What "Ende's Legacy" Taught Me About Rethinking Money and Time After 60

Ende's Legacy: Questioning Money at Its Root is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started thinking about and doing at 66. This blog has mostly featured novels and personal essays, but this time I read something a little different: the book is built around a long final interview that Michael Ende — the German children's author known for Momo and The Neverending Story — gave the year before he died, on the subject of money. I came across it at a time when I've been looking back on my own long years as a stock and property investor.

An image evoking money and nature quietly trying to find balance.

Stepping off the chase for interest, for a while

In his last interview before his death, Ende spoke about the essential nature of the modern financial system:

The point is that money is a thing that always forces growth. — from the book

Since I started investing in stocks and property back in 2015, growth has simply been my default goal — comparing yields, watching compound-interest charts, feeling reassured whenever the numbers kept climbing. Reading this line made me wonder whether that "reassurance" was really just something built into the nature of money itself, rather than something I'd chosen. Now, before making an investment decision, I try to pause and ask myself: is this growth actually necessary, or has growing the number become the goal in itself?

"Aging money" and Japan's sense of impermanence

One passage that stayed with me was from a letter Ende wrote to the economist Werner Onken:

You were the first to notice that the idea of aging money lies behind my book "Momo." — from the book

The idea that money might age like a living thing, rather than growing without limit forever, and eventually finish its role — that resonates with something very familiar to Japanese readers: mujō, the sense of impermanence. Kamo no Chōmei opened his classic essay with the line that a flowing river never stops, and the water passing by is never the same water. If nothing is meant to stay fixed forever, then perhaps it's money alone being asked to grow eternally that's the genuinely strange arrangement. When I talk economics with friends in the UK, growth and compound interest tend to be taken for granted on both sides — but reading this book reminded me how rich a vocabulary Japanese already has for describing impermanence.

Holding on to "solidarity" as the measure of economic life

In the course of the interview, Ende leaves behind this line:

Economic life is, by its very nature, something built on social solidarity. — from the book

Living between the UK and Japan, I keep noticing moments where economic activity turns out to be less about exchanging numbers than about the relationships between people. In the English village where I spend part of the year, neighbours regularly hand over surplus vegetables for nothing, and I do the same in return. That kind of mutual support, invisible in any spreadsheet, may well be what economic life actually looked like at its root. I can't claim to know the grand reason human beings were born, but at this age I think I can finally say, with some conviction, that we have economic life at all so that we can support one another.

Trusting that the "exactly right book" arrives when it does

Ende posed this question about his own books:

When you're at a crossroads in life, and at exactly the right moment you pick up exactly the right book and find exactly the right answer, do you really think that's a coincidence? — from the book

Reading this made me feel that picking up this particular book, at this particular time, wasn't really a coincidence either. Now that I notice my concentration and memory don't hold the way they used to, keeping a record of what I read on this blog feels more meaningful than it once did. Even if I can't remember the content itself, writing it down means I can come back to it later and find something new in it. Writing has become, for me, a way of continuing to edit my own life — a thought this book brought home again.

An image contrasting the hurried time of a clock with the unhurried time of a blooming rose.

Not letting the "grey men" take my time, in the garden

The book describes Ende's best-known novel, Momo, this way:

Save your time and deposit it in the time-savings bank, and interest will earn interest, giving you many times more time than you'd otherwise have — the temptation of the grey men. — from the book

Thinking only about using time efficiently can end up costing you the very richness that time was supposed to hold — a point that lands uncomfortably close to home, given my years as an investor. Lately I've made a point of keeping the time I spend tending my roses deliberately separate from "efficiency." The dozen-plus varieties of English roses I grow take real work — pruning, training — and it's not unusual for a plant to take years before it blooms the way I'd hoped. Even so, watching a bud slowly swell each day isn't time spent growing anything; it's just time spent being there. It feels like a small refusal to hand my time over to the grey men.

What Eastern medicine's "accumulating time" teaches about a different kind of wealth

Near the end of the book, Ende offers this note of hope:

The current financial system is something people built barely a few hundred years ago, so once we recognise its limits and irrationalities, it can be changed. — from the book

If a system built over a few hundred years can still be changed, then surely habits built up over decades within a single body can also shift, gradually. Studying acupuncture and Kampo medicine in the UK, I learned the logic behind practices like the "thousand-year moxa" — not chasing a large effect all at once, but accumulating small stimuli over a long stretch of time. Where compound interest on money pushes us to hurry and grow, the time of Eastern medicine, spent tending the body, builds up unhurried but steady. Reading this book, I began to think that healthy longevity itself might live somewhere along that same kind of "unhurried compounding."

Closing: the words that belong on a banknote

At the very end of the book, the author leaves this question:

Have you ever actually picked up a banknote and looked at what's written on it? … If there's nothing written on it, then it's up to you to write in the vision. — from the book

Even now, in my sixties, honestly, the worry of "will I have enough money" hasn't entirely gone away. But since reading this book, I've found I can hold that worry differently — not just as a question of numbers, but as a question of what meaning I want money to carry for me. Even without a two-way conversation, a one-way message can still be a support to someone — and it's with that belief that I keep leaving these records here. What Ende left behind wasn't an answer, but a question. Perhaps all I can do, at 66, is keep quietly taking up that question in my own daily life.

The book I mentioned here:

Kawamura Atsunori + Group Gendai, Ende's Legacy: Questioning Money at Its Root (NHK Publishing, Japanese edition)

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

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An image evoking a father's studio kept alive under prohibition, and a boy's memory of walking through a night forest.

The times Michael Ende lived through

Ende was born in 1929 in Garmisch, in the German state of Bavaria. His father, Edgar Ende, was a Surrealist painter. Around the time Ende started primary school, the Nazi party was on the rise, and his father was branded a "degenerate artist" and banned from exhibiting his work. Forbidden to paint openly, Edgar still shut himself away in his studio, sketching the images that came to him onto small cards. It's said that young Ende inherited from watching his father a sensitivity to the "other reality" lying behind visible, everyday things, and a capacity to be astonished by ordinary objects. In 1945, at fifteen, Ende received his call-up papers — and tore them up, walking eighty kilometres through forest at night to reach his evacuated mother, after which he served as a courier on his bicycle for an anti-Nazi resistance group. As a boy, he experienced firsthand what it looks like when a state places "cause" or "growth" above an individual life. It's hard not to see a line running from that formative experience to the discomfort with "systems that force growth" that Ende carried throughout his working life as an actor, playwright, and eventually children's author. In 1995, at 65, Ende died of stomach cancer. He had been meeting with economists and businesspeople, intending one day to write a book about money — a project that never came to fruition in his lifetime. What was left behind was a single interview tape, recorded in 1994, which became the basis for this book.