The title is a little startling from a monk, and it’s meant to be. He’s not preaching poverty as holiness. Just the opposite — he’d rather you weren’t poor at all, in either sense: not short of money, and not short of the generosity that (he argues) is the actual cure for being short of money.
The counterintuitive move is that the road out of scarcity runs through giving, not hoarding. The instinct when money’s tight is to clench — guard it, fear it running out. He says that clench is the trap.
Build the habit of giving. Don’t take it lightly, don’t be stingy, don’t cling to your money, don’t grieve it, don’t live in fear of it running out.
— his own line, 2007Part of this is the karmic engine from the last few chapters. But part is pure psychology, and it’s the part worth keeping: a scarcity mindset — the fear-clench — tends to make people smaller, more anxious, and worse with money, not better. An open hand is also an open, confident posture toward life. There’s a spiritual poverty in here too: a person with plenty who can’t bear to give any of it away is, by his lights, the truly poor one.
Behavioral economists have a name for the fear-clench: scarcity mindset, the tunnel-vision that scarcity itself imposes, which reliably worsens decisions. You don’t have to accept “give now, get rich later” to notice that the anxious hoarder and the generous, secure person are running very different software — and that the second one tends to live better, right now.
Two ways to be poor: no money, and no willingness to part with it. He wants you out of both. Loosen the grip — it’s better for your wallet and your nervous system than the clench.