The fog you feel when someone asks how it's going with money has a name. It's privacy armor. You can loosen it without undressing.

The thought behind it

The work here is precision: calling the thing what it is instead of what it has been politely mistaken for. Under Money Mind the number is never the subject; the decision that produced it is. Watch what “17” does here. Change it and the sentence becomes comfortable again, which is how you know it matters.