Let’s talk about love.
Specifically:
Given living well with money is about aligning what matters most to you with what you do for and with your money, the non-negotiable first step is getting clear on what matters most.
There’s nothing quite like love to provide such clarity.
However! Despite the power of love, love isn’t all you need… plenty of people are, in apparently obvious ways, aligning their money with the objects of their love, and buggering their lives up because of it.
Dig a bit deeper and it’s clear that the typical way we ‘see’ money (philosophically speaking) is responsible for this. For love without wisdom is chaos.
And so! The starting point for living with money in a better, more loving, way is to become wiser with money. We’ll dance with what that may look like.
Dismissing love and money as incompatible is foolish
Talking about love in the context of money isn’t usually pretty. From the De Beers marketing team exploiting our half-brained inability to divorce meaning from measurement and using ‘love’ to excuse extravagant expenditure, to something about the love of money being the root of all evil, the two topics, so central to life and how to live it, rarely resonate all that harmoniously.
And yet, to talk about living well with money without talking about love is like talking about behaviour change without talking about brain change. Sure, you can do it essentially endlessly, plausibly purposefully, and even intermittently ‘insightfully’, but ultimately, you’re doing it pointlessly.
“Do more of what you love”
Assuming you aim to live well rather than to live expensively, financial planning is all about alignment. Nothing else directs our decisions quite like money, therefore align what you do for and with money with what you value and all will be well.
No financial-advice advert is complete without a promise that delegating the organisation of (and possibly even the thinking about) your finances to a professional will leave you with more time to ‘do more of what you love’. Financial planners also love to tell you to ‘align your use of capital with your values’. Rightly so. As I once wrote:
If there’s one thing that broadly differentiates good financial planning from its infamously salesy, exploitative, commission-cowboy evil twin, it’s that good financial planning prioritises alignment over accumulation.
Build this into a professional process, and you end up with an in-depth interview about what money has meant to you throughout your life, maybe an ‘exercise’ to help you ‘discover’ your values, and most likely a cash-flow model to show how, with the right advice, your money will flow towards whatever it is you love, and consequently you will live happily ever after.
Getting clear on that ‘whatever’ is key to the whole process.
One of the very best ways for a financial planner to earn the respect of their colleagues, competitors, and clients, is to describe ‘goal clarification’ as ‘perhaps the most important part of the job’. This is usually accompanied by a very sensible analogy about how before you set off on a journey, it helps to know where you’re going.1
This is where love comes in.
Love is clarity
When you tilt your attention, and by extension your resources, towards what matters, your life becomes better. There is nothing quite like love to do that.2
The defining characteristic of love for many people is how much clarity it brings to your thoughts and your actions.
Previously felt a bit guilty for how long you spent on Twitter, or how many meetings you went to, or how much crap you ate, despite knowing they added nothing to your life? Suddenly, find love and as if by magic, the thought of a casual scroll, or time-killing chat, or mindless meal feels viscerally off-putting. That’s if you even find yourself thinking about any of those things at all.
So long, so-so activities!
So long, too, ‘goal clarification’ and ‘values discovery’ exercises! If you have to ask if you care about something, you don’t! If you have to remind yourself, you’re doing it wrong!
Amid myriad maelstroms of meaninglessness, love anchors your attention on the meaningful. When you are in love, you just know. There’s no need for any complicated considering or calculating. You just find yourself doing the next right thing, effortlessly, by default.
Well, almost. This very definitely can be true. However, there’s a pretty glaring problem with it: it matches almost no one’s lived experience, especially those living in the most half-brained cultures.
But! – and this is very important – it does match some people’s lived experiences. Mine, for example. And it’s oh so much better and more beautiful than the alternative (I know, for I’ve lived that too), that it’s worth investigating how to make it match more of them.
Love isn’t all you need
It’s perfectly possible to ‘align your use of capital with your values’ and have the confidence that instils that you’re doing the right thing mask the fact that you’re actually buggering everything up.
This newsletter’s archive is awash with tales of very wealthy people who’ve done everything they were supposed to do and it not have made a damn bit of difference to how well they live with money.
For example, Nigel, who, having sold his company for four times more than his ‘enough to do anything’ sum, was choosing to spend his time with his colleagues rather than with his wife and two young children… or so it seemed to his wife, his adviser, and everyone else but Nigel.
Or the abundantly paid but scarcely present parents who on the surface at least aligned their resources with what mattered most to them spectacularly well, and yet in doing so were managing to spend £450,000 on being worse parents.
In each case, it would be easy to say that the protagonists loved their jobs or simply money more than they did their families, that if they ‘really’ loved their families, then how could they even contemplate choosing the office over the offspring? It would be easy, but it would also be wrong (and it’s a mistake I definitely made in my more-foolish past).
There are plenty of people, in plenty of ways, from their career choices, to their spending choices, to how long they spend on Twitter, that are acting like love-lacking idiots, but whose problem is not a lack of love.
It’s a lack of something else.
It’s a lack of wisdom.
Love without wisdom is chaos
Love will not help you live better with money unless it’s grounded in a financial philosophy.3
I have a problem with how the financial-planning industry talks about ‘wants’. It has pretty important implications for stuff like goal-clarification exercises.
If a drug addict told you they ‘wanted’ a fix, you would probably counter that they shouldn’t trust their own words; in all likelihood, the drugs are probably making the taker’s life worse, and therefore it’d be silly to describe them ‘wanting’ that.
How about a billionaire who ‘wanted’ a private jet, only for it to signal, not success, but a poverty of imagination?
When you find yourself regularly doing what you know you deep down do not want to do (however much you may use the word ‘want’ to excuse it), it’s probably fairer to say you’re addicted than you are irredeemably stupid.
As long-time readers well know, addiction is not a problem of compulsive desire. It’s a problem of narrow vision – of seeing no alternatives.
And if your vision is crappy, what is the point in a ‘goal clarification’ exercise?
(For more on the problem with ’wants’, see here. For more on how addiction is about narrow vision, not compulsive desire, see here.)
You’re therefore better advised to learn to see clearly first, and then ‘discover your values’.4 And the most fun part… if you are seeing clearly, then you don’t need to discover your values… you’ll simply be living them, and be incapable of doing anything else.
You can control your eating environment so what you consume is essentially perfect, and yet the way in which you consume it could still be incredibly unhealthy… possibly because of how you’re using all your clever environment-control hacks. Yet sort out how your relationship with food is mapped in your brain, and your need for ‘controlling’ anything simply vanishes.
This is why your financial philosophy is so much more important than your financial products, financial plans, financial planning processes, and even your fancy financial psychology hacks and exercises designed to ‘discover’ your ‘purpose’.
Because philosophy isn’t some arcane academic pursuit. It’s the very deeply practical examination of how you pay attention, how you see so clearly that you do the next right thing by default. Your philosophy isn’t some airy-fairy notion of what you think about now and then when you’ve magically discovered some extra time (i.e. when something you were previously prioritising got cancelled). Your philosophy is physiological – it’s written in your neuronal wiring, a wiring that is being shaped and expressed with every damn thing you do. If you think something is more important than that, the comments are open 😊.
In the first issue of this newsletter, I wrote:
Aligning what we do with what we (deep down, undistracted and undeceived) care about, rather than with what unreal deceptive influences tell us to care about, is what joins up having resources with living a good life. It was so important to Socrates that he rather died than be prevented from doing it. So should it be for the rest of us.
Love makes your priorities clear. Wisdom guides how you go about serving them.
And money… well, money messes stuff up.
Money poisons your attempts to become wiser
In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm wrote: ‘Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.’
Active. Concern. Life. Growth.
Money is passive, not active. There is an inarguable sense in which modern society worships money. For so, so, many, money is the universal objective ‘answer’ to everything. If in doubt, make more, spend more. Higher salary = ‘better’ job. Higher price = ‘better’ product. Money is the ultimate symbol of the craving for certainty which inspires all worship.
Whether that’s worship of money, or a deity, or, in the following passage from Fromm, another person, it’s characterised by passivity. A passivity rooted in a lack of one’s own wisdom – a degeneration of your power to want what you want to want.
If a person has not reached the level where he has a sense of identity, of I-ness, rooted in the productive unfolding of his own powers, he tends to ‘idolise’ the loved person. He is alienated from his own powers and projects them into the loved person, who is worshipped as the summum bonum, the bearer of all love, all light, all bliss.
Money is also anti-growth. Growth comes from avoiding short-term ‘comfort’. Money, for most people, means buying it.
No one says they use money as a substitute for love (even when they’re consulting De Beers for how to express their love). And yet, as Fromm continues (my emphasis):
In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power – almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
This is why you’re reading Money Blind. Because the most costly dangers are the ones we don’t see, often precisely because we’re confident we’ve cleverly dodged the more obvious errors. ‘I obviously don’t worship money like some freak from Wolf of Wall Street! I spend money only on things that I’ve matched to carefully considered values, therefore all is well!’
Nigel, despite appearing to choose the office over his wife and children, was acting out of love. He was expressing the story of love that he – like so many – lived. A story about what it meant to be a loving husband, father, man, human. A story that had been infected from the start by money.
As I wrote in the original article:
when a brain wired by a lifetime of unhelpful messages about money met a great big sack of it, he saw only numbers, blind to their more important narrative consequences. Through the narrow lens of ’20 years to make £10 million, and only five more to make another 15!’ there was only one choice. His wife, however, could see other choices more clearly. Ones that would undoubtedly enrich their lives in ways extra money could not.
He was acting the role as scripted by the typical money-infected model brilliantly. He just didn’t see that the model was ‘right’ only up to a point. A point his visionary – philosophical – skills weren’t good enough to see. So he’d shot way past it. Money is just so damn measurable. So certain. So easy to model. More money = more love, right?!
Here is Fromm again:
they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being ‘crazy’ about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
And here is a beautiful (though rather depressing) passage from a beautiful (and at times even more depressing) book, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon’s A General Theory of Love, that brings together so much of what we’re talking about here:
When launching a life raft, the prudent survivalist will not toss food overboard while retaining the deck furniture. If somebody must jettison a part of life, time with a mate should be last on the list: he needs that connection to live. Couples do not receive this advice from friends, colleagues, family – their world. Instead they are encouraged to achieve, not attach. Americans spur one another to accomplish and acquire before anything else – our national dream holds that industry leads to a promised land, and nobody wants to miss out on a share of paradise. When consummating a career does not bring happiness – as it cannot – few pause to reconsider their assumptions; most redouble their efforts. The faster they spin the occupational centrifuge, the more its high-velocity whine drowns out the wiser whisper of their own hearts. […] Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America's values.
Are we getting to the takeaways yet?
Effortlessly making better financial decisions sounds great! So what am I supposed to do with this? What’s the ‘actionable’ advice?
First, drop your desire for ‘actionable’ advice, for summaries, for takeaways (and, while we’re here, for using action as a verb). Summaries speed you towards information and knowledge, but a craving for them is a roadblock for becoming wiser. And if something can be summarised, it's probably not that important.
Next up, know that because love is an attitude, an orientation, a disposition, a way of living, an existential mode, to live with money in a more loving way requires a shift in worldview, not a series of behaviour-change tactics.
Then, live an examined life. Pick a few ways you could be leading yourself astray and tilt your attention towards catching them, challenging them, and – where appropriate – leading yourself in a different direction.
For example:
The words you use – If you continually use ‘better’ when you really mean ‘more expensive’, you’ll believe it increasingly strongly. Catch yourself and ask if you mean what you say, and such unhelpful associations will gradually disappear. See here for examples of some common words and phrases it’s worth trying to catch.
How you view possessions – Choose presence over presents. Do you show love (to a child, a partner, etc.) by how much you spend? Do you symbolise a ‘special’ occasion with more thought, or more expense? Connect consumption to love and not only does your world die, but you contribute to killing it for everyone else too. Please note, this is not about ‘buying experiences’ – that’s simply far, far, too easy to bugger up, because if your mind is still stuck in a model that craves measurement and uses money to do it, whether you buy a car or a holiday won’t make a damn bit of difference.
How you describe what you do – Have you ever tried telling somebody when they ask you ‘what do you do?’ that you try to become a bit wiser, more loving, more compassionate, etc.? They’ll look at you like you’re mad! Especially if you deliver it without really believing it. Relax, you can live in a way as if you could do this honestly without needing to actually do it. It’s the attention, not the answer, that changes your life.
The ways in which you model, and measure the world – When making decisions on what to do, how quickly do you grasp for the most easily measurable metrics? How much, when in doubt, are you swayed by them? How much a job pays or a thing costs are clearly important considerations, but if you are treating the number as the determining factor, you’re probably missing something. Try again. Don’t seek a better measurement, seek the stuff it feels absurd to measure, and then let go of the craving for quantification.
Are you building character, or wealth? – And no, however tempting it is to believe otherwise, you can’t buy the former with the latter!
And finally, if it feels like a decision, it’s probably a bad one. Options that need to be weighed and measured probably just need to be ignored. Love isn’t an input into a decision-making process. It’s the reason you don’t need a process in the first place.
The record should probably state that I have pretty strong issues with all aspects of this process as it’s typically conducted. We’ll get to them all on other days.
Psychedelic medicines are, in my experience, the only thing that even gets in the same picture. Thanks to a combination of many years of philosophical living, and some indescribably profound experiences with some medicinal plants (e.g. killing all cravings for all unhelpful foods stone dead overnight, never to return), I was frankly pretty damn good at this before I found a magical, cosmic, love (and I even have the budgeting spreadsheet proving that for many months before doing so I hadn’t spent a penny on anything that hadn’t positively contributed to my life). And still…
I didn’t realise quite how deeply at the time, but one of the most insightful lines I’ve ever heard was during a discussion last year between two of my wisest friends, John Vervaeke and Johannes Niederhauser: love without wisdom is chaos. Love is such a powerful force, that without a philosophic (wisdom) grounding, it can easily spin you out of control. And while undoubtedly some people like to portray this as a feature, it’s definitely more fun to fly just as fast and free but without all the inelegant flapping about. It also neatly encapsulates why simply being guided by your heart, while wonderful in many ways, is no bulwark against being very foolish, and can even be the cause of it.
Yes, a values-discovery exercise or whatever can probably help uncloud your vision. But it could also entrench the poorness of it, especially where what’s screwing it up is your insistence on building models to solve every puzzle, rather than seeing in a more whole-brained way.