Charles Dickens, perhaps the most famous novelist in the Victorian era, made a great living during his lifetime and yet, all his life, was deeply fearful of returning to the workhouse. When he was 12, his father was put in debtors’ prison while he, separately, worked at a nearby factory, Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. It is thought that his untimely death at 58 could have been brought about by his intense and persistent financial anxieties.

Your first reaction may be to scratch your head or else to scoff at Dickens. How could such a wealthy man have harbored such irrational fears and this for so long?

Rather than appealing to some theory of trauma or another, I’d like to say a thing or two about ego-tendencies or samskaras. The point at hand will be we’re much closer to Dickens than we may like to believe.

Just this morning, in fact, I was speaking with a CEO of a very successful social enterprise, one that he’s run for over 25 years now. He has received awards, and his financial situation is no doubt far better than most across the world. And yet, in the midst of a financial dispute over someone’s compensation, he felt anxiety, experienced contractions in the body, and noticed recurring thoughts. A voice said, “You’ve got to handle this right now.”

It turned out that he was preoccupied with the possibility of having something taken away from him, and he didn’t want to be poor again. “But this is crazy, completely irrational,” he told me. Not exactly.

Deep down, there’s an ego tendency that should it speak would say, “I will never have enough.” While the colors and hues of such an ego tendency may differ from case to case, from person to person, at a deeper level Dickens’ fear of never having enough is the same sort of tendency as that of the man with whom I was speaking this morning.

The genuine question is: “Could it also be yours?”