The irony of Murakami's point is that most people think wealth is about accumulating stuff—the houses, the cars, the visible markers of success. But he's describing something quieter: the luxury of not having to keep score. When you're constantly worried about money, your brain is always half-occupied doing the mental math. Should you get coffee out? Can you afford that small thing? It's exhausting background noise that never fully stops.

What Murakami is really talking about is cognitive freedom. When you don't have to track every dollar, you're not just saving mental energy—you're buying the ability to think about things that actually matter to you. Your attention becomes yours again. The catch, of course, is that this kind of freedom requires already having crossed a certain threshold, which most people haven't. But the principle works at smaller scales too: the less you're preoccupied with financial anxiety, the more mental space opens up for creativity, relationships, or just peace of mind.

There's also something refreshingly honest about admitting he doesn't know his own net worth. It suggests that once money stops being a source of stress, it also stops being psychologically interesting. That alone tells you something about what we're really chasing when we chase money—not the numbers themselves, but the comfort of not having to think about them.