Your Money or Your Life

“shop till we drop”

“nine to five till you’re sixty-five”

Just as with money, our concept of work consists of a patchwork of contradictory beliefs, thoughts and feelings—notions we absorbed from our parents, our culture, the media and our life experience. The following quotations highlight the incongruity of our different definitions of work:
E. F. Schumacher says:
. . . the three purposes of human work [are] as follows:
◆First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.
◆Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.
◆Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.1
The late economist Robert Theobald tells us:
Work is defined as something that people do not want to do and money as the reward that compensates for the unpleasantness of work.2

In 1958, when economist John Kenneth Galbraith appropriately described the United States as “The Affluent Society,” 9.5 percent of U.S. households had air conditioning, about 4 percent had dishwashers, and fewer than 15 percent had more than one car. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s successful bid to replace Jimmy Carter was based on the widespread sense that people were suffering economically, the percentage of homes with air conditioning had quintupled, the percentage with dishwashers had increased more than 700 percent and the percentage with two or more cars had about tripled. Yet, despite the astounding economic growth—despite owning more of the gadgets, machines and appliances thought to constitute “the good life”—Americans felt significantly less well-off than they had twenty-two years before, polls showed.10

We build our working lives on this myth of more. Our expectation is to make more money as the years go on. We will get more responsibility and more perks as we move up in our field. Eventually, we hope, we will have more possessions, more prestige and more respect from our community. We become habituated to expecting ever more of ourselves and ever more from the world, but rather than satisfaction, our experience is that the more we have, the more we want—and the less content we are with the status quo.

e work to pay the bills—but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff to . . .

long with racism and sexism, our society has a form of caste system based on what you do for money. We call that jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings and even at home. Why else would we consider housewives second-class citizens? Or teachers lower status than doctors even though their desk-side manner with struggling students is far better than many doctors’ bedside manner with the ill and dying?

People don’t need enormous cars, they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic equipment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives.

When you feel a desire to shop, take time to trace it back to the need and ask if creativity rather than consumption might best fill it.”

Financial Intelligence is knowing that if you spend your life energy on stuff that brings only passing fulfillment and doesn’t support your values, you end up with less life.