At the Heart of the Money Matter

Money is the commonly accepted measure of material value, but what does it really mean to us? That is a question I explored in an article I wrote for a British psychology magazine 30 years ago, "Money Is A Mirror: How Much Is Enough?"

Do you know anyone that is totally comfortable with their relationship with money? Money is one of our culture's most emotionally loaded concepts: it is a metaphor for all our worst fears, our highest expectations and those parts of our lives we can and cannot control. Wealthy, poor or making ends meet, rarely is anyone satisfied with their financial position.

Many people spend years trying to come to peace with money and that peace is hard to come by. In a culture obsessed with money, most of us don't have an answer to the question "how much is enough?" Some of the reasons it is so hard to answer this questions are:

1. Many of us don't know what matters most to us at the heart of the matter. What makes you happy? What brings you joy and contentment? We are bombarded with marketing messages telling us what we should have and all the new products and services that are "out there." One small problem: what we think we SHOULD have, may not be what makes us happy.

2. "Enoughness" follows from living purposefully. Many of us struggle with what brings us meaning and purpose. If we do what others tell us or define ourselves from the outside in rather than the inside out, both purpose and "enoughness" are hard to find.

3. Defining enough requires both a spiritual grounding to identify what really matters and the ability to translate the actual cost of what matters into financial terms.

Psychologically and culturally, we have projected onto money our most basic needs, our deepest fears and elusive things we hunger for. This is what I. mean when I say "money is a mirror."

Here are some examples:

1. Money is power. It comes with the ability to influence other people. How people hold and use their power varies. Some use money to serve. Others use money to manipulate.

2. Money is safety and security. It enables people to meet their basic needs for survival: food, shelter and protection. It can also bring us the ability to access resources that can keep us safe and secure.

3. Money separates people. Defining people by how much money they have, "the haves" and "have nots" or the "upper class," "middle class" or "lower class," is a common cultural practice. Neighborhoods often reflect the financial common ground of a particular group of people. Renting an apartment in a multi-family home suggests a different social subgroup than living in a gated community of homeowners. Disagreements over money can cause rifts in families. Long standing friendships can be thrown into question when the financial position of one friend greatly changes, but not the other.

4. Money is all the things we want in our heart of hearts. This includes freedom, happiness, peace and love.

5. Money is a responsibility and for some a burden. Managing money takes a lot of time and energy.

6. Money creates opportunity. Money can enable possibility. Money can open doors.

7. Money is acknowledgement. Money is often a reward for our labors. Sadly, different professional areas are valued financially very differently. Someone who works on Wall Street makes far more money than a grammar school teacher. The professions that are most highly paid are not always the ones that make the greatest contribution to society.

How much is enough?

The key issue with money is not how much you have but how you hold what you have. Getting caught in the cycle of "I never have enough" creates a trap which impedes the quality of life. I like to answer the question "how much is enough?" by saying "whatever I need to do the things I really care about." The answer is different for every person. Someone who enjoys living in the country might need a very different amount than someone who really loves living in the heart of the city. If someone is single and unattached, their needs are very different than if they have children. At different times in outlives, we may answer the question differently.

Learning to know ourselves is both an introspective process, and sometimes a process of trying out something that interests us and seeing if the experience increases or decreases of sense of interest. We need to look to our hearts as well as our minds to find answers. Learning to become honest with oneself takes time and courage.

I believe it is also important to look at our wants and needs in the context of others and their needs. If we are afraid of life and do not trust we will find what we need, we might hold onto money and things tightly. We may find ourselves building fortresses and cushions of protection so we don't end up left in the lurch. In doing so, we may be taking more than our share out of fear. This behavior can become a cycle of stuckiness built on feelings of "I'll never have enough."

In our culture today, we have too many examples of people who are ruled by greed with little conscience. The media is full of stories and images of people who lie, break the law and do whatever they want with little care for the consequence of their actions. There is a very high spiritual cost to living this way. And it breaks down the fabric of community and interconnection that is so important for all of us to have what we really need.

Developing a healthy sense of "enough," while also incorporating a sense of social consciousness, is far more likely to lead to peace than living from a place of fear or great. Gratitude and appreciation feed the spirit and often generate more of the things we really want and need.

Becoming grounded about your financial needs, your financial resources and your financial habits is also a key part of the money equation. How often do you spend money without tracking what you've spent or if you have enough for all your basic needs if you make a spending decision? Are you afraid to add up your expenses for fear of what the number might be? These kinds of habits leave us ungrounded. Keeping a money log where you track what you spend, and what you have to spend allows you to compare income and outflow consciously. It helps ground your money choices in money reality and lets you truly take care of yourself.

Greed Is A Terminal Disease

While intellectually, many of us know that anything taken to an extreme can lose its goodness, practically, our culture seems to have forgotten that this is so. While the Wall Street culture promoted the idea that greed is good, just as a person who lives on a diet of junk food will ultimately become seriously ill, too much greed for too long exacts a toll. This toll is felt by the greedy, the people taken advantage of or shut out from the food chain, and by society as a whole.

Bernie Madoff's uncontained greed not only led to his sentence of life in prison, but also to the suicide of one of his sons. Greed on Wall Street, in business, and in the political arena, has left countless people adrift, unemployed, homeless and displaced, without hope of any change in their circumstances. And the greedy who put so many people in such difficult positions turn their head the other way and watch their bank accounts grow.

We have example after example that greed is a terminal disease, and perhaps an addiction in our culture where success is measured in financial terms, not in meaning, contribution, and making a difference in the world. In his article, The Real Social Security, published in Ode Magazine, Kenyan microcredit bank managing director, Kimanthi Mutua notes that the only REAL social security is our collectiveness.

Mutua notes, "Centuries of individualism and materialism have destroyed most of this essential support structure in the West." We have no collective infrastructure to catch people when times are tough, and falling through the cracks of life is all too familiar a risk of hard times and forces beyond our control.

While Americans may look at Africans as residents of third world nations, emotionally and spiritually, America is a third world nation, or worse. The richness of daily connections with people, face to face, where people know and care for one another, cannot be made up through bonding in virtual reality. Mutua notes that in Africa, people connect in the daily reality of their lives. They naturally support each other, which builds an experience of community and compensates for the hardships of their lives."

Mutua notes as well that based on data from a World Value Survey, "most people in Africa do not report feeling less happy than people in developed nations despite being the poorest people on the planet. African is a living example of the fact that more money does not bring more happiness."

So, if we can stop looking at our own reflections in the narcissistic mirror that is so common today, perhaps we can look at ourselves through the lens of other cultures that may be more spiritually and emotionally rich than we are. As we are lost in the trance of working ourselves to death, and pursuing the American Dream, that a Psychology Today article notes has transformed into the American Nightmare, we lose sight of what really matters, and what we really need to survive.

Copyright 2011 Linda Marks

See "American Nightmare" in April 2011 issue of Psychology Today, and "The Real Social Security" by Kimanthi Mutua in the October 2007 issue of Ode Magazine for more.

Q

It just seems counterintuitive that by bullying people and focusing on one's own self-interest at the expense of others, one can achieve long-term success, and even be part of a sustainable society.
Today, sadly, there are too many examples of abuses of power, and societal structures where the bully emerges victorious and dominant. To make matters worse, many "common people," feel powerless to change or improve their circumstances, because those "in power" have made it virtually impossible to organize and do so.

So, it was very inspiring to read an article on Alternet today, written by University of California, Berkeley writer Yasmin Anwar, entitled, "Do Kinder People Have An Evolutionary Advantage." According to research conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, there is "a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive."

This just plain makes sense. The people I define as most successful, and in decades prior to our current ones, were even successful in business, were those who displayed nurturing, compassionate and altruistic traits as well as good skills, pragmatism and a timely vision.

I worked at Digital Equipment Corporation from 1978 - 1985, a company whose motto was "do the right thing." That was what attracted me to work for Digital, and until market forces and too many MBA's diluted the entrepreneurial culture of founder Ken Olsen, this was truly practiced, not just preached at all levels: with customers, employees, stockholders, the community and other stakeholders.

My last organizational development project at Digital involved bringing 5 business units housed in the same complex in Merrimack, NH back to life. And by building a collaborative team, we succeeded in doing so in 9 months time. When I left, I gave my team members t-shirts that said "empowered and loving it." Not quite the way most people feel today when they come home from their corporate jobs.

The 1980's just seemed to be a more functional time in our society than the first decade of this century. And perhaps it was because people were more in touch with the empathy in our genes than they are now. Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley and colleague Sarina Rodrigues of Oregon State University have found that "people with a particular variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are more adept at reading the emotional state of others, and get less stressed out under tense circumstances."

Oxytocin, which is the love or bonding hormone, is secreted by lactating mothers to help bond with their babies, but also can be generated by snuggling, hugging, heartfelt communication, doing yoga or petting your dog. It makes me wonder if we focus more on emotional literacy and try to raise our own EQ's if we will raise the level of "social oxytocin, so to speak, and change the qualities of interactions in our world.

People who take care of others and focus on the greater good, do receive sincere appreciation from those they help. Today's world of self-interest might call the sincere public servant a "chump," but to me, that reflects a cultural heart wound and a generally low EQ.

Perhaps, if parents start modeling altruism, care and service to their children, we can build the foundation for a higher capacity for empathy in the next generation. Without this capacity, those invested in the "dog eat dog" model might destroy our ability to survive.