The emotional roots of money

All financial advice is mostly right, and also mostly dumb

Imagine a young man, unhappily and unwelcomely single. This luckless lothario’s problem isn’t starting relationships. It’s sustaining them. He is unwaveringly attracted to unsuitable partners.

Each time he thinks he’s found lifelong love, a week, or a month, or a year down the line, he discovers that what he’s actually found is an embodied version of the sketch his immature mind recorded of his dysfunctionally coupled mother.

No one (one hopes!) would try to guide this young man to break his pattern of unsuccessful relationships by telling him to be attracted to a different sort of person, or by handing him a checklist of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ to look for in his next prospective partner and proceeding only when he’s got ticks in all the right boxes. Only a very select sort of person can even pretend that’s how attraction works, and it’s not the sort of person from whom you want to be taking dating advice.

Advice in the realm of personal finance is different. Checklists abound. Follow these investing rules. Spend your money on these things, not those things. Often, the advice in these lists is mad, of course. But sometimes it’s perfectly sensible. It’s exactly what you should do. Just like our lovelorn lad should be attracted to an alternative archetype of what love looks like instead of the one implanted by his troubled parents.

And yet, despite treating them very differently, neurologically speaking, troubles with money and troubles with love have the same roots. Understand the way in which they are the same, and you go a long way to understanding how to live better with money.

All roads lead to the brain

Despite never mentioning the m-word, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon’s A General Theory of Love is one of the most important books about money you’ll find.

They pick up on our unintentional-singleton example, and note that: ‘Left to himself, he will not realise there is something else to be found.’

This not realising is more than a mere ignorance of better options. It’s a very literal not seeing of them. What we expect to find is, to a very large extent, exactly what we do find. As the authors put it: ‘Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see.’ A person imbued with a particular archetype of what ‘love’ looks like – however repeatedly damaging it proves to be – simply cannot see any alternatives. Our man could be introduced to the ‘perfect’ partner for him and it’d be about as romantically alluring as if you’d introduced him to a pretty hat.

We notice the symptoms of unhelpful patterns rather better than we do their causes. Which leads us, rather sadly, to try to rewire the neuronal pathways in the oldest part of the brain with solutions designed for the newest.

As anyone who’s felt their body temperature rise or their skin tighten when talking about it, or argued with their spouse because of it, or had thoughts about it keep them up at 3am knows, money is one of the most emotional topics there is. But we treat it as if it’s one of the least. Because we fail to fully appreciate that the emotional brain’s distorted associations between money and its meaning are inaccessible to the intellect, we keep trying the same things, despite decades of them not working terribly well, if at all.

So what should we do instead?

Just knowing about this isn’t enough. As the authors, in relation to our example, explain:

Even common sense will mislead him. He might think, as many reasonable people do, that analysing childhood pivot points will resolve his troubles. The simplicity of this supposition appeals to both patients and psychotherapists – how easy for us to believe in a single, concentrated cause for complexity, and how hard to find visceral satisfaction in the accretion of infinitesimal influence that is often nature’s way.

The key points here are that to actually fix something, it needs to be viscerally (not merely intellectually) satisfying (because your brain needs to know it’s important!) and the way to enact change is through an accretion of infinitesimal influence – i.e. your brain is wired (or rewired) with repeated responses to common encounters (not by extracting a protocol from a podcast and declaring – however vociferously – that your life will now change).

Understanding the roots of our failure to see alternatives is vital, because to believe that we need to consciously try a different approach, we need to believe that simply not seeing any alternatives doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

A person cannot choose to desire a certain kind of relationship, any more than he can will himself to ride a unicycle, play The Goldberg Variations, or speak Swahili. The requisite neural framework for performing these activities does not coalesce on command. A vigorous self-help movement has championed the hoax that a strong-willed person, outfitted with the proper directions, can select good relationships. Those seduced into the promise of a quick fix gobble it up. But the physiology of emotional life cannot be dispelled with a few words. Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love.

Unfortunately, because money is woven into so much of our lives’ tapestries, the old unhelpful patterns are pretty hard to unpick.

But fortunately, because of this same interweaving, we have innumerable opportunities to do that unpicking, and to weave ourselves better futures. To examine our unconscious associations – do we use ‘better’ or ‘nicer’ or ‘good’ when we really mean only ‘more expensive’? – and to challenge them, and then, slowly but surely, change them, in the only way that has a hope of working – deeply, viscerally, emotionally.