Idiot Money
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  • #3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.
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  • #21: The merits of money are negative
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  • #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
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  • #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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  • Leaving the palace
  • The deeper and more hidden the attachment, the harder it is to remove
  • The paradox of money
  • There is no way

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#67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream

27th December, 2021

Previous#66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)Next#68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?

Last updated 3 years ago

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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that most of the stuff you’re attached to you don’t know you’re attached to, including:

  • why money is the ultimate siren call to shoddy substitutes for stuff that’s worth anything;

  • while money is the best at leading us astray, it’s also the best tool we have for digging ourselves out of the mess we’ve been led astray into; and

  • how your relationship to money turn out to be a useful bridge for showing that the core messages of eastern and western philosophy are essentially identical.

This is part 18 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu .

Most of the stuff you’re attached to you don’t know you’re attached to. That’s how being deeply attached to something works. And this is a huge problem… especially when it comes to the common philosophies of money that secretly govern how you make it, use it, and live with it.

You see lots of unusual things on a meditation retreat, especially when your eyes are closed.

Sitting in silence for ten hours a day for ten days, eyes shut, studying your skin and bones and brain and breath and all the fun that’s trapped in or flowing around them can be weirdly hallucinogenic.

You also see lots of unusual things when you finally open your eyes (and your mouth) on the last day.

One that stands out for a lot of people is the number of your fellow retreaters that were drawn to spend 10 days very intensely doing absolutely nothing because they had recently lost a faith. Of the first five people I spoke to when the silence was lifted, two of them had got to the last stage of becoming a priest before they decided it was all bullshit.

While this no doubt offers handy succour in the short-term, it’s pretty dangerous in a ton of other ways: most immediately when challenging a long-held belief becomes rebounding into something equally silly.

Lost a faith? Find another!

Beaten an addiction? Watch another rush in to fill the void.

As Jung explained in The Undiscovered Self: ‘You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.’ Or, as H.L. Mencken put it rather more pithily: ‘A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was formerly an ass – and is probably one still.’

Leaving the palace

What’s this got to do with how well you turn money into a Good Life?

Just about every way we stray with money can be characterised by succumbing to a substandard substitute – trying to meet a real need with something that makes sense only with a distorted view of reality.

On the plus side, while money is the best at leading us astray, it’s also the best tool we have for digging ourselves out of the mess we’ve been led astray into.

To understand why, we need to revisit what we mean by ‘attachment’ and ‘addiction’.

The deeper and more hidden the attachment, the harder it is to remove

We ended by asking: What if the problem wasn’t the object of the belief, but the system of belief that deified the object? We asked too whether there were a better way to live than simply ‘picking the best thing to believe in’?

In answering this question in a way that’s relevant to how well you make, use, and live with money, we have to go a lot deeper than saying ‘don’t be attached, man!’ or even ‘don’t be attached to not being attached, maaaaaan.’

No one sets out to become addicted to anything, and when they are they don’t believe they are, so telling them not to be is as pointless as telling someone who didn’t set out to spend more than they earn to live within their means.

You jump to conclusions, however silly, when you see no saner alternative.

  • ‘Yeah, I know smoking’s not great for me, but what else gets me what I (believe) I want?’

  • ‘Living in a palace left my soul hungry, so I guess the answer lies in aestheticism.’

  • ‘Aestheticism made my stomach hungry, so I guess better to be in a palace after all.’

If there are two things you can count on from the average person’s relationship to money – whether they worship it or denounce it – it’s that they simultaneously say there’s obviously more to life than money, and make the majority of their decisions as if there weren’t.

The problem is never an attachment to money, or stuff. Outside of object-obsessions operating at the psycho-stalker level, money and stuff have plenty of obvious alternatives.

The problem is the shoddy story someone tells themselves about how to live with money in a way that’s faintly meaningful, that affords opportunities for flowing, rather than distractions from floundering.

The problem is being wired for attachment, rather than wisdom, and seeking ‘freedom’ as the ‘prize’ of an unwinnable game, rather than as freedom from the fantasy world in which the game takes place.

As the 9th Karmapa Wangchug Dorje wrote in Mahamudra: The Ocean of True Meaning: ‘Liberation occurs through recognizing just by that which you are bound.’

The paradox of money

This is why money is both the strongest siren for succumbing to deceptively simplistic solutions, but also the best tool we have for overcoming our tendency to attachment.

You overcome attachments by seeing the world more clearly, more broadly – becoming aware of alternative views that could be just as true as the narrow one currently governing your short-sighted behaviour.

You do this by expanding the maps of meaning you have constructed in your brain.

You do this by challenging the existing maps; by examining your life choices.

Because money plays a role in more of your decisions than anything else, your credit-card statements are the best place to start living a more examined life.

Mentally reduce your possessions to zero and build back up from scratch. Imagine a choice between some ‘stuff’ and the opportunity to help someone you care about. Is it still that difficult to know what you do that gives you energy rather than leaves you feeling flat? Bollocks is it.

There is no way

The point of the Buddha’s origin story is the understanding that whatever the state of one’s mattress, the state of one’s soul is under constant threat by the self-deceptive forces of attachment. But that there is a way out, and it’s not by either blindly embracing or denouncing material comfort.

It’s not by denouncing anything, but renouncing (a la Socrates) living in an unexamined way, and renouncing (a la the Buddha) living looking through self-deceptive lenses.

And thus did your relationship to money turn out to be a useful bridge for showing that at their core, the OG messages of eastern and western philosophy are essentially identical. Huzzah!

As Stephen Batchelor wrote:

Like the Prince Siddhartha we may have to slip away from the palace at night while everyone is sleeping. However, this should not be naively interpreted as meaning that it is necessary to actually reject our homes, families, social obligations, and so forth; we can easily do all these things without ever undergoing any radical change within ourselves.

Money is the best tool for this radical change. But we use it to build walls – distractions of numbers, stuff to have, and excuses not to examine our lives; rather than to knock them down – to free ourselves from such self-deceptive, self-destructive bullshit.

Our daily money engagements are central to determining who we are and the goodness or otherwise of our life. There is nothing more crucial to do consciously. Engaged, conscious choices come from the way we relate with the world. This is the job not of investment analytics, but of philosophy. A better life requires better behaviours, which requires better thinking, which requires better philosophy

We’ll look at what renunciation really means and its implications next time.

Despite the whole thing being very specifically secular, more lost-faithers followed; each one there for the promises of promised lands, rather than the .

As I wrote right at :

We’re already pretty prone to jumping from one simplistic but shoddy conclusion to another. Money makes this orders of magnitude worse. Because money’s great attraction is that it offers the ultimate easy answer to every question. The trouble with easy answers, however, is that they’re often a good indication that they’re either wrong, or . Possibly both.

In , we noted that the problem of being led into dumb life choices by an attachment to money – whether prince or pauper – was not a money problem, but an attachment one.

As we’ve seen (especially in Idiot Money and ), addiction – regularly allocating your money, time, and energy resources towards stuff that makes your life worse – isn’t about compulsive desire, but about seeing no alternatives to doing these things.

‘Some sort of middling amount of material goods – “” is clearly the answer.’

‘Always say yes!’ ‘Always say no!’ ‘!’

it runs through everything we do, money is the best place to focus whatever energy we can muster for behaviour change. Embedded in our lives means embedded in our brains, whether we like it or not. Few things excite our emotions like money, yet because we pretend we become robots in our dealings with it, we get a distorted view of money, ourselves, and how the two interact.

However, this requires paying attention. And as we saw in , one of the main motivations for making a ton of money is to not have to pay attention to it.

It’s often said that we make poor financial decisions – waste money on stuff that doesn’t make our lives better – because we don’t know well enough what actually makes our lives better. This is nonsense. As I wrote in , we’re not crap at knowing what we want, as is often claimed. We know what we want when we pay attention. We’re just crap at paying attention.

As I wrote :

neuroplasticity training
the start of the book
the question wasn’t worth asking
Idiot Money #65
#31
#32
knowing my number
Always say yes in these circumstances, and no in these other ones
Because
Idiot Money #8
Idiot Money #41
here
#72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
here