How to spend almost nothing, feel the opposite of deprivation, and live fabulously

Why does the way we try to meet our desires so often mess us up instead?

Quick recap: Out of the thousands of hours I’ve spent studying such things, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things are the best books I’ve read for understanding the world and how to operate within it. They also map spookily well to everything I’ve written about our screwy relationships with money, and how we fail to make more of the money in our lives. So I’ve a dedicated series of posts doing that mapping, of which this is the latest (though you don’t need to have read the others first).

---

‘We human beings,’ wrote Erich Fromm (possibly the second-most-useful author for getting a grip on the role money plays in your life) ‘have an inherent and deeply rooted desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be related to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness.’

Of course we do.

And yet… look around.

Ask anyone whether it’s better to live in a way that demonstrates compassion or consumption, and I’m confident that everyone – and I really do think I mean everyone – would plump for the former.

And yet… look around.

You don’t need to have helped a bunch of multi-millionaires plan their finances to see that at every level of society the way in which people actually live demonstrates the opposite.

This isn’t because the desires are different to those described by Fromm; we all really do want to express our beings and connect with others expressing their beings. But the way in which people try to meet these desires is calamitously, catastrophically, soul-crushingly, messed up. The way we relate to money is a major culprit… and the best place to start to tidy up the mess.

(See also the story of Nigel in Love and Money for a stark demonstration of this)

Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #10: Money makes you prioritise dead stuff over living relationships (even though you really don’t want to)

There’s a madness to most images of what it means to live well, where ‘ownership of’ is prioritised over ‘connection with’.

As if a private tennis court were more likely to lead to feeling good about life than membership of a tennis club.

Or as if a holiday home were a better idea than a holiday budget.

Or as if more or less anything owned alone were better than the equivalent anything rented and shared with others.

In the majority of the examples of people doing mad things with money – things that not only don’t buy them what they want, but actively work against what they want – there’s an unmistakable favouring of the inanimate, the dead, over the animate, the living.

This is a hallmark of the drive to ‘own’ ‘things’ as a proxy for living well. It’s a hallmark of an inability to see clearly, of a lack of wisdom.

And of course it’s a signature move of a half-brained approach to personal finance.

As McGilchrist wrote:

[There is a] close relation between a concern for materiality and a simultaneous impulse towards abstraction.

In other words: the more you tilt your attention to material things, the more you think in terms not of your living relationships, such as to yourself, other people, and the world, but towards categories, theories, and inanimate objects, robbed of the life that only a relationship can breathe into them.

McGilchrist continues:

That the left hemisphere is concerned with abstraction has been a theme of the first part of the book [The Matter with Things], but it also has a preference for inanimate things, particularly as they have use for us. There is no paradox involved: materialists, as I suggested earlier, are not people who overvalue, but who undervalue, matter. They see it only under Scheler’s lowest realm of value: that of utility and sensation. The abstraction is reified, the concept becomes a thing ‘out there’.

Consider for a moment all those ‘things’ we claim to value in the name of something else. For example, big house = great place to entertain friends, because I value friendship. Makes sense, right? Though, have you ever, perhaps, just maybe, a little bit, really enjoyed time with friends just as much if not more without a big house?

Perhaps you’ve even experienced those friendships in a way that made the location, let alone your ownership of it, irrelevant?

The double trouble with the ‘linking goals to values’ tables so beloved of well-meaning financial planners is, first, that the links are used to justify any old nonsense, and second, that the very act of putting something like ‘friendship’ in such a table changes its nature from a Good to A good. From something that matters, into matter.

An extreme example of this is seen in schizophrenic patients:

Asked to describe what a Rorschach blot resembles, a schizophrenic patient may either describe the literal characteristics of the blot – the very disposition and quality of the strokes on the page – or declare that it represents some vague concept such as ‘motherhood’, or ‘democracy’.

Money does the same. For how we tend to live with it – as an objective, convertible, universal measure – strips it (and therefore a life focused on it, be that earning it, spending it, or just using it to value things that aren’t it) of relational meaning.

Of course no one says that they live in a way that prioritises inanimate, abstracted things! But as we have occasion to point out all the time around here, that only makes it worse! The most costly mistakes are the ones you don’t see… and, where your brain is concerned, specifically your left-hemisphere’s hijacking of your attentional resources in appropriate situations… can’t see.

Prioritising privatisation doesn’t mean you want to; you’re just being led astray by incredibly powerful forces deep within your skull

Rich people don’t aim for privatising every conceivable aspect of their life, from their transport to their tennis-playing, because they are aiming to avoid connection.

Their desires remain firmly for connection.

They’re just crap at the execution.

And they harbour some daft belief that being able to ‘fix’ problems by throwing money at them in private is what makes life Good, or at least better, than solving such puzzles as part of a community.

The modern human’s tendency to turn experiences into things is as baffling as it is bottomless. (Baffling, of course, when judged on its life-enriching results; not baffling to anyone that’s familiar with McGilchrist’s work.)

The examples that most sadden the soul are not the people that do not even see the issue, for example that dedicate their entire lives to using expensive ‘things’ like square-footage or sports cars as substitutes for existing beautifully.

No.

Far sadder are those who’ve fully clocked that having rooms the cleaner visits more often than their owner does is a waste of a life’s resources, but who angle their lives towards owning them anyway. Those who believe they’re doing just what they ‘should’ be doing, like ‘buying experiences instead of things’… and are that bit more existentially confused why none of that is working either.

Plenty a poor soul has heard about the hot new research finding that says buying experiences is the cool-wise-kid way to spend money. So they go to a gig, and then watch it through their phone. Or they choose where to eat based on how good it looks on the ‘Gram. Jumping from one conclusion to another (even when the second conclusion is better than the first) isn’t much help in becoming aware that it is the craving for conclusions that needs to be addressed, not the specific conclusions jumped to.

As I wrote here:

More people favour splashing out on ‘experiences’ over material goods, reflecting a new collective consciousness of an old intrinsic understanding. Unfortunately, the way most people go about this, they bugger it up. By focusing on the output (the executive summary that ‘experiences make people happier than possessions’) rather than the input (the deep reasons why we get more enjoyment from experiences) we manage to buy experiences in a way that turns them into material goods.

When we buy an experience we are spending on both the chance to participate in a transitory process, and a vain attempt to eternalise the event: to fuse it to ourselves in the eyes of others. The value of an experience is in its transitoriness, yet every time we sign up for an ‘experience’ because we think it’ll produce a cool new profile photo or envy-inducing social-media ‘story’, we cancel that bit out. We try to transform the most powerful parts of our process of becoming into something to own, something to have.

This ‘thingification’ is more than a mere quirk of behaviour, and a way to know who the dickheads are at a gig. It’s a sign of someone who’s taken their potential to use money to live well and locked it in a cage.

Who’s entrusted – unwittingly and unwisely – their life choices to the half of their brain incapable of making them well.

Who’s living, in Fromm’s terminology, in ‘having’ – as opposed to ‘being’ (or, I prefer, ‘becoming’) mode.

Which is why, despite the demands to do otherwise, 99% of what I share about money and investing has nothing to do with how to pick investments or the like.

Because when it comes to your life choices, if it doesn’t start from a focus on how you see the world, and how this is wired in your brain, then your priorities need a punch in the face.

Focus narrowly, live narrowly

When you live instead in a whole-brained way, and in ‘becoming’ mode, you don’t merely worry less about owning stuff, or get better at resisting your acquisitive urges. You simply don’t care about them.

In the way that the person in love doesn’t need to ‘resist’ ‘temptations’ towards activities that don’t speak to something alive in them, because they’re seeing so unavoidably clearly what really matters in each moment.

‘None of these experiences,’ wrote Fromm, referring to renewing oneself, growing, loving, giving and so on (and chiming with the point above about the sad fate of ‘linking goals to values’ exercises)

can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience.

Live like this, and choosing consumption over compassion feels so viscerally wrong it becomes impossible to do, even accidentally.