Idiot Money
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  • #1: The correlation between having money, managing it well, and living a good life
  • #2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it is
  • #3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.
  • #4: Spending £450k on being bad parents
  • #5: Idiot Profile: Private-Jet Guy
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  • #7: What fund managers can teach us about what really matters
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  • #9: Idiot Profile: An oligarch with a gun
  • #10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
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  • #12: Financial Independence: An (Actual) Idiot’s Guide
  • #13: Let’s talk about money, baby
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  • #16: "Just tell me what to do"
  • #17: How to choose better investments
  • #18: You cannot count. This leads you to make idiotic financial decisions.
  • #19: What's your number?
  • #20: 7 magnificent money lessons that have nothing to do with money
  • #21: The merits of money are negative
  • #22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldview
  • #23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them
  • #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
  • #25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisons
  • #26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money
  • #27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview
  • #28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2
  • #29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1
  • #30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3
  • #31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2
  • #32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)
  • #33: The six financial stress responses: what's yours?
  • #34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics
  • #35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3
  • #36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing
  • #37: The ABC of money, part 7: financial nobility, step 4
  • #38: The best diet advice and the best financial advice are the same
  • #39: The ABC of money, part 8: The Eightfold Path and interdependence
  • #40: The dance of becoming wiser with money
  • #41: Building a better money brain (the ABC of money, part 9: neuroplasticity)
  • #42: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 1)
  • #43: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 2)
  • #44: A story of lions and loss
  • #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
  • #46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is
  • #47: Idiot Profiles: Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction, Teenage Ozymandias, and me
  • #48: Living mindfully with money (the ABC of money, part 12)
  • #49: Give, give, give, me more, more, more
  • #50: Our most costly money problems are the ones we don't see
  • #51: Align what you care for with what you care about
  • #52: Do what only you can do
  • #53: Money for many means happily ever after… but after what?
  • #54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment
  • #55: Identifying your hidden money addictions
  • #56: Treating your hidden money addictions
  • #57: Idiot Money Maths #1: How much does it cost to keep you happy?
  • #58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom
  • #59: The ABC of money, part 15: freedom to, freedom from, freedom for
  • #60: If you go there blindfolded, you probably won’t like where you end up
  • #61: Idiot Money Maths #2: What is your default unit of spending?
  • #62: Balance isn’t stillness
  • #63: A problem shared
  • #64: How to live well, even in a palace (the ABC of money, part 16)
  • #65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)
  • #66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)
  • #67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream
  • #68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?
  • #69: Red Pill Financial Planning: Escaping the Money Matrix
  • #70: The nasty narrowness of number-governed living
  • #71: Getting into Financial Flow
  • #72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
  • #73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choices
  • #74: Kondo your credit-card statements
  • #75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)
  • #76: Forget about improving your decisions. Focus on improving your decision-making skills
  • #77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)
  • #78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
  • #79: Your money worldview is (literally) half-brained
  • #80: Cost-consciousness beats cost-cutting
  • #81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short
  • #82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
  • #83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention
  • #84: The value of (almost) everything to you is nothing
  • #85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips
  • #86: Five regrets of the rich
  • #87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot
  • #88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely
  • #89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview
  • #90: Wanting wisdom, craving financial fortune cookies
  • #91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as well
  • #92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?
  • #93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
  • #94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up
  • #95: The tyranny of the takeaway
  • #96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth
  • #97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
  • #98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem
  • #99: Is what you’re doing for and with money working?
  • #100: Where to start, where to go, what to do about what’s stopping you
  • #101: The life cycle of a financial idiot
  • #102: I can read your financial mind
  • #103: Don’t worry about playing a game better when there’s a better game to play
  • #104: Reflections on two years of this newsletter, and why I’m taking a six-month break
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#22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldview

15th February, 2021

Previous#21: The merits of money are negativeNext#23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them

Last updated 4 years ago

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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. The newsletter that models for Rorschach tests.

This week: becoming wiser with money by understanding that meaningful stories are written by minds, not by money.

Are you telling your story through money, or is an inherited and imposed money story telling itself through you?

In other ways, it’s a disaster. The reason the weeds of our wiring around money are so hard to even acknowledge, let alone do something about, is because so many of them have their roots in our childhoods (and your parents’ childhoods, and so on).

Of vastly greater import than any actual money we may inherit from our parents are their money stories. Not least because we inherit them at a time when we have zero capacity to challenge them, and zero money to prove that they are probably bollocks. This can set us up for some pretty tragic life choices when we do.

Get these worldview-shaping stories right, and the money doesn’t really matter. Get them wrong, and before you know it, nothing else matters as much, and you end up with the mind, if not the means, of a member of the Bullingdon Club.

As psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz explains in The Examined Life:

Our childhoods leave in us stories like this – stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.

Despite dozens of client conversations, covering many millions of pounds’ worth of transactions, I was continually surprised by how many money actions were taken that, when put on the spot with innocent questions, the actor didn’t understand. And while mouths may loudly deny such a deep-rooted connection between searching for meaning and searching for money, actions while they don’t speak more loudly, do speak more honestly.

I’ve known people excitedly dive into the details of tax-mitigation strategies for hours, only for them to abandon them in a second when asked if such action were a fair reflection of who they wanted to be. I’ve known people on the brink of trading in months of hard-earned opportunity, and stressful weeks of research for a purchase, only for it to be kiboshed when asked if it were likely to ‘work’, i.e. make their life sustainably better. Or ‘did it work last time?’ Or ‘did it work for the million other people that tried it before you?’

Plenty has been written about the dangers of praising children for outcomes over inputs, because it ties senses of worth to achievements over existence, and forces everyone to live in a world where ‘success’ is valued more than competence.

Being present builds a child's confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive, if we've not been attentive to her?

Less is written about how the same story plays out with money. Praise expensive things and your sense of worth becomes unhelpfully – and self-deceptively – material. The child’s inevitable aiming for praise becomes the adult’s inevitable aiming for money.

*

The duty of our parents is to define the universe of the possible. To define the worlds in which whatever story we decide to tell with our life is told. The children of a parent who started their own business will think this more of a possibility than the children of a lifelong employee of a single firm. The children of a professional athlete will know that their parent is less a superhuman and more a person that didn’t shirk from the challenges of their practice.

We are all highly susceptible to the limitations of our parents’ views of the possible. So susceptible, that we remain in a psychological sense, children. Especially, I think, when it comes to that most interwoven of aspects of our lives – money. This is a huge problem. Because children are idiots.

‘The source of neurosis in the young is, as a rule,’ wrote Jung, ‘the collision between the forces of reality and an inadequate, infantile attitude.’ And ‘Mankind in respect to the most essential things, is psychologically in a state of childhood […] The great majority of people need authority, guidance, and laws.’

Many, mistakenly seeing money as a path to a meaningful life, also see it as a tangible sign of ‘freedom’. Yet money has no inherent meaning, and, to quote Jung again, ‘It is only the meaningful that sets us free […] The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.’

Yet meaningful stories are written by minds, not by money.

It is a central theme of that money, in the way it is relevant to your ability to live a Good Life, is about stories. About narrative, not number. .

This is wonderful, in a way. Because we have tremendous capacity to . And because if you’re monetarily unlucky, it needn’t bother you anywhere near as much as you (and the rest of the world) may be prone to believing it should.

As Grosz continues (echoing the story from ):

This is part of why despite ‘’ being the reason a lot of people get rich, getting rich doesn’t stop those people thinking about money. It’s also why, as I wrote , there’s a depressing tendency among those that have the opportunity to wait for a personally fulfilling and fitting job to take work primarily for the money anyway. Come from a place where money meant meaning, and you’ll head off that way in search of it too.

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