The Hunger Beneath

The child sits alone in a boarding school while other children pack for Christmas.

His name is Ebenezer Scrooge, and he's seven years old, and he's learning the first law of money: it arrives when love leaves. His father has sent him away—not because the family lacks funds for his education, but because fathers sometimes abandon sons, and money is the acceptable excuse.

Little Ebenezer reads by candlelight while footsteps echo down empty hallways. He invents companions from books because real ones go home to families that want them. He counts the days until his sister Fan might visit, because she's the only person who sees him as more than an inconvenience.

Charles Dickens shows us this scene not to explain Scrooge's miserliness, but to reveal its true nature. The old man clutching coins isn't greedy. He's still that seven-year-old boy, trying to buy his way out of abandonment.

You know this story. But you don't know what you know.

*A Christmas Carol* isn't about redemption. It's about substitution—the terrible bargain we make when love disappoints us. Scrooge doesn't choose money over human connection. He chooses money as human connection, the only relationship that promises never to leave.

Watch the Ghost of Christmas Past lead him through his own history. Young Scrooge, working late at Fezziwig's warehouse, gradually replacing colleagues with ledgers. Adult Scrooge, releasing his fiancée Belle because she sees what he's becoming. Old Scrooge, alone with his coins on Christmas Eve, the richest and loneliest man in London.

At each stage, money offers what people couldn't: reliability, security, the promise that accumulation will finally answer the question that abandonment planted in his seven-year-old heart. *Am I worth keeping?*

The coins say yes. They lie, but they're dependable liars. They don't leave for Christmas. They don't die young like sister Fan. They don't walk away like Belle when they see too clearly who you're becoming.

Belle watches him choose the golden idol, but she misunderstands the choice. He's not choosing money over her. He's choosing the certainty of money over the terrible vulnerability of love—the way love requires you to stay open, to risk abandonment again and again, to trust that someone might see you completely and decide to stay anyway.

Money asks for no such trust. Money stays because you make it stay.

Modern retail understands this ancient substitution.

You walk into a store carrying the same wound Scrooge carried—not his specific wound, but the human wound, the place where love failed to arrive or arrived and left. The store promises to dress it.

That leather jacket isn't selling warmth. It's selling the version of you who wears it—confident, untouchable, the person who would never sit alone in a boarding school. That watch isn't selling time. It's selling the status that protects you from ever feeling insignificant again.

The purchase delivers a moment of genuine relief. Something inside you sighs and settles. You've bought a small piece of the person you imagine you need to become. The transaction feels like healing.

Then you get home. You hang up the jacket. You set down the watch. The wound reopens because the wound was never about needing a jacket.

So you go shopping again.

Scrooge says this at the end, after the ghosts have done their work. But notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say Christmas is about gifts or spending or the economic engine of holiday commerce. He says it's about forgiveness—the thing money can't purchase, the thing that actually heals the wound.

Edmond Dantès gets everything money can buy, and it nearly destroys him.

Alexandre Dumas locks his hero in the Château d'If for fourteen years, then releases him with infinite wealth—treasure beyond counting, enough to buy governments and navies and the complete destruction of his enemies.

Dantès becomes the Count of Monte Cristo. He spends his fortune on elaborate revenge, purchasing the slow ruin of every man who wronged him. Money becomes his weapon, his tool of justice, his substitute for the life that was stolen from him.

The revenge works. His enemies fall one by one, bankrupted, humiliated, destroyed. The Count stands over their wreckage, rich beyond measure and empty as a tomb. He got what he wanted. He discovered what Scrooge learned: getting what you want doesn't heal what you've lost.

Dantès wanted justice, but justice is an abstraction. Underneath, he wanted what Scrooge wanted—to matter, to be seen, to have his pain acknowledged. He wanted love, basically. Love from Mercédès, who married another man while he rotted in prison. Love from a world that let him disappear.

Money delivered revenge. Love was never for sale.

The Count's fortune becomes his prison, more elaborate than the Château d'If but just as isolating. He can buy anything except what he actually needs: the ability to trust again, to be vulnerable again, to love without calculating the cost.

Dumas shows us the mathematics of substitution. Infinite money plus infinite revenge equals infinite emptiness. The equation never balances because you're solving for the wrong variable.

What are you actually hungry for?

Not the thing you think you want to buy. Beneath that. The feeling you imagine the purchase will deliver. The need you think the acquisition will meet.

Write it down. Be honest. That expensive dinner isn't about food—it's about feeling sophisticated, worthy of good things, deserving of attention. That new phone isn't about communication—it's about staying current, belonging, not being left behind. That house isn't about shelter—it's about proving you've made it, that the child who felt small can grow up to take up space.

None of these needs are wrong. The hunger for significance, for safety, for belonging—these are human birthright. The tragedy is the substitution, the way we try to buy what can only be given, earn what can only be received.

You can't purchase worthiness. You can't accumulate enough to feel permanently safe. You can't buy your way into belonging. These things come through relationship, through risk, through the terrifying vulnerability of letting people see you completely.

Scrooge learned this on Christmas morning. He opened his door, not his wallet. He joined his nephew's dinner as himself—not the rich version of himself, not the protected version, but the man who had been alone too long and decided to try connection again.

The ghosts didn't teach him to spend money better. They taught him that money was never the answer to his real question.

The substitution runs deeper than shopping.

Work becomes a substitute for worthiness. If you achieve enough, accomplish enough, earn enough recognition, maybe you'll finally feel deserving of love. Busyness becomes a substitute for purpose. If you're always moving, always productive, maybe you won't notice the emptiness underneath.

Success becomes a substitute for self-acceptance. If you can just get important enough, maybe you'll finally matter. Wealth becomes a substitute for security. If you can just accumulate enough, maybe the fear will stop.

The substitutes work temporarily. That's their cruelty. The promotion does make you feel worthy—for a week. The purchase does make you feel better—for an hour. The achievement does quiet the inner critic—for a moment.

Then the original hunger returns, stronger than before because you've fed it sugar instead of substance. The wound wants what it wants: to be seen, to be accepted, to be loved without condition or transaction.

Money whispers that it can provide these things. It's the most seductive liar in human history.

There's a moment in *A Christmas Carol* when young Scrooge is reading alone at school, and his imagination peoples the empty rooms with characters from his books. Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe become his companions because real companions have gone home to families that want them.

This is where the substitution begins—not with money, but with the moment we stop believing we deserve the real thing. The moment we decide that imaginary connection is safer than risking real connection. That purchased approval is more reliable than earned love.

Scrooge spent decades perfecting this substitution, until money became the only relationship he trusted. The Count of Monte Cristo did the same with revenge. We do it with shopping, with achievement, with the endless accumulation of things we think will fill the space where love should live.

But the space has a specific shape. It's you-shaped, exactly the size and contours of who you really are. Nothing else fits. Not money, not success, not all the jackets and watches and houses in the world.

Only love fits. And love, despite what the substitutes promise, was never for sale.

The child in the boarding school knew this. Somewhere underneath all your careful substitutions, you know it too.