Money! Huh! What is it good for?

Selective attention, money, and keeping your focus where you want it to be

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).

You may well have seen the ‘Did You Spot the Gorilla?’ video. If not, I thoroughly recommend giving it a go. For those with other priorities right now, I shall explain the gist. And then talk a bit about how it demonstrates the ease with which we are all threatened by doing dumb stuff for, with, and because of money all the damn time.

In this video, two groups of people – one in white t-shirts and one in black – are passing basketballs. Your task is to count all the passes made by the white team.

At the end, there are two questions.

The first – ‘How many passes were there?’ – you are eagerly twitching to answer.

The second – ‘Did you spot anything unusual?’ – takes you by surprise.

‘No’, you say.

‘You mean you didn’t see the person in the gorilla costume walk slowly into the centre of the picture, stop, beat its chest, and then saunter off the other side of the stage?’

‘What? No! That can’t have happened’ you say.

You watch the video again, and wonder what the hell is going on in this world you clearly understand nothing of.

I first saw this in a room of over 100 eager-eyed graduate trainees at a massive accountancy firm. Not a single one spotted the gorilla.

This doesn’t mean they failed some sort of test of genius! (albeit some definitely thought this).

If you did spot the gorilla, you did fail the exercise you’d been instructed to do, because you weren’t paying attention to the counting. Because you – on a physical, neurological, level – cannot do both at the same time.

If you can be bothered, er, paying attention to it, this little lesson on selective attention has pretty unbelievably important implications for how well you live with money.

Before you pay attention to the numbers, pay attention to how you pay attention

Your brain has two very distinct ways of paying attention. One (the left hemisphere’s) is narrow – which is really good for counting basketball passes. The other (the right hemisphere’s) is broader – much better for understanding reality, and spotting people in gorilla suits dancing in front of your face. They’re both very useful… at certain tasks.

The quality of your life falls into an abyss when you fail to keep the narrow one in its proper place.

Rather unfortunately, money, and the way we typically live with it, completely wrecks your ability to do this. Because it massively prioritises the narrow (left hemisphere’s) way of paying attention in all circumstances.

And, what’s worse, part of what makes it so ‘good’ at this is that it renders you totally blind to the fact that this is what’s happening.

This means you can hire all the most well-meaning, cleverest, and extraordinarily expensive advice in the world, and it’ll run into the limits of its usefulness in a matter of minutes. Which kind of sucks if you’re planning on living longer than that.

And, what’s worse even than that, is that you’ll have no idea why.

So you’ll keep trying the same thing, with the reliable stupidity of the person that’s so convinced that there’s a messianic investment manager out there, that they’ve now hired and fired a dozen false prophets and are on the lookout for lucky number 13.

Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #9: Keep money in its place

Selective sounds good, right? Selective means a conscious focus. You’ve narrowed in on what you want and are pursuing it with tunnel vision. No more drifting in distractions for you! This is the way fortunes are made! This is the way to get ahead!

And it is good!

Sometimes!

The lesson here isn’t that if you’re counting, or calculating, or measuring then you’re committing some sort of sin against sensible living.

A refined, fast-functioning, left-hemisphere gives rise to all sorts of handy life skills. But because it cannot see that those life skills should be in service of something that actually matters, it takes their accumulation as the thing that matters instead. Because, being human, something has to matter. And while what matters is never a thing, if all you can see are things (as the left-hemisphere does, and as money encourages) then you’ll lean towards accumulating them anyway.

If you want to count the passes correctly, you damn well better not get distracted by the gorilla.

If you want to make partner in record time, you damn well better not get distracted by people that can’t help you do so.

If you want to earn ‘enough’, accumulate ‘enough’, or ‘optimise’ a given metric, strap on the blinkers, zoom in, and ease up only for your weekly progress review.

But if you to generally feel as though life is pretty damn good and beautiful, then you need to give your brain a bit of a shake.¹

If you want to live better, become a better person, that sort of thing, then you need to learn to spot when your narrowly focused attentional powers are getting ideas above their station: where they are misleading you into mistaking measurement for meaning, when, if anything, if something can be measured, it probably doesn’t ultimately mean very much.

In McGilchrist’s words (my emphasis):

The main point in Part I [of The Matter with Things] has not been so much to demonstrate the left hemisphere’s weakness in this or that area: it has been to demonstrate that the differences are stark in every area relevant to making sense of the world.

What I think I have shown in these chapters is that the left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters.

By virtue of being human, you’re always going to be looking for meaning. So if you get stuck in left-hemisphere mode, stuck in models that by their very definition are built to analyse things that don’t have meaning, you’re going to attach meaning to things in a really screwy way.

Money gives us measure without meaning. But by Jupiter do we try to shove meaning into the measurement.

Analysis is a great servant, and a damn silly master

Possibly the most repeated sentence in this newsletter’s archive is this: by all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.

When you give your left hemisphere something to calculate, it gets lost in it. It builds a model world designed to make the calculating easier.

This is great for analysing some sleep stats.

It’s terrible for judging what to do with that analysis.

It’s great for comparing the cost-effectiveness of different products, or the pros and cons of different jobs, or different places to live.

It’s terrible for judging if your life would actually be improved with either product, either job, or either home, based on those lists of pros and cons.

You will feel the terrible effects of this. But. You. Will. Not. See. The. Terrible. Cause.

When you’re attending to the world with the left hemisphere (such as when you’re counting passes and ignoring gorillas) you literally cannot see the world outside of the model, which is why people do such dumbass things as use money as an overriding reason to pick a career, or as a way of showing love.

Used well, the process of producing such lists could make it clear what you actually care about (e.g. you start making the lists and find yourself cheating in favour of one option). Used carelessly (as an overriding master), the lists can mask what actually matters, because what actually matters transcends the 2D world of the list. If you’re seeing clearly, happily unburdened by shiny distracting nonsense, the lists are likely unnecessary anyway.

When you’ve spent so long building model worlds for the purposes of being able to measure stuff  (or maybe just living in a world that does it for you) you start to forget that the models were supposed to help you live better within reality, not to replace it.

To avoid getting sucked into living your whole life in 2D requires a level of attentional flexibility – the ability to flick into model-making mode when appropriate, while retaining awareness that you’re doing it for a purpose which, while you’re in that mode, you’ll be oblivious to. This ability has been eroded from most people’s lives, especially in the West, and especially where money is concerned.

You can live with this attentional flexibility only if you are seeing clearly… if you are alert and alive to reality as it presences itself, so you remember, when you click into analysis mode for each appropriate situation, to always bring that analysis back out of the model and into the whole.

Because your human life is always, and in every situation, a whole. It is the whole you are aware is Good-and-Beautiful or not-so-Good-and-Beautiful. And it is at the level of the whole, rather than its apparent component parts, that you ultimately need to look at it (ideally enriched by, but not directed by, all your component-level analysis).

The alternative is a blind chaos. As Erich Fromm wrote:

In the name of ‘freedom’ life loses all structure; it is composed of many little pieces, each separate from the other and lacking any sense as a whole. The individual is left alone with these pieces like a child with a puzzle; the difference, however, is that the child knows what a house is and therefore can recognize the parts of the house in the little pieces he is playing with, whereas the adult does not see the meaning of the ‘whole’, the pieces of which come into his hands. He is bewildered and afraid and just goes on gazing at his little meaningless pieces.

1. The lesson here isn’t something about finding ‘balance’, in the way you hear people decrying the blind pursuit of ‘more’ and advocating ‘finding enough’ as the antidote… where ‘enough’ is always an ironic point-missing ‘number’, or a ‘destination’ of some kind.

Nor is it something about realising that buying ‘things’ isn’t working, and how you should ‘buy experiences’ instead. Because goodness knows how many left-hemisphere-dominant folk have done exactly that, but have bought those experiences in a way that makes them just as much ‘things’ as what they were supposedly rejecting.

Nor is it something about ‘balancing’ short-term and long-term ‘wants’. This is a road which always leads (albeit often very subtly) to some batshit notion that all consumption is good and that aiming to spend your last penny on your last day is the epitome of good planning, rather than a symptom of a serious brain disease.

(See also Balance isn’t stillness)