We are living with harrowing geopolitical uncertainty. The economy teeters on a knife’s edge. Expenses strain our accounts; prices insult our wallets. The cost of living exacts a toll on our wellbeing, both physical and mental. The strain across society manifests in debt, unemployment, and worse, homelessness. A generation of young people are locked out of a future that promises a fair return for their hard work. This exclusion wreaks havoc on their self-esteem and undermines their relationship with others. Systemic inequality further erodes the social conditions for collective progress. Everywhere, people are struggling to make ends meet. Money has become a pernicious source of stress. The rat race has never felt so nasty.
There are overarching systemic and social factors that influence our relationship with money. On the one hand, economic structure exerts pressure on our individual well-being. On the other, people’s psychological and emotional profiles play a vital role in shaping their relationship with money. I have met millionaires who are miserable and paupers who live in bliss. Beyond the ability to afford a basic standard of living, people tend to over-estimate the correlation between money and happiness. Putting external factors aside, our relationship with money is an extension of our selfhood, a manifestation of unconscious desires and patterns. Even people raised in upper middle-class homes, who have never known deprivation, can be susceptible to improprieties that leave them in financial ruin. Their upbringing did not fail them – it is rather the unexamined impulses and unconscious drives that rule their financial lives.
This makes money a particularly rich area of exploration in psychotherapy. Money is never just money; it always refer to some deeper psycho-spiritual composition, a self-concept, the fibre of one’s character. In his book, “The Psychology of Money,” Morgan Housel presents the story of a brilliant entrepreneur who made himself wealthy several times over, but who also squandered his wealth with equal abandon. This toggle between wealth creation and destruction indicates a psyche that thrives on great risk, a soul enthralled by gain and loss. His motives remain unknown to himself. He is locked in the turmoil between euphoria and despondency. Stability appears to fall outside his agency. Although financial literacy is a matter of education, living a financial responsible life is another matter entirely. Tell a spendthrift that he must live within his means – one might as well spit against the wind. Reforming our relationship money requires a change beyond behaviour; it calls to a deeper reform of values, character, and our inner constitution.
In “Homo Deus,” Yuval Noah Harari posits money as a useful fiction that has facilitated many advancements in human civilization. An invention of collective imagination, money is an expedient means to facilitate trade and cooperation. In classic economic theory, money serves three functions: a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. In the modern economy, money comes in many forms beyond cash, including equities, bonds, and cryptocurrency. The total value of a person’s holdings comprises their net worth. However, these assets denote value in so far as we all believe them valuable. A government bond is no more than a piece of paper. Its monetary function rests on the belief that its market value exceeds that of the paper itself. Money, therefore, is representative measure of worth.
As a fiction, money is infinitely malleable. Its denotation of value crosses into other domains of where value comes into play. For example, because time and energy are both precious, they are subject to monetary measure. One’s wages and salary indicate the value of one’s time and energy. It is therefore no stretch of the imagination to evaluate one’s own worth using a monetary metric – the more one has, the more one is. Money thus becomes a proxy for self-worth. Further, our feelings of dissatisfaction and inadequacy often seek redress in money, which promises to replace our dysphoria with contentment. Because money is an abstract fiction, we erroroneously assign to it functions that it cannot perform. When it comes to compensating for the arduousness of the human condition, money buys very little.
Money is too often used to fill the vacuous spaces in our inner landscape. We look to money as a mechanism that counteracts emptiness in character, lack of purpose, and paucity of fulfillment in relationships. For a man who works long hours in a job he loathes, the expenditure of energy and time compels him to seek redress in his private life, where he indulges his desires in the spirit of vengeance. In his mind, the deprivation of his soul entitles him to consumption. However, indulgence only intensifies his desperation, as material comforts offer no balm to a wounded soul. Many of us purchase sensory gratification as a form of consolation, only to find that such pleasures scratch spots far from the itch. When people spend profusely, the question is not how to stop the spending, but what the spending is trying to alleviate. A person living the fullness of life has little need for such compensatory measures.
Money can also become a blank screen onto which we project the solutions to our present discontent. We take wealth as a facilitator of dreams and imaginative escapades. We fantasize about liberation from the dreary constraints of daily life, a time without financial worries. No more mortgage payments or credit card debt. No scrimping and saving. Surplus replaces scarcity. Money, in this sense, becomes the fictional enabler that promises life’s fullest potential.
However, this gambit is bound to fail due to its fictive promise. So long as lifestyle creeps along with income growth, the feeling of scarcity remains. As long as spending grows in proportion to earnings, financial pressures persist. The problem is not that there is not enough money, it’s that we don’t know the meaning of enough. I know people with a net worth of millions who live among the working poor. They must dig into savings or go into debt to meet monthly obligations. They believe themselves members of a wealthy elite, but their lifestyle puts them under perpetual strain. Financial stress makes them susceptible to riskier investments and costly gambles. The need to make more money becomes deafening. They do not recognize their servitude.
Money is often a mirror of the soul. A tightwad who frets in the face of uncertainty is really searching for security. They believe that a growing bank account is a bulwark against a frightful future where anything can happen. However, because uncertainty is a feature of this fragile human life, and insecurity an inextricable part of the world, no asset can fully assuage one’s existential anxiety. Attempts to encourage a more relaxed attitude toward money are futile without addressing the fundamental insecurity within. Conversely, a spendthrift who squanders every dollar may allude to impermanence of life, and the importance of seizing the day. For this person, money is freedom. Financial discipline is unnecessary constraint. Attempts to corral spending will be futile if not accompanied by an examination of a reckless freedom that eschews responsibility.
Financial responsibility is a form of self-care, part of a portfolio of wellness under a mature sense of agency. We need to make enough money to live well. We also need to manage our money wisely. But equally important to making enough money is the importance of not making too much. That money is often imagined as the ultimate enabler does not make it so. In fact, money disables as much as it enables. Along with the luxuries that money buys comes a host of entitlements that corrode our character and blunt our perceptions. This blindness imposed by privilege finds vivid illustration in the HBO Series The White Lotus, where wealthy patrons play out their foibles to disastrous ends. The characters are ludicrous to everyone except themselves. Their privilege suspends them in a reality both stilted and peculiar. Their tantrums are absurd in light of other people’s problems. They are oblivious to their own pettiness. Their privilege militates against self-understanding. The coddled prince lives in frustration, vexed by a world that can never service his needs. The blindness that comes with wealth creates misery by strengthening the prison of self-concern and circumvents the adversity that nourishes wisdom and maturity. Too much money is detrimental to the soul.
How we are with money is one of the strongest indicators of our inner fibre. Maturity is marked by contentment, balance, steadiness and responsibility in matters of money. Volatile swings in fortune, perpetual debt, profligate spending, indicate a psyche arrested in its development. An examined life includes an investigation into the values, impulses, and patterns that shape our attitude toward money. We conduct this investigation with warm and compassionate curiosity, holding each part of ourselves with empathy and unconditional regard. There may be a neglected part of ourselves that is relegated to silence, that has learned to be loud through an ostentatious display of wealth. We can find this inner child and extend to her a supportive hand. We may have buried the gold deep in our unconscious in the process of socialization. We toil and struggle in exchange for coins that pale in comparison to the treasure within. Ongoing reflection and psychotherapy can help us recover that treasure.