Reason as Financial Auditor

Zera Yacob emphasized reason as humanity's highest faculty—a tool for examining inherited assumptions and cultural conditioning. In your 50s and 60s, this means applying rigorous rational inquiry to your financial life. What beliefs about money did you inherit? Which investment choices rest on emotion rather than evidence? Yacob's method demands honest self-audit: Are you spending to prove worth? Saving from fear? His Ethiopian humanism suggests that financial integrity stems from understanding your actual values versus internalized pressures. Pre-retirement is the ideal season for this reckoning, when you have time to course-correct decisions made from unreasoned habit, and when clarity about what you actually need—versus what society says you should want—becomes both possible and urgent.