Money you earned yourself feels different to spend. That’s growing up.

Money you earned carries a price tag in hours, and that changes how it spends. Forty dollars stops being a number and becomes most of a shift, and the comparison now happens by itself at the till. This is not meanness arriving. It is the first time cost has felt real to you, which is one of the quieter markers of growing up.

Use the conversion deliberately for a week. Before something you were going to buy without thinking, work out how long it took to earn. Then buy some of it anyway, on purpose, because earned money is also yours to enjoy.