The Uncomfortable Trinity: Sex, Money, Death

The three things we avoid, and why diving deeper into them can help us become more of ourselves

This week it is Dying Matters Week in the UK, and the theme this year is "the culture of dying matters."

It's made me reflect on some of the important conversations that circle around, but rarely land in, our culture. Conversations about death, yes, but also given my recent post about the wonderful series Dying for Sex, I’ve also been reflecting about sex. While given my new life as a newly minted solopreneur, I’ve been pre-occupied with - and thought a lot about - money.

These, to me, are what I call the Uncomfortable Trinity. The troublesome trio of topics that can derail a polite work conversation or still ruffle feathers in a social setting (especially when delivered with a dose of raw honesty): Sex, money and death.

What’s fascinating to me is not that they’re ‘taboo’ (I really dislike that phrase, especially about death) but that they seem energetically similar. There’s a certain charge in the room when one of them is brought up. People either lean in with hunger or shrink away.

When I think about the culture of death and dying, I think of the culture of change. Of inter-relationship. Of dependency and effect.

Our culture – lets speak of the British one with which I have been partly raised in, and many of you are bathing in – does not allow for much space for these murky, webby, sticky things. They are inconvenient. They are difficult. They remind us of each other, and the actual fuzziness between us. Not the clean lines of glass and frictionless exchange we’ve adopted in our 21st century lives.

These things remind us of each other, in an inconvenient way, and I think it’s useful to broaden the scope a little. To identify some of the coherent rhythms and particular associations that we might experience with those awkward things.

Since starting Mortals – my attempt at consciously creating a space to engage more honestly with death and mortality – I’ve seen how people are desperate to talk, once permission has been explicitly given.

It becomes a release valve. Something opens up. Stories pour out: about parents, about grief, about not knowing what to do, about what matters. Death, for all its difficulty, becomes easy to talk about when the container is clear and boundaried.

Sex (at least to me and some of the circles I move in) feels more shrouded. In community, I’m a card carrying member of

Kevin Maguire

’s New Fatherhood, and the topic of sex has recently come up in our Dadscord, but not embraced with the energy that other topics have. Everyone was encouraging and keen to talk about our sex lives, even organise an event to talk about it. But we haven’t done it yet.

I don’t think it’s disinterest. It’s hesitation. I mean, sex and parenting is a cruel combination for sure, but even among open-hearted, reflective men, there’s a feeling that this subject might invite too much risk, too much vulnerability, or simply too much confusion.

And money…well, money is maybe the most elusive. I made the investment in myself to join

IMMA Collective

as I began my solopreneur career phase earlier this year. I’ve been heartened to discover it is a place where money is very clearly on the table. It’s shown in how we price our offerings, how we feel about scarcity, how we navigate the messiness of value as ‘impact-makers’ and creatives. It’s one of the few places I’ve been where the conversation is both real and supportive. But even there, I notice my own patterns: the way my scarcity mindset constricts my throat, the way disclosure feels like danger.

I’ve started to wonder: what does it really take to make space for these conversations? Not just about death, but about sex and money too. Is it just safety? Is it intimacy? Is it something deeper?

On reflection, I’ve found it helpful to consider not just the conscious culture we swim in, but the unconscious one too.

Carl Jung saw the psyche as full of symbolic material. Archetypes and unconscious drives that shape our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. When I think about sex, money and death, I see them now not just as awkward topics, but as archetypal forces.

Sex is the force of desire. Jung would see this through the archetypes of the Anima and Animus. The internal feminine in men, the internal masculine in women. Sexual energy isn’t just about the body; it’s about the longing for wholeness, for the parts of ourselves we’ve projected onto others. Desire is not something to be embarrassed by. It’s our yearning for integration. That might be why it's so hard to talk about: because in talking about desire, we risk exposing the parts of ourselves we don’t fully understand or accept.

Money, then, is the force of value. Not just economic, but psychological and symbolic. Jung believed that our relationship to money reveals how we relate to power, self-worth and the Persona (the mask we wear in society). I notice in myself how often I equate money with security and safety. If I feel skint, I feel unsafe. If I feel abundant, I feel temporarily safe. It’s not rational. It’s mythic. It's archetypal.

Death is the force of impermanence. Of transformation. For Jung, death wasn’t just an end; it was part of a psychic cycle, a symbolic descent into the unconscious, followed (if we’re able to do the work, a bit of luck and lots of support) by rebirth. He believed that a full life required a conscious relationship with death. Not denial, not obsession, but integration. That’s what we try to do in Mortals. And it’s what I think more of us are hungry for, even if we can’t quite say it.

So when I think about the cultural awkwardness around these topics, I don’t just see simply denial, or discomfort. I see fear of being fully alive. Because that’s what these forces represent.

Desire (sex) reminds us that we want more. More connection, more pleasure, more truth. Value (money) asks us what we’re worth, and what we think others are worth too. And impermanence (death) reminds us that time is short. That we don’t get to live forever. That what we choose now matters.

I think many people fear death not just because of oblivion or the unknown, but because of the possibility that they haven’t really lived. That we’ve spent our time avoiding ourselves. That we’ve never allowed certain parts of ourselves – sexual, creative, relational – to come fully into the light.

The same might be said of sex. The discomfort around it might not be about lust or shame, but about the grief of unrealised desire. Of never having given certain parts of ourselves room to breathe. Or the shame of what happened early in life that shut down our connection to that part of us.

And money, too. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not just about spreadsheets or pensions. Maybe it’s also about love. About how we were held or not held. About whether we feel deserving. About how we determine what has value, and who gets to have it.

So for the rest of Dying Matters Week and beyond, I’m thinking about this Uncomfortable Trinity not as problems to be solved, but as invitations.

Invitations to become more whole. Invitations to listen to the charge, the silence, the pull-back in the body, and go toward it… gently. To be sensitive to the undercurrent. Not to what is said, but what is unsaid. What is felt. What arises in the body, in the air. Not with force, but with curiosity.