Idiot Money
Go to the bookTwitterSign up for updates
  • Hello.
  • Whole-Brain Personal Finance
  • #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
  • #6: What the bloody hell is a ‘relationship with money’ anyway?
  • #7: What fund managers can teach us about what really matters
  • #8: “I want money so I don’t have to think about money”
  • #9: Idiot Profile: An oligarch with a gun
  • #10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
  • #11: If all the world's a stage, then what does it matter where you stand?
  • #12: Financial Independence: An (Actual) Idiot’s Guide
  • #13: Let’s talk about money, baby
  • #14: New Year's Non-Idiotic Financial Resolutions
  • #15: New year, old message
  • #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
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #4: You can break a whole into parts, but you cannot build a whole from parts
  • A way of life, not a way to life

Was this helpful?

#87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot

16th May, 2022

Previous#86: Five regrets of the richNext#88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely

Last updated 2 years ago

Was this helpful?

Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that while you can break down a whole life for analysis, you cannot build one up from its parts, despite the typical money worldview believing that this is exactly how to live well, including:

  • If you believe successfully living full of belonging and connection and whatnot is something to focus on AFTER acquiring lots of stuff, then you could not be doing it more wrong.

  • The goodness of a ‘thing’ is borderline irrelevant when seen in appropriate context.

  • Money manifests not only as a form of brain damage, but also masks the very damage it causes.

You know money with only half a brain. And it’s the stupid half. This prevents you making more (a lot more) of your money. By mapping Iain McGilchrist’s work to our relationships with money in this of lessons, I hope to both introduce you to the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, and help you do something about this.

Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, or The Matter with Things.

Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #4: You can break a whole into parts, but you cannot build a whole from parts

Look at the picture above. The ‘B’ side is what happens when you ask a patient with right-hemisphere brain damage to build a human from bits.

Hilarious, right?

It’s less funny when you understand that money damages your brain in a similar way.

That crazy kid on the right is basically how people put together their financial lives.

When it comes to money and its role in living well, people act like they’re toasters, rather than people: that the way to optimal living is to optimise every part. To a Western mind at least, this couldn’t be more tempting. It also couldn’t be more misguided.

*

In humans, just as in animals and birds, it turns out that each hemisphere attends to the world in a different way – and the ways are consistent. The right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focussed attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a ‘whole’: something very different.

Central to this – and with jolly important implications for helping you understand how everybody ends up being so silly with money all the damn time – is that your left hemisphere (when it comes to living with money: the stupid half of your brain) builds a model of ‘reality’ by building things up from each component part it lays its narrowly focused attention on, while the right hemisphere (which despite it being the wiser half, money makes you basically ignore) takes in the whole.

The right hemisphere doesn’t care for collapsing things into categories so they can be modelled, because it understands that reality doesn’t work like that, and it’s cool with whatever heretofore unexperienced way unique things present themselves, without needing to make shit up so it can pretend it knows what’s going on, and what’s going to go on.

Although you may imagine that you construct the world by putting together the bits that your gaze lands on, adding the pieces one by one and recognising that this must be – tada! – your living room, in fact it is the other way round: you take in the whole first, and then your gaze is attracted by particular parts. […] This correlates with a shift of activity from the right to the left hemisphere.

‘So what?’ you may ask. ‘What’s this got to do with being better with money? Money is literally the most building-blocky thing there is. The whole value of money rests upon its universality, its divisibility, its fungibility: the fact you can swap one bit of money for another bit of money of the same size without affecting anything. It’s all just numbers in a spreadsheet.’

This is true, as far as it goes.

But it’s irrelevant.

Because you don’t live in a spreadsheet.

The relationships between the parts don’t go to make up the whole, but derive from the existence of the whole.

While there are certainly those that try (and hell, I’ve flirted with it myself, before a few mind-jigglingly transformative experiences woke up the wiser bits of my brain), if you can’t feel the quality of your relationships, your health, or your life, without consulting some quantities banged into Excel, then you’re probably missing something more serious than a few unsynced data points. It’d be like thinking the quality of a date were determined by ‘optimising’ every part from the venue, to your clothes, to your insightful roster of questions (and yes, pre-mind-jiggling, I’ve been there and done that embarrassingly often).

(Not that the quantities are pointless – of course they’re not! But their place is as an assistant in the analysis part of the ongoing examination-and-refinement process, not as the judge!)

A way of life, not a way to life

Your left hemisphere does exactly the same thing. It turns you, the human, into you, the machine.

To the left hemisphere, all that matters is the object in front of you. Use all the objects in the ‘right’ way… follow all the procedures ‘correctly’, and the life they add up to will be all right too. How could it not be?

To the left hemisphere, there is no zooming out. Only zooming in. Look after the details, it believes, and everything else not only will fall into place, but must do so.

When you live in a world where money is seen as the only constraint worth worrying about (as opposed to mundane human constraints like time, energy, values, and so on) you not only do idiotic things, but you make it more likely you’ll do more idiotic things next time too.

This ties back to the core importance that your two hemispheres pay attention to the world in two very different ways. And if you pay attention in the narrow-focused way, you miss all the good stuff.

Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact.

How you live – how you relate to things, not how many things you have – determines how well you live. The way in which you become somebody matters; the things do not.

Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:

A few weeks ago, , and how those different ‘takes’ are responsible for the reality you experience.

And because making the most of the money in your life is about and its role as an eye-opening of your life choices. It’s not about what you’ve made out of it in its role as a blinding bunch of building blocks.

The silliness of seeing life as the sum of some parts is seen in every expression of the ‘’: my name for the idea that the Good Life is something we arrive at, usually found in the formula: ‘when X is sorted, then I will be able to do Y and feel Z’. The Arrival Fallacy derives from a belief there’s a ‘number’ (or a size of house, or a job title, or a flash new gadget) which, when obtained, unlocks the ‘financial freedom’ levels of life’s great game, where all worries whoosh away, and where unicorns frolic in the garden.

As I wrote , ‘The Arrival Fallacy tricks us into treating a human journey like a robotic production line. It’s oh-so-tempting, but oh-so-futile.’

Yet, as I wrote about when looking at construal level theory, and when looking at attentional scaling, wisdom (and making the most of the money in your life) requires doing both zooming in and zooming out concurrently: seeing your whole life when acting on each next few decisions, like a chess grandmaster conceptualising piece movements within a wider vision (a right-hemisphere skill, by the way; novice chess players are left-hemisphere dominant).

This is obvious when taken to extremes – the billionaire who buys all the things just because they can afford them is manifestly not improving their life. Yet how many people basically run the same script that says being able to afford something is a valid input into a purchase-making decision? (Not being able to afford something is a valid input, as I wrote .)

we looked at the fundamentally different ways you pay attention to the world
your relationship with it
accounting record
Arrival Fallacy
here
here
here
here
#89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview
series