Ruskin cuts against the grain of Victorian prosperity-hunting by insisting that accumulation itself becomes poverty if it drains your vitality. Most of us understand the sentiment loosely—money isn't everything—but he means something sharper: that a life spent acquiring things you don't have time to enjoy, or maintaining a status that exhausts you, has already squandered the only currency that matters. When someone stays in a lucrative but soul-deadening job for twenty years, believing retirement will finally let them live, they've already spent their wealth; Ruskin would say they've made themselves bankrupt by confusing the means of living with living itself.