# Hello.
In case you were wondering where you are...
**This newsletter has** [**moved to Substack**](https://moneyblind.substack.com/?r=2o448s\&utm_campaign=pub\&utm_medium=web)**.**
This archive will hang around for a bit. You can dance through via the menu on the left, or check out some highlights below:
### A few popular posts
[#26: Consider the pineapple](/26-consider-the-pineapple-the-perfect-symbol-of-idiot-money) – The story of my favourite symbol of money idiocy, starring St Paul's Cathedral, prisoners rioting because of being made to eat lobster, and taking fruit for a walk.
[#78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read](/78-how-to-lose-2-1-2-stone-in-6-months-an-intro-to-the-best-non-fiction-book-ive-ever-read) – A mind-expanding story about expanding one’s waistline in Vegas with a not-very-subtle application to why we fail to make more of the money in our lives.
[#97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like](/97-what-seeing-your-financial-life-more-clearly-looks-like) – Some super-important topics and some ways people typically approach them idiotically... or dodge the obvious idiocy but caught in clever traps... and what it looks like to act more wisely instead.
### The clip shows
*Should you be more into bullet points than arguments, some summaries of a bunch of posts at once.*
* [#50](/50-our-most-costly-money-problems-are-the-ones-we-dont-see) – Covering #1-#9
* [#60](/60-if-you-go-there-blindfolded-you-probably-wont-like-where-you-end-up) – Covering #10-#19
* [#70](/70-the-nasty-narrowness-of-number-governed-living) – Covering #20-#29
* [#80](/80-cost-consciousness-beats-cost-cutting) – Covering #30-#39
* [#90](/90-wanting-wisdom-craving-financial-fortune-cookies) – Covering #40-#49
* [#100](/100-where-to-start-where-to-go-what-to-do-about-whats-stopping-you) – Covering #50-#59
### Five important points
* [How some basic psychotherapy can save you wasting a ton of money](/22-the-psychoanalysis-of-money-or-how-to-screw-up-your-childrens-financial-worldview)
* [Why being able to afford something is an idiotically invalid reason for buying something](/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)
* [What a relationship with money is, and why it's so important to understand it before you worry about actually having any money](/6-what-the-bloody-hell-is-a-relationship-with-money-anyway)
* [The threshold theory of good living (aka why the benefits of money are negative)](/21-the-merits-of-money-are-negative)
* [The three types of financial freedom](/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for) (warning: tons of people have said this has most changed how they view the money in their life)
### Five silly stories
*Point and laugh at people doing dumb stuff with money.*
* [Famous Russian Oligarch guy wasting his life on a Scottish hill](/9-idiot-profile-an-oligarch-with-a-gun)
* [Parents parenting very ineffectively](/4-spending-gbp450k-on-being-bad-parents)
* [An idiot wasting his life on a private jet](/5-idiot-profile-private-jet-guy)
* [Me wasting my life at a posh dinner with investment folk](/7-what-fund-managers-can-teach-us-about-what-really-matters)
* [Why peeking out of the curtains is not the place to look for investment advice](/66-what-do-blackheath-people-do-a-story-about-how-not-to-do-financial-planning)
### Post series
*Occasionally, I link a few newsletters together because I think an idea is too important not to cover, but too complex to cover in one go. Each post in a series contains a link at the bottom to the next one in that series.*
#### Whole-Brain Personal Finance
Mapping the two best books I've ever read for understanding the world and how to live within it to how to make the most of your money.
This series is important enough to get [its own page](/whole-brain-personal-finance). Because paying attention to money with only half a brain is no way to live a whole life. Lesson #5 is a sort-of summary of some key points.
#### The ABC of Money (using Buddhist philosophy as a framework for seeing money more clearly)
* [Part 1](/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons) – Mental poisons and their antidote
* [Part 2](/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview) – An overview of the Four Noble Truths
* [Part 3](/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1) – The First Noble Truth
* [Part 4](/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2) – The Second Noble Truth
* [Part 5](/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5) – Impermanence
* [Part 6](/35-the-abc-of-money-part-6) – The Third Noble Truth
* [Part 7](/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4) – The Fourth Noble Truth
* [Part 8](/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence) – The Eightfold Path and interdependence
* [Part 9](/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity) – Neuroplasticity
* [Part 10](/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt) – Meditation: what it isn't
* [Part 11](/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is) – Meditation: what it is
* [Part 12](/48-living-mindfully-with-money-the-abc-of-money-part-12) – Living mindfully with money
* [Part 13](/54-the-abc-of-money-part-13-financial-enlightenment) – Financial enlightenment
* [Part 14](/58-the-abc-of-money-part-14-the-secret-shackles-of-financial-freedom) – Financial freedom, part 1
* [Part 15](/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for) – Financial freedom, part 2
* [Part 16](/64-how-to-live-well-even-in-a-palace-the-abc-of-money-part-16) – How to live well, even in a palace
* [Part 17](/65-denunciation-is-still-attachment-the-abc-of-money-part-17) – Denunciation is still attachment
* [Part 18](/67-the-abc-of-money-part-18-addicted-to-a-dream) – Addicted to a dream
* [Part 19](/72-the-abc-of-money-part-19-denunciation-bad-renunciation-good) – Denunciation bad, renunciation good
* [Part 20](/77-seeing-your-financial-world-more-clearly-the-abc-of-money-part-20) – Seeing your financial world more clearly
* [Part 21](/82-the-overlooked-truth-of-reality-that-is-messing-up-how-you-live-with-money) – The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
* [Part 22](/93-some-personal-finance-puzzles-and-how-not-to-solve-them) – Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
* [Part 23](/96-deep-wealth-v-shallow-wealth) – Deep wealth v shallow wealth
* [Part 24](/97-what-seeing-your-financial-life-more-clearly-looks-like) – What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
#### All investments are gambles (my favourite way to think about investing)
* [Part 1](/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1) – The importance of internalising the insights of understanding all investments are gambles
* [Part 2](/28-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-2-the-approach) – The secret to successful long-term gambling and its application to choosing investments
* [Part 3](/30-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-3) – The starting point for choosing investments
* [Part 4](/34-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-4-betting-beyond-the-basics) – Investment options beyond the basics
* [Part 5](/36-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-5-cost-benefit-investing) – Cost-benefit investing
#### Idiot Money Maths
*When it comes to using money in a meaningful way, the importance of the numbers, from using price tags as a measure of value, to fretting about growth forecasts, is grossly overblown.*
*We tend towards tunnel vision on the most misleading numbers (such as an investment-growth forecast, or a retirement ‘number’) while remaining ignorant of the insightful ones (such as the role of the unequivocal accounting record of our life choices in living an examined, wiser, life).*
*Some numbers, however, are actually helpful. This occasional series highlights the most important numbers for you to know.*
* [How much does it cost to keep you happy?](/57-idiot-money-maths-1-how-much-does-it-cost-to-keep-you-happy)
* [What is your default unit of spending?](/61-idiot-money-maths-2-what-is-your-default-unit-of-spending)
* [The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)](/75-the-rule-of-72-and-its-oft-overlooked-implications)
# Whole-Brain Personal Finance
The ultimate guide to making more of your money, built from your brain up – the only way that can work in the only context in which it counts: your life
**Everybody wants to make more of their money. Only a few do. Why? And how can you be one of them?**
Out of the tens of thousands of hours I’ve spent studying such things, Iain McGilchrist’s *The Master and his Emissary* (and the follow-up, *The Matter with Things*) are the best books I’ve read for understanding the world and how to operate within it.
They also map spookily well to everything I’ve written about our screwy relationships with money, and how we fail to make more of the money in our lives.
Therefore, to introduce these magnificent books to a wider audience, and to set their ideas in the most practical of worlds (that constructed by your incessant interactions with money), and to hopefully enhance your understanding of both McGilchrist’s work and my own, the posts listed on this page break down McGilchrist’s arguments and highlight the implications for helping you live better with money.
Because paying attention to money with only half a brain is no way to live a whole life.
## What's the argument in a nutshell?
* Unluckily, you know money with only half a brain. And it’s the stupid half.
* Luckily, this worldview-ruining brain damage is voluntary: you can do something about it.
* Unluckily, this form of brain damage is highly resistant to recognising that anything is wrong, so doing something about it is not something you believe matters. Yet nothing matters more.
* Luckily, masterful help for slowly dissolving these defences is at hand, in the form of Iain McGilchrist’s *The Master and his Emissary* and *The Matter with Things* – the best books I’ve read for understanding the world and how to operate within it.
* Both luckily and unluckily, money magnifies the damage, but also, because of the unique way it’s woven into your life, offers a way out… if you choose to pay attention [TO it, rather than merely THROUGH it](/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is).
By introducing McGilchrist’s work via a series of short lessons that show how it maps to your relationship with money, this series aims to deepen your understanding of how to burrow into your brain, uncover the cerebral secret to all money mysteries, and redraw the maps of your money worldview so they direct you towards making more of – rather than a mess of – the money in your life. Each lesson stands alone, though they’re most helpfully read as an interdependent web of wisdom.
And, because no doubt it needs to be said to someone, if you have \*any\* notion of left- and right-hemisphere differences and haven't read McGilchrist's work, there's a very high chance that those notions are wrong. To quote McGilchrist: 'The old dichotomy – left hemisphere rational, right hemisphere emotional – is profoundly mistaken, on both counts; not to mention the fact that reason and emotion are never entirely separable.' If any part of you was about to excuse yourself from engaging with this series because of something like that, don't let it!
## What's the TL;DR version?
There isn't one.
Not because I couldn't be bothered, or because I'm being mean, but because there *cannot* be one. The value (and I mean it when I say this is the most valuable set of ideas to understand to improve your financial wellbeing, your relationship with money, and how well you live with money in general) comes from the multi-layered, interdependent web of ideas. Any summary would sell you short.
This will, I hope, become exceptionally clear as you work through the lessons, and by doing so gradually come to see more clearly how the signatures of your two takes on the world show up in your daily decisions... and how, therefore, to catch yourself before you're led astray by the idiot take.
## The lessons
*This is an ongoing project. This list will be updated as new lessons are published. At the bottom of each lesson will be a link to the next in the series.*
* [Introduction](/79-your-money-worldview-is-literally-half-brained) – **The single best thing you can do for your financial health is increase your awareness of the two distinct ‘takes’ on the world that exist in your head, and how left unattended, money fires up the self-destructive one**.
* [Lesson #1](/81-financial-change-that-doesnt-start-from-your-financial-worldview-is-selling-you-short): **If you want to make more of your money, you have to aim for brain-based worldview change, not action-based behaviour change** – Typical financial planning focuses on half-brained hacks: clever tips, tricks, and tactics aimed at changing your financial behaviour. These quickly hit a limit of usefulness, and ultimately block you from making the most of the money in your life. The only way to transformative improvement in your finances has to start at the level of your financial worldview.
* [Lesson #2](/83-how-money-hijacks-your-hierarchy-of-attention): **Money messes up the proper ordering of your hierarchy of attention** – Money hijacks your hierarchy of attention. It promises you a shortcut to purpose, but this is a trick, because purpose is beyond its purview. Without a conscious effort to keep money in its place, it’s simply a shortcut to simplistic stupidity.
* [Lesson #3](/85-financial-philosophy-greater-than-financial-psychology-greater-than-hot-investment-tips): **Making more of your money starts with philosophy, not behaviour-change hacks** – Personal finance *demands* a philosophy. A way of understanding yourself, and how you live with money. Without one, you waste money, time, and energy chasing other people’s dreams, and flick from one siren-call of investment advice to the next, never sure if what you’re doing is right for you.
* [Lesson #4](/87-sum-malfunction-a-sure-fire-way-to-spot-if-youre-being-a-financial-idiot): **You can break a whole into parts, but you cannot build a whole from parts** – Your left hemisphere 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.
* [Lesson #5](/89-the-tell-tale-signs-of-a-poor-financial-worldview): **To improve your financial decision-making skills, learn to spot the signature of poor financial thinking** – Train yourself to catch your money-triggered idiocy with this list of 20 foundationally important signs that maybe you're being led astray from making as much of the money in your life as you could be.
* [Lesson #6](/94-the-main-reason-your-relationship-with-money-is-so-messed-up#whole-brain-personal-finance-lesson-6-the-half-a-brain-that-controls-your-financial-decisions-is-the): **The half a brain that controls your financial decisions is the blind half** – When it comes to money, you are brain damaged, and literally so not see some vital elements of your reality, but you do not see that you do not see, so keep making the same mistakes.
* [Lesson #7](/94-the-main-reason-your-relationship-with-money-is-so-messed-up#whole-brain-personal-finance-lesson-7-money-is-the-universal-convertible-but-prompts-a-way-of-seeing): **Money is the universal convertible, but prompts a way of seeing that shuts you off from seeing alternative solutions** – *The left hemisphere, in effect, ‘says’: ‘It’s seemed OK round here to date, so there isn’t a problem.’ The right hemisphere is on alert for things you should adapt to. ‘The left is too busy getting the next bonus.’*
* [Lesson #8](/98-making-more-of-your-money-isnt-a-maths-problem): **Putting everything into numbers is a game with only losers** – Lives are screwed up by prioritising money simply because it can be measured and because it promises an easy answer to a complex, existentially terrifying conundrum. However, no one thinks that’s what they’re doing when they’re doing it, so they don't see it, and don't change, and then wonder why things don't feel as fulfilling as expected.
* And many, many, more...
**\*\*\*To keep updated, be sure to** [**sign up to the newsletter**](https://www.moneyblind.net/free-wisdom)**\*\*\***
# #1: The correlation between having money, managing it well, and living a good life
21st September, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that bothers to check if what it does all day, every day, is actually worth it.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that how you allocate your money is the worst possible thing to do blindly.
**There is no correlation between having money and living well. However, when it comes not to what people *****have*****, but how they *****are***** with what they have, there sure as shit is.**
Personally and professionally, I’ve been inside the heads of the people that other people think they want to be (or rather that have what other people think they want to have).
Business folk, film folk, sport folk, idle posh folk… from the boardroom to the pages of Tatler, I’ve examined a circus of rich people’s relationships with money, even if they couldn’t be bothered to do it themselves.
And yet in the context of living, rather than simply existing, what more valuable act could there be?
> Money misleads us into believing it will bring us what we want, when in reality it is only a well-disguised substitute. \[…] What is very bad indeed is when we try to meet ‘being’ wants with ‘having’ answers. If anything feels more like something you have rather than something you are in the process of becoming, it will never feel real \[…] becoming who you want makes having what you want happen by accident. The reverse is not true. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode)
Socrates’ assertion, when on trial for his life, that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ may be the most famous line in classical philosophy. But what does it mean?
Socrates is saying that he would rather die than live a life governed by self-deception. He is on trial for seeking wisdom, for trying to understand what is real and living in alignment with it; for seeking to establish a rational basis for what to care about, and what to do. For seeking to express his authentic soul through his societal self.
**Aligning what we do with what we (deep down, undistracted and undeceived) care about, rather than with what unreal deceptive influences tell us to care about, is what joins up having resources with living a good life.**
It was so important to Socrates that he rather died than be prevented from doing it. So should it be for the rest of us. There’s bugger-all benefit in being rich if you use those riches in a miserably misaligned manner.
None of us is going to be forced to knock back a happy-hour hemlock. Sadly, our fate is worse. Because it’s all too easy to ignore. The slow suicide we don’t see, that hides in the unexamined, unchallenged, wiring of our minds, is far more dangerous.
> This book should be seen in a symbolic light. A tempting beam from a brighter future that draws you along your own path to becoming a financial sage. That shines lights on previously unexamined aspects of your financial life, to inspire examination in a way that gradually changes how money is represented in your mind, in an ongoing virtuous cycle. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage)
I’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t. The ways that work are the same, and the ways that don’t are too. It is simple, and systematic.
Focusing on embracing what works and shunning what doesn’t should be everyone’s aim. Yet if anything, because of the way we’re wired, because of the way society is set-up, and sometimes because of the way the people we pay to help us are incentivised, everything gets flipped: we embrace what doesn’t work, and shun what does.
Often this is as easy as just asking if what we do blindly we’d still do consciously. This is a central principle of the book.
> Asking ‘Does it work?’ is the bridge between the theoretical and the practical, and the inspiration for this book. If the screwy way most of us obsess over money, and the gap between its accumulation and its application in service if the Good Life actually worked, there would be no need for me to write, nor for you to read, this book. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#the-strange-silence-of-does-it-work)
This needs to change. For the stakes – your life savings, if not your life – couldn’t be higher. And the application – you’re thinking about money right now, and you’ll be spending some soon – could be neither more incessant nor more immediate. A poor relationship with money leads to poor money decisions leads to wasting money. And time. And energy. It leads to wasting your life. It leads to expressing yourself in ways that don’t feel right, but that you can justify in the short-term, conveniently overlooking the ability of the short-term to turn into the long-term when you’re not looking.
When the stakes are high and you’re busy looking elsewhere, it can be tempting to hire some help. Unfortunately, the obvious place to turn often doesn’t help at all. More on that next time.
# #2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it is
28th September, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that will keep telling you sorting out your finances starts with sorting out your head, despite knowing you’ll probably go broke before you believe it.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that despite every temptation to the contrary, stop-gap financial housekeeping is the falsest of economies.
**Everyone acts as if managing their money begins with knowing which investment to hold in which account, and worrying about mindset changes later. This is why everyone fails to make the most of the money in their life.**
Your bank account is growing. You've heard your money should be 'working harder for you' but you're not sure what that means and the person you heard it from had the aura of an estate agent.
Maybe you own something spicier. Maybe in an ISA\*. Maybe a cash ISA because it felt sexier than a current account, and though you remember hearing that cash ISAs were pointless, you never took the time to work out why, so it's still there. (\*non-UK readers should insert their own alternative)
Maybe you own proper investments. Shares and stuff. Perhaps an index-tracker because you did the requisite five minutes of research to work out this was the sensible thing to do. Which it probably was. Until you made one of a dozen mistakes, like buying it through Hargreaves Lansdown, or 'supplementing' your tracker with a fund you read about in the paper.
You know something goes into your pension every month, but you're buggered if you know what it's doing when it gets there. You vaguely remember choosing an allocation when you opened it, but now you've got half a dozen pensions, no unifying strategy and no confidence in how much is going in... or should be going in.
Maybe investing feels a bit scary or complicated. You could use some help, but you're not sure what sort. So when someone sufficiently trustworthy pops up offering to ease your burden for a small fee, you'll probably pay it.
You'll also probably do what they say, with minimal verification. Meh, it's only your life savings. And you're sure compounding small inefficiencies can't be \*that\* costly.
It's not perfect, but it's something; you'll deal with it properly later. It's a reliable plan. Just ask all those who've ever waited to do important life things just as soon as they got 'rich', or promoted, or had children, or got rid of children, or retired, or went on holiday, or bought that new bit of exercise equipment.
Alas, all diets are doomed to fail, especially those scheduled to start on Monday.
> You can sort your finances 'perfectly', but without getting your philosophy sorted first, you may be less fucked up, but you'll be far from flourishing. A grounding philosophy wisens up our defaults, linking them to a vision big enough and cool enough to get us to stop and think things through, rather than being blindly swept away by self-deception. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#revolutionising-your-relationship-with-money)
Sorting your finances is not your goal.
> There is only one goal. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#2-there-is-only-one-goal)
'Sorting out the finances' may be a mainstay of many a to-do list, but like so many of its aspirational brethren, the sorting ends up indefinitely shelved while we get caught in a fire-fighting flummox of acting first, and forgetting to ask questions later.
Even if you do 'sort' them, nothing's meaningfully changed.
**It's possible to have perfectly organised finances and live a shitty life. The opposite isn't true. Sort your relationship with money – wire your brain so it's not baffled or scared – and you'll organise stuff as a side-effect.**
You got stuck, or into a half-arsed – or even totally shitty – mess with money because of your mindset. Paying someone to set a few things up for you (even if they don't do it terribly) hasn't changed this mindset. It's enabled it. Your problems will return, just as reliably as the person who didn't stick to their last diet won't stick to their next one. It wasn't a lack of financial knowledge that meant your financial life was subpar. And it won't be more knowledge that saves it.
We believe in financial orthotics. But that's an inhuman crock of shit. We need to build strength in bare financial feet, not pay for padding to temporarily numb the pain. The self-deception of confusing 'quality of life' with 'access to comfort' is the world's slowest and silliest suicide note.
> In the short-term, it's simply far more effective to get comfortable in the bad position than it is to rediscover one's innate human strength in the good one. Yet foot problems are worsened by orthotics, not solved by them. And mental orthotics are more devious, more deceptive, and more dangerous. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#orthotics-is-bullshit)
Sometimes the extreme lifetime cost of sitting in cash or hiring a crook or a well-meaning idiot (the result is the same in either case) is enough to trigger learning how to not be scared. Most of the time it isn't.
The housekeeping is still important, of course (it's what Part Three of the book is dedicated to) and finding great help is possible (Part Four is about that), but tidying up your thinking is more important still.
# #3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.
5th October, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that would rather get comfortable with complexity than seek simplistic succour.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that success with money isn’t about knowing how investments ‘work’, what to invest in, or whom to delegate that stuff to, but understanding money’s role in your life and how to live with it every damn day.
**Whenever you hear someone praised for being ‘good at explaining complex ideas in simple terms’ what you are hearing is a piece of crap. Grasping why is fundamental to financial advice.**
People seek financial advice because they think – or rather believe – that finance is complex, that the complexity is numbers-based, and that therefore it’s worth paying someone who understands the numbers to make the complexity go away.
This is thrice-flawed. The numbers bits of finance that are relevant to you are simple, the complexity comes not from the numbers, but from the narrative of your life, and complexity by definition cannot be made to go away.
True complexity is irreducible. When people see scary numbers-based ‘complexity’ in finance, what they are seeing isn’t complexity, but complication. Because people are either being stupid or trying to sell you something, simple things are made complicated such that we praise those who cut through the crap, rather than blaming those who put the crap there in the first place.
While complications can be dissolved, to ‘simplify’ a complexity is to distort it, resulting not in simplified, but simplistic. It’s comforting, but crap. Simplistic versions can be stepping stones – children read Dahl before Dostoyevsky – but they’re not substitutes. Retweeting a conclusion hasn’t saved you the time taken to understand something, it’s wasted the time you could’ve understood it in.
Often a simple version of a complex thing, or a conclusion with a cursory understanding (so-called[ chaffeur knowledge](https://fs.blog/2015/09/two-types-of-knowledge/)) is all you need. But when it comes to how you interact with money, be it by its direct input into decisions, or just thinking about it, nothing so obviously or so frequently shapes and expresses who you are: it’s not the time to be taken for a ride.
**By all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.**
Unfortunately, complex and complicated (and simple and simplistic) are hard to distinguish. Yet the distinctions are important. Because scared minds – as ones thinking about money often are – are so desperate for simple answers that they beg to be sold them, blind to the fact that such answers not only don’t work, but can’t work.
When we talk of ‘knowing’ about money or investments, it’s crucial to understand what we really mean.
> There are four ways we can ‘know’ about money. We talk about the two that don’t really matter, and ignore the two that do. [\[Continued…\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#do-you-know-how-to-know-if-you-know)
Simple and complicated can be reduced to propositions and procedures: statements of fact and technical know-how. Complex requires a knowing that is perspectival and participatory. That understands ideas in the context of the life they are symbiotically serving.
What you do with money is irrelevant unless it’s making your life better. You can get rich and stay deceived, and those riches won’t mean shit. Think about money more clearly, and not only will you use money more meaningfully, but you’ll get richer as a side-effect.
> We see all things financial as complicated and scary and in response cover our eyes. When a well-meaning, well-heeled helper offers to sell us a guide dog, we’re so grateful we barely pause to consider how much it costs, or how effectively it works. And it never occurs to us to just uncover our eyes. We remain money blind. [\[Continued…\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#what-is-money-blind)
Believing simplicity automatically equals sophisticated is dangerous. It deceives us into perceiving profundity when presented with triviality, and teaches people to[ “optimise for solving easy problems in ways that make it harder for them to think about the hard ones”](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchallenged/). A byzantine recipe could be because of Heston Blumenthal, but it’s usually because of some idiot inflating their own intelligence and importance. In financial advice, it allows con-men to create unnecessary complications and charge for removing them.
When someone claims a complex idea is being explained in a simple way, what they mean is a simple idea has been stripped of its traditional covering of unnecessary complication. Complex processes may end up with simple conclusions, but to jump to them is to trivialise them. And trivial is not transformative. It’s a self-deceiving trick to make you feel you’ve solved something despite knowing in your soul that you’ve done no such thing, and wasted time in pretending otherwise.
> Most investment advice rightly knows it has to combat the perceived complexity of finance, but focuses on painting prettier pictures of clarity and simplicity, forgetting that the audience still needs to go to the gallery, still needs to remove their hands from their eyes, and still needs to learn how to see what they’re looking at. [\[Continued…\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#to-jump-higher-first-bend-lower)
# #4: Spending £450k on being bad parents
12th October, 2020
***Even ostensibly value-driven decisions can be misleading if they are not thought through***
‘Do you have a rough idea of how much you spend on, or because of, your children?’
The husband looks surprised. He’s come armed with spreadsheets and the sort of job title that, refusing to be constrained by a business card, seeks to colonise the air in every room it enters. But his spreadsheets don’t know the answer to this question. I look at the wife to remind her that she’s allowed to play too. The wife looks at the husband. The husband looks around the room.
‘I guess it must be a couple of hundred,’ he says. ‘Three sets of school fees… These are undoubtedly “peak” spending years… all three in school… a nanny is a necessity because of our jobs… we’ve visited my parents – their grandparents – in Australia a lot too.’
‘Good guess! It’s about that. More pertinently, how much of your earnings does that represent?’
‘Well it must be about double.’
‘Last year, according to your own figures, your children accounted for £457,000 of your earnings before tax. And that’s before considering their effect on your second biggest expense – your mortgage. It’s probably fair to assume that you wouldn’t live in such a big house if you didn’t have three children.’
‘True. Wow. Sounds a lot when you put it like that.’
‘How else would you put it?’
‘I guess we just wouldn’t. I tend to think of the ins and outs as more of a monthly flow–‘
‘Rather than a finite lifetime pile of resources? Most do.’
‘This room is the only place we address these sorts of questions–’ says the wife.
‘It’s great to do so,’ interrupts the husband. ‘They’re obviously so important, but between work and the kids and what’s left of each weekend–’
‘–and worrying about work even when we do get time to think,’ says the wife, the recollection triggering a shudder that starts at her shoulders and works all the way through the hefty boardroom table.
‘Completely understandable,’ I say, tactfully not screaming: YOU SPEND 90 HOURS A WEEK AT WORK, HOW CAN YOU NOT STOP AND THINK A BIT HARDER ABOUT IF IT’S WHAT YOU WANT TO BE DOING?
‘The key is… you’re not spending for the sake of it (I hope). And while it’s great – superb, really – that your spending is largely aligned with your core values, in this instance being great parents, my job is to help you think things through to ensure that not only are you living in accordance with these values, becoming who you are, fulfilling your potential and all that, but also that you’re doing so in a way that’s effective and burrows well below the surface.
‘So, hypothetically, could you meet the value of being great parents for less? In a way that would leave you more to “spend” on other values… I use quotation marks, because it could be that you “spend” time not being at work, or “spend” mental energy on calmness by doing a job that you didn’t – in your words – “hate”, that you \[peeking at my notes] “felt in your heart rather than your neck”, that allowed you to actually see your children more, and “be more present” – and less on-edge – when you did.
‘And, less directly,’ I continue, speeding up with the fear that I’ve said too much already, but have an irresistibly important point twitching on the tip of my tongue, ‘do you think you risk instilling in your children the idea that a “high standard of living” or perhaps even “work” in general, must be boring, painful, unloveable, even? To quote every tech start-up’s favourite guru, Paul Graham, “A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.”\[i] I’d argue it’s at least worth contemplating whether good, smart, people like you can achieve their parenting goals without spending 20 times the average UK salary each year to do so.’
\[Pause for effect… while wondering if I’ve poked a bit hard this time.]
‘When we first met,’ I continue, in response to heads trying to scratch themselves with eyebrows, ‘you said you wanted to retire. Well you can. Yesterday. But it would mean pulling your children out of public school, living somewhere worth “only” £1m – so matching your equity, not your equity and your borrowing. Maybe not flying first class…’
That’s enough for now.
Silence descends.
Silence grows slightly awkward.
Digits start to fidget. Even the table feels tense. Left unchecked, we’ll soon be in disastrous-first-date territory, shifting and squirming and soliciting of divine intervention to just make it end. It’s a dangerous play for a professional relationship.
Let it sit. Let them squirm, I tell myself. If this isn’t important, nothing is.
‘It’s amazing,’ the wife says, fighting back tears with mixed success, ‘it’s amazing to think that we could spend that much in the name of being good parents and actually be… be… do a worse job of parenting because of it.’
I make some reassuring noises about going easy, about even the best parenting intentions struggling in such a situation, about focusing not on what’s been lost, but what’s been learned, and what’s to be gained. About responding to the uncontrollable circumstantial challenges, not with direct attempts at remedial action, but with environmental control. About aiming not for lower stress and lower shoulders, but for the sort of environment that ensures such things as side-effects. About not being told what to think, but heeding being told just to think, and trusting the rest to look after itself. What would be lost by quitting? What would be gained? What confidence is attached to each? What would be irrevocable? What could be learned? What could be unlearnable any other way? What’s worth more: wealth, health, money, posture, time with children, or toys for children…?
‘You know what the craziest thing is,’ the husband says, ‘I’d always… sometimes… well, in the sort of circles that come with this sort of job… while no one really talks about spending specifically, we do talk a lot about it generally… those hints that pretend to be subtle but really aren’t… and it’s always to brag about how much has been spent, not how much one has got in return.’
My cold financial heart lives to be warmed by these moments. ‘That’s possibly in the top three things I’ve ever heard a client say. How much more beautiful all our worlds would be if people remembered that [the goal is living a *Good* life, not an expensive one](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.4).’\[1]
\---
\[1] See also this from Lynne Twist in *The Soul of Money*: ‘Our three young children \[…] were the center \[sic] of our lives, or so we thought. Our marriage and our relationship with our children were the most important things in the world to us, or so we said. Yet, if someone had filmed us during this time and looked at it objectively, they would have said – No, they don't care about the children. The kids are with the nanny, the wife is always off on these boondoggles with her husband, or shopping or entertaining, and they're missing out on the most important stages of their children's development, seeing those first steps, being there for good-night stories, kisses, or the spontaneity that builds relationships. They're able to purchase child care and purchase toys and a great house, but even when they're with their children their heads are spinning with what they need to do next to achieve financial goals or demonstrate to their friends that they know how to be facile with the emerging experience of wealth. We felt we were sincerely devoted to our children, but if you looked honestly at how we actually spent our time and energy, you'll see that our actions were not consistent with our intentions.’
\---
\[i] Paul Graham, ‘[How to do What You Love](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)’
# #5: Idiot Profile: Private-Jet Guy
19th October, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that isn’t afraid of public transport.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that what your super expensive stuff says about you behind your back wouldn’t put a smile on your face.
**Don’t let billionaires bugger up their lives to no end. Use their big mistakes to save yourself from smaller ones. Money can buy happiness, so having more of one should lead to more of the other, but we’re wired for waste, not wisdom.**
A week or so ago, a noble member of the Personal Finance Twitter aristocracy wrote: ‘My friend just bought a private jet and I asked him what he’s learned in the process of achieving this goal…’
In an answer more befitting of a parody LinkedIn account than a real human, the friend, we’re told, replied: ‘The trick is to set really big goals. Then work towards them as if you want to achieve them in under a year. But accept that it will actually take 10.’
The Friend is either a psychopath or a fool. Heeding the age-old advice to never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, I’m going to credit The Friend with the latter.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps The Friend’s apex aim in life really was to own a private jet. However, this would assume he’s not human, which feels like a stretch. Humans are always after an underlying emotional reward. And to live an overall ‘[Good Life](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.4)’ of which jets, jacuzzis, and jewel-encrusted pet clothes are potential contributors, not substitutes.
Perhaps also I am wrong in thinking that The Friend isn’t the exception to the end-of-history illusion. Perhaps who he was when he achieved his goal is who he was when he set it. Maybe his ten-year tunnel-vision trip towards his younger self’s dream was an appropriate way to spend a decade.
Perhaps also I am wrong in thinking that the ‘[arrival fallacy](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#13-beware-the-arrival-fallacy)’ is a universal error. Maybe happiness is a destination after all, and the pot of Good Life gold does lie at the end of a checklist of material, marriage, or business-card acquisitions.
It could be that the jet was the single finest means The Friend had of converting that amount of resources into a better life.
**Money can buy happiness. We say it can’t as an excuse to shirk the responsibility of having it, before trying our little hearts out to buy it anyway, blind to the reasons it didn’t work last time being the same reasons behind what we’ll try next time.**
\[Side note: it’s not about buying experiences, or time, or clichéd crap like that, as explained in ‘[How not to buy experiences](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-buy-experiences)’.]
As explored in [this section](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.1#mo-money-mo-problems), objective measures of success are as pointless as a miserable millionaire; and while traditionally wealth is defined not by worth, but by waste, for money to truly enrich your life, you must understand, and then shake, this belief.
The Friend probably isn’t a total idiot. But he probably is prone to the same self-deceptions that screw up each of our relationships with money. Having more money than most, his idiocy is demonstrated in a more illuminated – and we can but hope instructive – way.
Our monetary self-deceptions make us do idiotic things by narrowing our vision, or making us look in completely wrong directions. It’s simpler, but stupid. For we are complex, and while simplistic shortcuts can sometimes be sane, they aren’t when it comes to what we do with money.
Retail therapy is a short-term shelter from psychological storms, but it doesn’t eradicate problems, it incubates them. We level-up the cost of our lives without levelling up the quality, and we bolster the very blindness that got us into trouble in the first place. Not to mention the knock-on effects such as reduced savings reducing the options for finding a more fulfilling job.
Any joy The Friend experienced from the jet was not because of the jet. And, again assuming The Friend is at least partially human, there were undoubtedly more effective ways to achieve the same joy. Probably ones that don’t contribute to climate change, or eschew the chance to save, or otherwise transform, hundreds of lives. Or to which he will hedonically adapt in way less time than it took him to ‘achieve’ the goal in the first place.
It’s not just jets, of course. As I delve into in greater detail in [this post](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#instincts-often-lead-our-wallets-hopelessly-astray):
> In every other walk of life, intelligence is signalled by putting in less effort for no shortfall in the quality of output \[…] Yet when it comes to living a Good Life, we act as if achieving it for £10,000 per month is better than doing it for a tenth of that.
I’m guessing The Friend is some sort of businessman. If one of his employees dedicated an enormous amount of his company’s resources to an ultimately arbitrary goal, The Friend would’ve fired them, not promoted them to CIO.
An often overlooked aspect of hedonic adaptation is that bad news is better in batches, but good stuff should be drip-fed. It’s not the jets, but the little stuff, that shapes us. We act as if we’re capable of feeling a million times better when something costs a million times more. We’re not. \[We’ll look at the wider problem of how we’re screwed by the scope insensitivity of our brains another day.]
The short-sightedness of those with oodles of money isn’t only about not seeing better ways to use it. It’s about not seeing what they could have won.
# #6: What the bloody hell is a ‘relationship with money’ anyway?
26th October, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that knows that money is for life, not just for Christmas.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that you’re married to money, divorce isn’t possible, and estrangement is illusory, so it’s better to work on the relationship than resign yourself to a loveless monetary malaise.
**The growth in the use of ‘relationship with money’ is not matched by an understanding of what it is, and the importance of its implications. It is not a nice-to-have woo-woo supplement to more quantifiable concerns, but the practical hardcore root that determines if you’ll use the money in your life for good, ill, or churning in mediocrity.**
Most of what you hear about cultivating a better relationship with money is well-intentioned, but bollocks. We want practical wisdom, not well-meaning woo-woo.
> ‘Wisdom,’ wrote Matthieu Ricard, ‘is precisely that which allows us to distinguish the thoughts and deeds that contribute to authentic happiness from those that destroy it. Wisdom is based on direct experience, not dogma.’ [\[Read more on becoming practically wiser here…\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3)
Telling someone to improve their relationship with money by cultivating an ‘abundance mindset’ is cute, but when our problems are ones of self-deception, comforting labels are more likely to enable unhelpful behaviours than change them.
Our major money mistakes come back to three main sources of self-deception. That’s why the book [opens with them](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#better-money-decisions-step-by-step).
But pointing them out is only the beginning. The point of self-deceptive beliefs is that we don’t see them as idiotic in ourselves. We may, on occasion, diagnose them in others, but our minds prefer projections to mirrors.
Mindset flaws are harder to correct than technical ones. From tribal politics to sports performance to investing, deeply engrained mental patterns aren’t rewired by reading a punchy op-ed.
Rewiring requires work, but because the changes happen slowly and unconsciously, we don’t do it, and because we believe changing our minds is as simple for us as it is impossible for everyone else, we don’t believe we need to. We remain blind to how our money worldviews are passively absorbed rather than actively acquired, and end up with a poor relationship with money as a result.
Self-deceptive beliefs reassure us that everything is fine, because we don’t see how things could be better. Our relationship with money is like one between two people who stay together through a combination of convenience and fear of not finding something better: defined by overlooking obstacles, not overcoming them.
> A relationship with anything involves one thing meeting another thing and together creating a new thing that stands outside of each original thing, while at the same time changing those original things by virtue of the relationship. [\[Read on for more on the role of your philosophy in your relationship with money\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#your-financial-philosophy-and-your-relationship-with-money)
A person meeting money creates an expression of who that person is. Money is sitting there all inanimate, then a person comes along and chooses how to allocate it. In that allocation of resources, that web of decisions, lies the determination of whether the life it is shaping is a good one or not.
**Your relationship with money is how you interact with money: how you think about it, and consequently act with it, and around it. It is about the role money plays in your life: how you connect money to who you are and what you value, and how you use it in a participatory process of becoming who you want to be.**
The money bit is easy. The you bit is complex. The ‘you’ is the story you tell yourself about yourself – what Daniel Dennett calls your centre of narrative gravity.
> The application of Dennett’s theory is described in detail in one of the most important sections of the book [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self).
Seeing ‘you’ as a story is key to writing and editing it into a better story, and using money to do so.
A story is a device for making sense of the world, of making the impossible inevitable. Because each interaction with money is both an expression of – and a stimulus to changing – who you are, your relationship with money is a process to be lived and observed, not a snapshot to be ‘discovered’ and ‘preserved’.
> The way your relationship with money is mapped in your brain is either changing or being reinforced with every decision about how to make it, save it, spend it, invest it and even just think about it. As Iris Murdoch wrote: ‘The task of attention goes on all the time and at apparently empty and everyday moments we are “looking”, making those little peering efforts of imagination which have such important cumulative results.’ [\[Read on for more on how you are a brain surgeon\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1#pay-attention)
Our relationship with money is a means of matching the story we tell the world about who we are with the one we tell ourselves. You do not improve this by thinking you can avoid it, either by delegating the decisions that shape it to someone (or something) else, or by denouncing money as evil or irrelevant. You improve it by editing it (a story for another day… [or now, if you’re feeling impatient](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3)).
# #7: What fund managers can teach us about what really matters
2nd November, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that prefers companionship to caviar.\
\
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that no matter how often and how subtly we act otherwise, costliness is never a substitute for connection.
**Things that cost a lot are crappy substitutes for things that mean a lot. But as long as we see external prices more clearly than internal benefits, the con will continue to consume resources for no reward.**
I’m dining in a private room in one of the swankiest restaurants in London. Around me, the thick scent of leather and mahogany. In front of me, food both delicate and demanding of reverence; each of the seven courses dances on the tastebuds with a commanding balletic grace.
The same cannot be said of my dining companions. At least they’re paying. And at least I get to claim two hours of Continuing Professional Development points, which’ll save me pretending to have learnt about investments some other way later on.
The food’s not really free, of course. Nor is it really being paid for by the designated driver of the company card. It’s sponsored by the investors in the fund whose managers are trying to sell said fund to my firm. And of course the vampiric ability of fund managers to suck the time out of me and the life out of that time ensures I’m paying in other ways, foolishly unaccounted for when accepting the invitation to a ‘free’ feed.
The empty suits the fund-management firm has plucked off the conveyor belt are talking about the size of the fund, the manager’s track record, and other stuff with zero bearing on the likely future performance of the investments. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance, and the quality of a chap’s tailor and public-school debate coach are no guarantee of the quality of his ability to guess what’s going to happen to a company’s share price relative to what the rest of the world thinks is going to happen to it. They know this. They know I know this. They also know that I can’t just add their funds to our portfolios even if I wanted to.
The empty suits don’t care. They’re zombies: '[both insatiable and insubstantial, everything they eat seems to go straight through them](https://books.openedition.org/obp/4255)'. A living metaphor for how our desperate search for security is continually crushed by the batshit belief that psychological needs can be met by material consumption. They’re here because they can be and because one of their KPIs is meetings with advisers, however pointless. Their investors are wasting money paying them; there’s little harm in wasting it in return.
Not that the food isn’t great. I love a bit of Michelin-graded grub as much as the next man. Actually, the next man is Steve, a colleague with a penchant for Pizza Express and a mystifying tendency to order his steaks well-done. I love it more than him.
**But nothing you consume is a substitute for anything you connect with. Where the human connection you are ultimately seeking exists, costly consumables are irrelevant to your enjoyment of an experience.**
To be inside the heads and bank statements of the rich is to confirm beyond doubt that just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.
One of the best evenings I ever had involved dining in a truly terrible restaurant. The company was good, so it didn’t matter. Crucially, the evening wouldn’t’ve been any better – it wouldn’t’ve added anything more to the Goodness of my life – if it had been somewhere ten times the price. Good meals with terrible company are better than bad meals with terrible company, but when the company is good enough, as long as you’re not being poisoned, the only thing that correlates with the price of whatever you’re consuming is your inability to do other stuff with it.
> Standard of living does not equal cost of living; quality of life does not equal access to comfort. \[A main theme of the book, e.g. [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#quantity-is-no-substitute-for-quality)]
There are people who spend fortunes every year on eating out, without it adding anything to their quality of life. We know this just as we know polo isn’t ‘better’ than pool – and yet most of us forget it the second someone dangles a ‘free’ £100-a-head meal in front of our maladjusted maws.
> We clutch at social performance as a substitute for something more meaningful, because we are too distracted and deceived to understand what it is we’re subbing it in *for*. \[[Continued...](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#social-performance-is-no-substitute-for-self-assurance)]
As the School of Life [put it](https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/consumer-self-knowledge/):
> We choose the wrong things because we don’t know ourselves well enough to select what will best work for us. \[…] Even apparently modest things like what we put in the trolley in the supermarket or what shoes we wear are distillations of large, nebulous notions: who we think we are, how we wish to live and what we think will contribute to our well-being.
Selling ourselves to crappy substitutes is a recurring consequence of our self-deceptive tendencies. We blindly rush to meet needs with stuff we’re promised will work, but never does… but because we’re deceiving ourselves, we fail to connect our blindness to our failure to find fulfilment, and so don’t do the work required to bugger it up a bit less next time.
The process of finding fulfilment can feel frustrating, flummoxing, and just too damn fluctuating. But the flux is inevitable, so it’s a crap excuse for grabbing at substitutes that promise solidity, while [delivering only decay](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#when-is-delegation-dangerous):
> So desperate are we to find it, that we attach the label ‘peace’ to anything offering a hint of temporary external calm. We substitute peace of blind for peace of mind; yet the peace we seek can come only from within.
# #8: “I want money so I don’t have to think about money”
9th November, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that doesn’t care what it can afford as much as whether what it can afford is what it cares about.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you use it unconsciously.
**One of the main motivations for making a ton of money is to not have to think about money. This is moronic. Because failing to think about money is a guaranteed way to waste it.**
To hear “because I can afford it” is to hear somebody choose becoming dumber over becoming wiser.
The ability to afford something is not a valid input into a decision-making process. “Because I **can’t** afford it” *can* be a valid input. You can consciously conclude that something would add value to your life, but if it put a greater source of value in jeopardy, it’d still be dumb. But simply being able to buy something does not a wise decision make. The ratio of the monetary cost of something to the cash in your bank account is relevant only to rule something out, not to rule it in.
Commonly, having cash to cover a cost shuts down our decision-making machinery. Lack of thought leads not to transforming our resources into a Good Life, but into wasting them on white sofas and publicising our insecurities.
Every expenditure is a sacrifice of an opportunity to level-up your life, so if you’re not levelling-up or learning, you’re pissing away potential. Going into ‘fuck-it’ mode and buying something because you can is simpler than contemplating the money, time, and energy spent, and the foregone everything else you could’ve spent it on, but ‘fuck-it’ mode is fucking stupid. Because it forgets the only thing that’s important: whether something will add to your life, rather than detract (or distract) from it.
> It is the alignment of our expenditure, not its accumulation, that determines the Goodness of it. [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#budgeting-is-bullshit)
**To pursue money so you don’t have to think about it is to believe that being able to spend blindly without going broke is a better aim than using your money to improve your life. And it’s to believe that the value of money to your life is about ability, rather than responsibility.**
Having more money expands the universe of what you can do with it. But this is a burden, not a benefit if you have no sodding clue how to use it well to start with. If financial planning taught me anything, it’s that people are phenomenally bad at using money to level-up their lives. The only difference with the rich is that they prove it in more publicly hilarious ways.
This is not a call for constant cognitive vigilance. The genuinely poor have to count every penny, and it sucks. Necessity may encourage wiser choices by making really stupid ones impossible, but the accompanying mental strain causes as many dumb decisions as it dodges.
We want to use our powers of thinking to create conscious habits of not-thinking – of programming ourselves to take the right action automatically. Yet we turn away from both thinking and not-thinking like a fat man from a salad, substituting for both the sugary disaster of unthinking.
> See [this page](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#thinking-not-thinking-and-unthinking-the-difficulty-of-making-things-easy) for more on this distinction.
Unthinking is easier, because someone else is doing the work, and meditation takes effort. But you don’t want easy. You want good. And where decisions must be made, avoiding them is not a solution to making crappy ones. ‘A meditator,’ wrote Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘is both an artist and a warrior.’
A salesperson’s job is to sell you something. When this aligns with what you want to buy (and you are seeing clearly) the product does the salesperson’s job for them. In other cases, their job is to narrow your view – to reduce your perception of possibilities. To get you to compare House A to House B, but neither to working part-time for the rest of your life.
If you can [look like an economist and see the opportunity cost of every transaction, and if you can think like a philosopher](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3) and judge which possible transaction is likely to lead to a Good Life, then the salesperson will have a harder time tricking you into ‘treating’ yourself to some shit that swells their pockets while converting your expectations into emptiness. When zooming in deceives us, to see more insightfully, we want to zoom out:
> Your beliefs about yourself have both internal and external origins. Those imposed by society are often the most resistant to challenge. Zooming out makes this easier. \[…] ‘You’re less easily pushed around by social influences precisely because you’ve lifted yourself out of that usually unchallenged arena of behaviour. It makes you more creative, it generates systematic insight.’ [\[Continued...\]](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#knowing-what-to-do-with-your-new-knowledge-of-knowing)
How you spend your money is an expression of the thoughts that shape who you are. To delegate those thoughts is to surrender your resources, to live someone else’s life, while wasting your own. Aiming for unconsciousness is an unwise way to ‘live’.
# #9: Idiot Profile: An oligarch with a gun
16th November, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter.** The newsletter that doesn’t get grumpy when it rains.
**This week:** becoming wiser with money by understanding that there’s a reason sane people don’t actually steal candy from babies, or take a helicopter to the top of Everest for a selfie.
**The trouble with being able to do anything is that you’re highly likely to do everything terribly.**
A friend of mine owns an estate in Scotland. When the wind’s not trying to toss you into the loch, the vista’s as peaceful as if it had been immortalised in oils and hung in a library. A solitary house sits amid thousands of acres of rugged, unspoilt land, like the earth had dared stuff to live there, and all but the hardiest beasts said ‘nah, you’re alright mate’.
Some of those beasts are deer. Deer are magnificent, but they need management, and so one way or another the herd is thinned to the tune of 80 or so each year. The thinning is executed by selling licences to kill to cashed-up amateurs pulled towards pulling a trigger.
(Personally, I prefer the mad-bastard method of hanging out of a helicopter, swooping past and rugby [tackling the things](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzq1OUZ63r8), but executives with pounds stuffed in both pockets and paunches call the shots round here.)
A few years ago, a Famous Russian Oligarch Guy wanted to have a go at getting his gun off by shooting a stag in the Scottish scrub.
‘Society’ stuff is important to Famous Russian Oligarch Guys. This is how you fit in. Don tweed, hike hill (helped by whisky-laden hip-flask), stalk stag, pull trigger (hopefully just the once), waddle triumphantly to gun room for more whisky and picturing the antlers on your wall, like other brave adventurers. Meanwhile, a gillie as imposing as the glen drags your deer off the hill and chops it up ready for the butcher.
However, Famous Russian Oligarch Guy had a problem. His manhood being apparently directly correlated with the size of the stag he was to bag, he wanted the biggest stag he could find. And they don’t live in Scotland.
So he imported a pair. From New Zealand. As a mark of true executive efficiency, the stags were also drugged, to save having to worry about the need to stalk, as opposed to just scuttle up and shoot them.
The ticket to gun-room bonhomie is a bottle with a story behind it. Perhaps your dad is Scottish, and you take his favourite tipple. Maybe a particular brand evokes a treasured memory of the end of a wedding. Possibly you just liked the label. Famous Russian Oligarch Guy was not, however, impressed by such stories. He had brought the most expensive bottle of whisky in the world.
**In this he was only copying everyone else who for want of a little thinking** [**mistakes better with more expensive**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#1-better)**; it is his funding, not his idiocy, that is off the scale.**
\*
All of which makes you wonder: why do it that way? What needs are attempting to be met? Would all that faff pass the [Non-Disclosure Agreement Test](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-buy-experiences)?
> This is not to say that one should experience things only after signing an NDA that expressly forbids ever telling anyone that you’re going to do something, are doing it, or did it. I suspect a huge part of what makes experiences so damn thrilling to a human is sharing them. But if you wouldn’t undertake an experience if you *had* to sign such an NDA, you probably shouldn’t do it.
It’s not only Famous Russian Oligarch Guys, of course. We all do it. And have done forever. As I explore more [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#are-you-being-eaten), when it comes to making money decisions, silliness is sadly seductive.
‘Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they're in other people's houses,’ wrote Seneca, back when one Amazon was much bigger, and another much smaller. ‘One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason, we're seduced by convention.’
It’s a view echoed by Benjamin Franklin: ‘The Eyes of other People are the Eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine Clothes, fine Houses, nor fine Furniture.’ Living other people’s lives is a tragic failure of imagination, for it is in a profound sense not to live at all.
However, both Seneca and Franklin stop too short. It is not the ‘eyes of other people’ that ruin us. The eyes of other people could elevate us. And there’s not a lot we can do about them in either case. What ruins us is our own eyes, and where we choose to focus them.
As described by the fantastic Paul Tillich quote in the [same section](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#are-you-being-eaten) (‘The man-created world of objects has drawn into itself him who created it…’) mankind has – in the very act of searching for meaning in money – created meaningless.
# #10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
23rd November, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that is occasionally as surprised as you are.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that *whether you broke or rich you gotta get this: havin' money's not everything, not havin' it is*.
Occasionally these [newsletters](https://news.moneyblind.net/) are in the form of ‘Idiot Profiles’: an encouragement to point and laugh at rich people wasting their resources, and by extension, their lives, in the hope that we can follow the threads of their idiocy back to the subtler ways our identical, but less well-funded, wiring leads us astray.
If pointing and laughing at former financial-planning clients or muppets I met in the Middle East or the City were easy, Mr West, I thought, would be easier still. Reader, having trawled through his Tweets, I can see I was wrong.
\*
One of the central messages of [Money Blind](https://book.moneyblind.net/) is that we fail to make the most of our money because of three main sources of self-deception. Kanye’s got them all covered.
I stress the importance of living in a [‘becoming’ mode, not a ‘having’ one](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode). Mr West counsels us that excitement of the having mode is ephemeral and that its material aims are shoddy substitutes for what we really want:
* [we don’t need to ever be excited we need to just be](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1041741691152064512?s=20)
* [sometimes we value the objects we create over life itself](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1323479605970259972?s=20)
He’s dead right.
I wish the world to understand that money is about [narrative, not numbers](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path). Mr West wobbles here. We all do. But he knows where it’s at.
* [I deleted that tweet about riches... the wealth is in our love of family and our brothers and our service to God ... let’s rise up... let’s communicate](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1305669058134597633?s=20)
* [my ego gets the best of me too... God doesn’t measure us by money in his kingdom ... let’s love each other... I love my brothers and I miss my friends ... real talk](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1305668610589769728?s=20)
* [Having your amount of likes on display for the world to see and judge is like showing how much money you have in the bank or having to write the size of your dick on your t shirt](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1043549598105526272?s=20)
He even understands that to denounce the numbers game is to keep playing it, and that we only really become free of it when we move beyond it, when we widen the worldview that the dark forces of the salespeople seek to narrow, when we move from freedom to, not only to freedom from, but onwards to freedom *for* \[look out for that one in the updates section of this newsletter soon].
* [not for profit is now for purpose](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1045399770070564864?s=20)
* [offering a service is having a purpose](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1034108313363857409?s=20)
* [if you’re in the way of your own life you’ll end up in the way of other people’s lives too](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/992476137870606336?s=20)
In [Idiot Money #8](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money) (and all sorts of other places, especially [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.1)) I espouse the idea that chasing money to remove the consciousness from our decision-making is moronic, as it turns the chances of you allocating your resources wisely into a crapshoot.
Mr West, having talked widely about both making billions and mental-health issues, is well aware of this. ‘[Raise confidence and consciousness](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1060589357046751232?s=20)’ he tells us; ‘[we need consideration](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1041739911240409088?s=20)’… '[free thinking is a super power](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/993899071650676737?s=20)’.
Mr West is rightly wary of [seeking advice before you know what you’re looking for](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blind-leading-paul-davies/), and without continually asking: [does it work?](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#the-strange-silence-of-does-it-work) ‘[I ain’t taking advice from no one who ain’t do nothing to actually help](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1079832911317164034?s=20).’
He recognises that while being rich (reminder: [you already are](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1#the-1-is-surprisingly-subjective)) may dodge the problems of penury, it worsens the problem of being so scared of losing money that you believe being more conscious about what you do have can wait:[ We’ve gotten comfortable with not having what we deserve](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1306202200423628803?s=20).
Mr West knows that there’s [nothing wrong with making money](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1#the-link-between-being-rich-and-living-well), but crucially, while it’s necessary, it’s a wholly insufficient aspect of using it to improve your life. He accompanied an article headlined “Kanye West is the highest-paid male celebrity in the world” with simply: ‘[This a good start](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1301327549193170944?s=20).’
Ye knows his [construal-level theory](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#knowing-what-to-do-with-your-new-knowledge-of-knowing). He knows when to zoom in, and zoom out. To live in the present, accounting for past and future presents in the process. ‘[I’m hyper focused on the now](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/993562911560761344?s=20)’, he says, and, if you think that’s too pithy: ‘[Your conscience should allow a physical manifestation of your subconscious but right now most peoples conscious is too affected by other people’s thoughts and it creates a disconnect from you doing what you actually feel now](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989562041324089344?s=20)’.
When it comes to urging us to reconnect to our souls, and to pay attention to them rather than other people’s lives, he’s an absolute champ:
* [I ain’t never followed anyone else’s methods I ain’t trying to be cool](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1079833398384910338?s=20)
* [the term followers should be changed to observers. We need to follow our spirit](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1044263766609674240?s=20)
* [Chasing validation is like putting your soul in a plank position](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1015818124698910721?s=20)
As surely as he knows that [alignment pisses on accumulation](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-accumulation-and-alignment), he knows that you need to beat your addictions before you can clearly see your real wants, enough is more important than more, and we’re in need of re-examining what we call needs \[all big sections to come soon(ish)]..
* [I’m drug free and my spirit is connected. No weapon formed against us shall prosper](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1079582777584930816?s=20)
* [So many of us need so much less than we have especially when so many of us are in need](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1323479840121450497?s=20)
Ye appears aware that these symptoms, like the self-deceptions that sprout, them come from [fear](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear), that ‘[most fear is learned](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/991561089291702274?s=20)’ and that we should seek to unlearn these fears, ‘[Remove stress](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1060586101138587649?s=20)’ and generally get strong in good positions, rather than more comfortable in bad ones.
While he’s got you covered for expenditure basics (‘[when in doubt... don’t](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1017560703891197952?s=20)’), Ye doesn’t dispense much direct investment advice. Perhaps he is cautious of inadvertently transgressing regulatory rules. But he does drop this nugget:[ trend is always late](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/986397252536041472?s=20). Anyone who’s seen a graph of inflows into a fund following a peak in its performance (and possibly an editorialised advert in the money pages of the paper) knows this only too well. Ye’s right to highlight it.
He delights us with bit of investment wisdom, couched in Bruce-Lee-esque brevity: ‘[let’s be like water](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989154899140096000?s=20)’, he tells us, referring, one assumes, to the need to recognise that humans and their goals are works in progress and not to get caught up in spuriously precise plans, or tunnel-vision for some shit you probably didn’t want anyway.
After the description, the prescription; ‘[it's not where you take things from. It's where you take them to](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/987018557660717056?s=20)’… Where should we go, West?
He implores us to focus on [the only goal any of us really has](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#2-there-is-only-one-goal): ‘[let’s make ourselves happy](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1034501234755915776?s=20)’ (I assume here that he uses ‘happy’ in the [deep, lasting, eudaimonic, sense](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.4#how-do-you-define-what-defies-definition) the monk Matthieu Ricard does; Ye’s a poet, he’s allowed a little licence).
As I talk of [each minor money decision being a fork in the road on the way to financial enlightenment](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-path-towards-financial-enlightenment), Ye’s got my back: ‘[Words and names are vital when bringing something like the school into existence. Couple thoughts: Dao The word for this concept, dao, indicates a “way” in the sense of a road or a path](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1045315400613806080?s=20)’.
Echoing my own conclusion that participating in the process of seeking wisdom is the only way any of us can defeat our debilitating self-deceptions, wise Mr West sets out both the problem, and the plan:
* [we’re in this so-called information age but we're starving for wisdom](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/990697283174858752?s=20)
* [we’re opening up the conversation to the psychologists sociologists and philosophers of the world and we're moving away from infiltrating the youth and using them as a tool to create a cult following based off of a desire to fit in](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/991018904515301377?s=20)
In a move reminiscent of Marx and Engels’s rousing entreaty to the proletariat to cast off their chains, Ye commands us: ‘[burn that excel spread sheet](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989184954310410240?s=20)’ (without feeling the need to caveat it with something about the technical stuff having a place, only that it should know a little better where that place is – he is, of course, a far better marketer than I).
Finally, he knows that, being human, it is our actions that define us, and[ agapic love that creates us](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRjPy8c44vI\&list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ\&index=39), without which, not money, nor anything else, would have any meaning: ‘[We believe in love We don’t just try we do.. we are... We are love](https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1064230822952099841?s=20).’
# #11: If all the world's a stage, then what does it matter where you stand?
30th November, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that does its own stunts.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that circumstances are your stage, not your script.
‘We like to make people feel at home here,’ I say to Mark, as he slumps into and then shifts about in his chair. His eyes flick from phone, to window, to whiteboard, with no concern for subtlety, like a crap spy scoping out his surroundings, or a fugitive getting ready to run.
Of all the clients to whom I’ve offered any sort of helping financial hand in the last few years, Mark is the one I’ve most longed to meet. From his glamorous career both on and behind the screen, to his objectively interesting close companions, to the inside story of what his wealth did to the inside of his head, he’s a fascinating fellow. Being averse to both meetings in general, and meetings in offices in particular, and now spending most of his life in America, I’ve had to be patient.
Mark’s eyes scan back to his phone, then to my boss, then finally to me. He’s slowly settling from the top down. The head is now still, but the fingers continue to fidget, and I swear I can feel the floor vibrating from a thumping foot.
‘I can only assume that talking to me and’ – with a gesture towards my boss – ‘him, across a boardroom table in London is much the same as sipping cocktails under and with the stars in the Hollywood Hills…’
I don’t know Mark that well yet. The second I start to speak, I feel uncomfortably conspicuous. Creepy gossip columnist was not the look I was going for. Mark responds with an almost imperceptible eye-roll that says either he isn’t sure if I’m joking, or he knows I am, but thinks it’s a damn terrible joke.
‘Seriously,’ I stutter on, ‘you’ve been in Hollywood a few years now. The family’s settled into your dream mansion. And if meetings with moviestars are a decent metric, it sounds like “breaking America” is gaining traction, while the money’s still rolling in from your UK projects…’
Mark cuts me off. ‘It’s all circumstances,’ he says, with a sort of friendly disdain, before lurching more enthusiastically into words it feels like he’s repeated often enough to qualify as a mantra.
‘All the stuff – the house, the money, the moviestars – it’s all circumstances. Life – mine, Anna’s, the children’s – they’re really no better or worse with or without them. There’s more, er, surface-level excitement perhaps, but there’s also more time spent faffing around with, y’know, architects, builders, accountants, security people… investment people,’ he says, with a smirk.
‘As for the stars,’ he continues, ‘you can get a meeting with anyone… once. That *can* be pretty cool. But the novelty soon wears off. And if you don’t have something useful to offer them, there’s no second meeting, nor any more firsts with anyone they know. If LA teaches you anything, it’s that you can have all the money in the world, but unless you’ve got something to do with it, it’s often just a cue for wasting time.’
I know Mark is friends with a few celebrity stoics, but I’m still surprised to hear how well it’s rubbed off on him, especially given some of his life choices (and indeed how championing stoic virtues tends to be an indication of their absence). There’s a lot of mental and physical effort (not to mention money) gone in to proving his ‘just circumstances’ theory.
‘That’s great to hear. Superb, really. I’d love to record that and play it on repeat to goodness knows how many of our other clients, let alone find a way to implant such thoughts into those that sacrifice everything chasing those circumstances… I have to ask, though: how do you square such thinking with your continuing keenness to see your net worth hit the £20m mark? Especially as that mark changes with the dollar:pound exchange rate, the shifting subjective and sporadic valuation of your houses… and the knowledge you’ll blast way past it in any case when the cash from the latest show comes in.’
‘Hah. Fair point. I guess I can’t. It’s pretty daft, I suppose. It’s something to do, I guess… and it’s definitely better than nothing. And it’s obviously a lot better than it was. You know about–‘
‘I do,’ I say, seeing no need to dwell on past impostor-syndrome troubles, especially as I’m told he’s previously made it pretty clear that’s his therapist’s job, not my boss’s, or mine.
‘I guess there’s still a bit of that floating about… still feeling the need to wear the badges, even though I know deep down they don’t mean shit. I’m reading Alain de Botton’s *Status Anxiety* at the moment. He makes the point that however well one may grasp the nonsense at a given point, because everything – us, the world – is shifting all the time, it’s incredibly easy to fall back to the default of letting society determine our significance, consciously or otherwise, even when we know it's crap.’
I stave off the urge to both share some of my favourite quotes from that book, and recommend a thousand others in the process by asking a follow-up: ‘Is it perhaps easier to be more perspectival about the whole charade when you own all the stuff? Because you know experientially it’s [always about the narrative, not the numbers](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path)? Or does it make it harder because there’s so much more opportunity to add to those lingering clouds of impostor syndrome?’
‘Neither. It’s just circumstances.’
# #12: Financial Independence: An (Actual) Idiot’s Guide
7th December, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that takes one for the team.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that simple step-by-steps often pave the road to hell.
I’m about to offend you. Badly.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but you – yes you – are a secret fan of Nigel Farage.
You may believe you’d be the last to follow in his infectiously hateful wake. You may believe you’d sooner hang yourself than hang onto his words. You may wonder what you could possibly want from something that looks like a conceited toad desperately hoping that if it croaks loudly enough no one will uncover the secret sadness beneath the bluster.
You still want what he is selling.
Or rather you believe you do.
And your bullshit beliefs and fearful grabbing at simplicity are failing your finances.
\*
Like a typical toddler, while the grown-ups are trying to clean up one mess, Farage has dived into making another. Via a new daily newsletter and videos that if he weren’t famous would be a clear cry for help, Farage’s fanfare of falderal is now focused on financial advice.
It’s classic Nige. Brow furrowed in mock-confusion to conceal actual confusion, he works his way through the con-man’s playbook.
He frames the whole thing as a ‘fight’. For ‘financial independence’. To ‘take back control – of our money’. The baseless promises are a mix of nostalgia (gold) and disruption (bitcoin). He picks on real problems (like investment charges), links them to emotional fires, and scatter-guns the resultant ire towards a wall of scapegoats to see what sticks.
Weirdly, so far there are no tips for getting Russian sponsorship or Question Time to do your PR. I guess that will be part of the Premium service.
\*
You may wonder why this matters; you’re surely above these tinpot tactics.
Not so fast. Our most costly mistakes are the ones we can’t see, and a [blindfold stops you seeing, not the things seen](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.1). Despite the very idea probably making you feel as though you’ve been slimed by an albatross with gastrointestinal distress, what Farage is hissing is exactly what you believe you want to hear.
Before you tie yourself to a mast and stuff wax in your ears to avoid this snake-oil siren, do not be disheartened.
If you’ve paid attention to anything I’ve written, you’ll have a suspicion that when it comes to financial advice, what you believe you want is – [assuming the aim is to turn your resources into whatever your version of a Good Life looks like](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.4) – not what you really want. And, further, that ridding yourself of this belief, while annoyingly hard and even more annoyingly necessary, is absolutely possible. And nothing is more worthy of the effort.
\*
While it would be easy to just the rip the piss out of the pathetic cries of a posh pinstriped political popinjay warning us against taking financial advice from posh pinstriped political popinjays, it wouldn’t be helpful.
People with mindsets not too different to your own will lap this up. Why? What’s Farage saying?
When you sign up for ‘Fortune & Freedom’ (please don’t – let me take this burden for you) you get sent: ‘How to take back control of your finances in 4 simple steps’, written, naturally, by a guy who’s going to be guilty of everything he accuses the ‘other side’ of.
In short, these are:
1. Understand your finances – I.e. List your assets and liabilities and income and expenditure.
2. Cut waste from your outgoings – I.e. Shop around, fly economy, and cancel unused subscriptions (interspersed, of course, with warnings about “lining the pockets of faceless insurance conglomerates”).
3. Make saving your top priority – I.e. Save an intentional specific amount at the start, not whatever random amount is left over at the end.
4. Invest to protect and build your assets – I.e. Channel your cash into something that, unlike cash, will likely stay ahead of inflation.
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with any of this. You should do all of these things.
**However, simple rules make better conclusions than starting points.**
This is a problem. With Farage. With financial advice in general. And with what you believe you want.
As Burton Malkiel put it: ‘stupidity well packaged can sound like wisdom’. When it comes to wiring ourselves to live better lives, surface-level sensible is dangerously counter-productive: it looks like progress, but keeps us [stuck, inert](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.1#how-do-you-get-unstuck-from-financial-confusion).
As I go into in more detail [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3#good-rules-v-bad-rules), rules rank reactiveness over reasoning – sometimes for good, and sometimes for ill.
There’s a heck of a market for these simple steps. They appear in every list of ‘how to sort your finances’ ever published (and that keep getting published, despite the last lot clearly not working very well).
You want to ‘sort your finances’ (or rather to feel as though you have). You want not only simple, but so simple even Farage can get it right. And you’d quite like someone to just do it for you, so you can keep your eyes shut.
Sadly, this works about as well as those that pay for a personal trainer, not to make them more likely to do the work, but as an excuse not to, or that post a motivational meditation poster on Instagram as a substitute for paying attention to something other than Instagram. Paying for a product can be a kick-start, but it’s the process of paying attention that saves you just kicking yourself in circles.
Farage knows that when the world looks scary, you shut your eyes. The investment industry knows this too, which is why it makes as much effort to fuel your financial fears as Farage does to rile racists.
However, while you’re hiding from imaginary monsters, real ones will come and steal your stuff.
**What matters is not the simplicity of the steps you take, but whether they take you where you want to go. A simple step taken blindly is worse than the same step taken with your eyes open.**
You believe you want to wallow in impractical ignorance. Really you want to become practically wiser. As I explain [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3), ‘the goal of phronēsis – of practical wisdom – is not only how to choose a path to an end, but how to choose the end most consistent with the aim of living well overall.’
Let’s revisit Farage’s four simple steps. What might they look like through a wiser lens?
#### \*
1\. Understand your finances. A comprehensive and easily accessible list of what you own/owe and earn/spend is important. Do it. But don’t confuse quantification for [understanding](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2). The numbers tell a story. What story are yours telling? In what ways does it need [editing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3)?
To know your finances as numbers rather than an expression of your [centre of narrative gravity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self) (your ‘self’) is not to know them in any meaningful way. The F\&F article entrenches this idiocy in three ways:
a) By encouraging you to treat your finances as ‘secret’, to the extent of avoiding online tools to help create your lists.
b) By grouping expenditure items however the heck you feel like (i.e. [like an idiot](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#budgeting-is-bullshit), [even with professional help](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.4#typical-approaches-to-expenditure-analysis-provide-only-illusory-benefits)).
c) By reinforcing the belief that the ‘solidity’ of your ‘place in the world’ is determined solely by what you have.
This is to double-down on [misunderstanding](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3), not move towards wisdom.
2\. Cut waste from your outgoings. The F\&F team are right to point out that ‘almost everyone could reduce their spending by hundreds of pounds a year – and in some cases by many thousands – without a noticeable difference to their standard of living’. But they’re wrong to focus on cutting waste.
No one believes they’re wasteful, at least not when they’re doing the wasting. So simply saying stop stops nothing. Telling people to ‘cut waste’ – whether it’s emptying a cupboard of crisps or a wardrobe of unworn clothes – doesn’t work. What’s worse, it’ll make you think it has, at least well enough for now. You’ll scratch ‘sort finances’ off your itch list, believe you’ve changed as a person, and *stop* yourself from paying the very attention the itch was suggesting you should.
Spending consciously will lead to spending less. The opposite is not true. It’s the consciousness, not the crap, that’s important.
3\. Make saving your top priority. This is the best of the four. Sorting the saving first (and making it a habit) is [often overlooked](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#non-bullshit-budgeting). They link savings to the consideration of lifestyle choices (e.g. do you live where you do because it really makes life better?). They even channel Kondo by linking physical to mental clutter. This is all good. It’s almost enough to forgive them for falling into the [trap](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#exam-conditions) of ‘go for delayed gratification, not the instant kind’, talking about saving in terms of deprivation, and confusing living in the moment with hedonism \[to be uploaded soon].
4\. Invest to protect and build your assets – Amid a lot of pointless stuff about precious metals and property, the focus on stock-market investments as the default hedge against inflation is sane. The jump it sets you up to make from ‘yes that all sounds sensible’ to ‘this guy must be able to pick stocks’ is not. \[We’ll cover investments in more detail soon; in the meantime, there’s [Monevator](https://monevator.com/).]
\*
We ‘want’ the ‘just tell me what to do’ answer. (Eventually, I’ll upload my own philosophically and psychologically enhanced tactics to the book. But there’s a reason I’m not doing it yet.)
We ‘want’ to dispel doubts. We flee from fear.
Yet fears grow in the dark and dissolve in the light. Doubts are human. We want not to dispel them, but [courageously take them into ourselves](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear).
This isn’t about constant cognitive vigilance.
It’s not about learning a ton of boring investment stuff.
It’s not even about being wise. That’s still to focus on an unobtainable destination.
It’s about [becoming wiser](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#becoming-wiser). More philosophically practical and less farcically Faragical.
> [Comments welcome](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/financial-independence-actual-idiots-guide-paul-davies)
# #13: Let’s talk about money, baby
14th December, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that thinks talk isn't always cheap.\
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**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that the words you use when talking about money make it harder to use it well... and that everyone else is silently facing the same struggle.
**We don’t talk about money (or when we do, it’s a hindrance, not a help) because we’re so attached to it as a measure of value. But the antidote to that attachment is talking about it. Damn.**
One of the most enlightening moments of my life happened a few years ago, in a small room with maybe 30 other people, while Alain de Botton pulled our anonymous confessions from a hat.
He unfurled the first scrap of paper: ‘I fear I’ve married the wrong person’. The room was as silent as a tomb, but the air was buzzing; pulsing with the synchronous vibrations of a block of people on expectant yet apprehensive edge.
‘I have a brain tumour’. ‘I’m worth 10 billion dollars’. ‘I fear I’m only ever going to have painful and dramatic sexual relationships until I get too old, then I’ll be alone until the end’. And so on.
And then: ‘I’m really anxious a lot of the time.’
Sensing, I suspect, that the pulsing had paused, as if waiting to be told what to do next, Alain stopped.
‘Raise your hand if you often feel you’re significantly more anxious than other people.’
The pulsing disappeared. Hands shot, squirmed, and squeezed up. And, though I doubt anyone other than me saw it (given I was stood at the back while everyone else was sat), I’ll bet everyone felt it: every shoulder in the room dropped two inches.
\*
I think of this moment a lot in relation to talking about money. Especially so in the dozen weeks of sending out this newsletter.
So many of our worries about money stem from the fact we assume everyone else knows what’s going on, but because we never talk about it, we never know this isn’t true. We suffer both *in* silence, and *because* of it.
This creates all sorts of problems, from believing that more money makes the worries go away, to never quite getting around to working out how investing works, and so either never starting to do it, or paying someone far too much to do it for us while never understanding how badly we’re being ripped off. And that’s before we talk about [unexamined expenditure](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3), unfulfilling jobs, and an unsatisfying lack of luck redistribution.
My experience inside the heads of those that have what other people believe they want (and often sacrifice the majority of their time and energy – aka their lives – for) is behind writing about this stuff in the first place.
I was hardly unaware of the scale of these self-deceptive issues, nor the high price we pay by our refusal to open our eyes to them. But sending out this newsletter has reminded me of the human costs behind the statistical ones.
I’ve been honoured to receive your comments. I’m flattered to be party to thoughts that clearly strike many of you – rightly, in my personal and professional opinion – as pretty darn important. Most of all, it’s great to see the thoughtfulness. The book is, after all, aimed at instigating thinking, not replacing it. The comments that say I’ve opened eyes, or stopped someone in their tracks (regardless of any change of mind) are the best of all.
The one thing these comments have in common is that they’re much more happily shared in private than in public. I asked a few people about this.
* ‘Money is in everything. And people – including me – don’t like to have it pointed out when they haven’t got their shit together.’
* ‘There's a bit of a stigma attached to admitting that you don't have your money game in order. Especially among certain company/circles.’
* ‘I can think of so many people that really need to read this… might risk offending colleagues however...’
* ‘Good luck getting anyone to talk about this in public!’
I even had separate people tell me they didn’t feel comfortable sharing one newsletter because ‘people will think I’ve got loads of money’ and because ‘people will think I’ve got no money.’
And of course variations on a theme of ‘so what do I buy to fix this?’ Because obviously the cure to believing that value is measured in numbers is a numbers-based solution.
My health-and-fitness friends see a similar thing. Fancy new workout equipment that costs a fortune and probably won’t work: ‘take my money!’ Learn how to breathe, move, sleep, and eat properly, it’s free and makes every minute of every day better: ‘lalala I’m not listening’.
As our friends at Examine.com put it:
> It sounds counterintuitive, but people are verrrry skeptical of free treatments. You can make millions selling the latest and greatest supplements, but if you try to convince someone to focus on their breath, be prepared for them to nod along with everything you say then forget it all right after the conversation is over.
**With money, it’s even worse. Because the very problem with money we need to overcome is the very thing that’s stopping us seeing the problem in the first place.**
\*
So what should we do about it?
Talk. Put your mouth where your money is.
By talk, I don’t mean count the numbers. I don’t mean talk about investment strategy, charges, cash-flow models, or definitions of ‘risk’. They’re all important, but most talk about them really isn’t. Even chat about ‘financial wellbeing’ usually ends up at [which product is best to provide it](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#when-is-delegation-dangerous).
I mean talking about money as a facilitator of trades – an investment of one thing in the hope of gaining something better that justifies it – and about how we make better trades, better decisions. What works and what doesn’t?
I mean challenging (and where appropriate changing) worldviews the only way they can be changed: one word, one phrase, or one concept at a time.
For example, catching yourself using ‘treat’ to mean ‘costs money and worsens health’, or ‘better’ to mean either ‘pays more’ or ‘costs more’, rather than ‘makes life better’, asking yourself if you mean what you said, and if not, telling your brain to do it better next time.
I’ve listed a load more money maxims in [this bit](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the book, and will be adding one to the newsletter each week. Please share your own: what words associated with money do you commonly hear in a distorted, distracting, or downright dumb way?
Better than debating with yourself is debating with others. In public.
If what I write about were already being done, or even talked about, I wouldn’t write about it. There must be dissenting voices. I’d love to hear them.
> [Comments welcome](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-talk-money-baby-paul-davies)
# #14: New Year's Non-Idiotic Financial Resolutions
21st December, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that's for life, not just for Christmas.\
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**This week**: becoming wiser with money in gift form.
**I want to know what help you would like with financial things. Because to celebrate the end of a pretty crappy year, and the start of a hopefully better one, to the extent I can, I’d like to help a few of you sort out your finances. This offer expires in two weeks.**
In the decade or so that I worked in tax and financial advice, I noticed a fascinating ratio.
Weighing down one side of the scales were friends that, vaguely knowing what I did for a living, saw me as the perfect person to complain to about financial ‘stuff’. From cash, to property, to investment accounts, to myriad pension pots, to the contributions to those pots, to the whole debauched ‘system’ that was clearly designed to work against them in a very personal, vindictive, way.
On the other side were those that took me up on my offer to do for them – for free! – what proper clients paid often tens of thousands of pounds for. That turning complaining into arranging a time to turn up with details of everything they owned, earned, thought they might own, and any secret US passports they had lying around.
This latter group remains purely hypothetical. Those meetings remain something that can apparently wait until whenever it is that life proper starts. Monday? New Year? New job? Retirement? The Second Coming?
What they (possibly *you*!) preferred was to be told that believing a system to be designed against them was a totally acceptable, if not completely brilliant, excuse for doing nothing but swear at it, even if it ‘works’ about as well as those poor souls trapped in traffic that act as if making their faces redder will make jams smaller.
The more I made bouncing over these anxiety-inducing administrative hurdles sound not only achievable, but easily so, the quicker the conversation would change. No one, it turns out, wants to be told important things are easy. Because what sort of an idiot hasn’t done important easy things already? Where to go for dinner? Happy to debate it for a week. What to do with a lifetime of earning and spending? Let’s pretend that saying it needs ‘proper time to think about it’ excuses never actually prioritising that time.
If it weren’t so important, and if it weren’t so sad watching so many millions leave the pockets of nice people and end up [lining those of cowboys](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-st-jamess-place-other-cowboys-paul-davies), it would perhaps be possible to leave it there. But alas.
So as another new year approaches, I’m drawn to ask:
**Are you planning to ‘sort your finances’ in the New Year? If so, maybe I can help.**
For the next two weeks, please send me your financial questions.
* What does having your finances sorted mean to you?
* What would it look and feel like?
* What actions would you be taking (or not taking)?
* What state would you be in when doing so?
* What specific questions would you like answering?
* What even matters about doing it?
* And if it’s that darn important, what excuses have you used to avoid doing it already? (Both the ones your internal spin-doctor spouts, and the real ones.)
And if you’d like me to work with you to bring this about, let me know that too (and of course for both regulatory and being-sustainably-helpful reasons, we're talking about pointing the way and marking your homework, not doing it for you)
I’m not selling anything, but this doesn’t come for free. If you’re interested in my help, you need to prove it, by telling me how much you’ll donate to [EA Funds](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/) if I do. This isn’t an auction; it’s the commitment not the quantum that counts.
Depending on your desire, overall demand, and the limits of my ability to help, I will work with a few of you to sort the shit out of everything. And in the 4th January newsletter, I’ll do something public with the questions, the answers, and the nearest I’ll probably ever get to the ‘just tell me what to do’ checklist.
In the meantime, have yourself a very responsibly merry Christmas, full of what you want, and not what you’re addicted to 😊.
> [Comments](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-years-non-idiotic-financial-resolutions-paul-davies) welcome
## [**Money Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the week: festive cheer edition
Our words are the building blocks of our world. The metaphors that power our language are the myths by which we live. Everybody’s lexicon has a special inner circle. Words, phrases, and theories that ears can’t fail to hear across a crowded room. These [Maxims](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) are designed to interrupt our unthinking as quickly and as effectively as possible. To stop, challenge, and where helpful, rewire our relationships with money.
**This week:** [**Trigger #4: Needs, wants, addictions**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#4-needs-wants-addictions)
Examining your expenditure is crucial to transforming your resources into a Good Life. But because of the most basic way we talk about it (typically in terms of 'needs' and 'wants') we bugger it up right from the off.
Needs and wants are the same thing; do you not ‘want’ a roof over your head? Your body no more 'wants' sugar than a smoker’s 'wants' tar. And is some form of meaning or purpose or a hug not a ‘need’?
Each time you hear yourself saying 'need' or 'want', just pause and check. Is it true?
The most common mistake is to confuse wants with addictions – wants make your life better, addictions do not, but they’re awfully cunning at convincing you otherwise. Every time we mistake an addiction for a want, and consequently say our 'wants' clash with our 'needs', we wire ourselves to waste money, by turning it into a life we don't really want to lead.
*Remember: 'There is an abyss,’ as Pierre Hadot wrote, ‘between fine phrases and becoming genuinely aware of oneself, truly transforming oneself.’ If all it took to have a fantastic relationship with money were these maxims, I’d have dashed out a book containing only this section, and kept the rest of it to myself.*
# #15: New year, old message
28th December, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, a quick reminder that my offer to help you sort out your finances expires on Sunday.
*If you're after something longer to read, there's a whole book's worth* [*here*](https://book.moneyblind.net/) *(and if you want a 'nudge', a few wise souls have told me recently that they've found* [*this*](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#your-financial-philosophy-and-your-relationship-with-money) *distinction between philosophy-based and psychology-based solutions to our screwy relationships with money handy).*
## 1. Want help sorting your finances?
Thank you to all those who've sent me answers to the questions I asked last week about what sorting your finances would look like to you. I'll round up the answers, together with the closest I'll ever get to a 'just tell me what to do' checklist next week.
If you'd like to ensue your own questions are covered, please hit reply and share your thoughts. If the list is too much, tell me the ONE thing you'd most like to know or sort out.
**And if you’d like me to work with you to bring this about, let me know that too. I'll be choosing a few lucky folk on Sunday (3rd January).**
Two more quick reminders:
1. For both regulatory and being-sustainably-helpful reasons, we're talking about pointing the way and marking your homework, not doing it for you.
2. I’m not selling anything, but this doesn’t come for free. If you’re interested in my help, you need to prove it, by telling me how much you’ll donate to [EA Funds](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/) if I do. This isn’t an auction: the help goes to the best answers, not the highest numbers.
**A reminder of the questions:**
* What does having your finances sorted mean to you?
* What would it look and feel like?
* What actions would you be taking (or not taking)?
* What state would you be in when doing so?
* What specific questions would you like answering?
* What even matters about doing it?
* And if it’s that darn important, what excuses have you used to avoid doing it already? (Both the ones your internal spin-doctor spouts, and the real ones.)
## 2. New year, new Twitter
For those that don't like to read things more than a couple of lines at a time, I'm going to start using Twitter properly soon. Follow along [here](https://twitter.com/Belgarvm).
## 3. [Money Maxim](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the week: New Year edition
*Our words are the building blocks of our world. The metaphors that power our language are the myths by which we live. Everybody’s lexicon has a special inner circle. Words, phrases, and theories that ears can’t fail to hear across a crowded room. These* [*Maxims*](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) *are designed to interrupt our unthinking as quickly and as effectively as possible. To stop, challenge, and where helpful, rewire our relationships with money.*
**This week:** [**Rule #1: Chuck out before you tidy up**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#1-chuck-out-before-you-tidy-up)
So many wastes of energy, time, and money, are rooted in pointless searches for clever ways to tidy up what should’ve just been discarded. But the chance to appear ‘clever’ coupled with being wired to believe that answers are better bought than thought, can deceive us into equating clever with worthwhile.
Filter first, process second. The cleverest filing system, and fastest filing fingers in the world are an irrelevance if what you’re filing should’ve been shredded, or better yet, ignored in the first place. Before accumulating any new material or mental possessions, or organising existing ones, ask yourself: is it adding enough to my life to justify the space it’s taking up in my head or my home?
This goes for investments, too. For example, the implications of seeing all investments as gambles makes all fancy stock-picking analyses pointless. Most budgeting advice flounces around categorising crap into different buckets rather than working out how to stop spending money on stuff that doesn’t make life any better.
Clever storage solutions are better than living amid a maelstrom of pointless crap. But living without pointless crap is better yet. And living in a way that doesn’t produce pointless crap in the first place is best of all.
# #16: "Just tell me what to do"
4th January, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that likes to bribe you to make yourself loadsa money.\
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**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that being able to keep on top of your finances in an hour a year requires a relatively tiny bit of homework upfront.
Greetings, now definitely older and possibly wiser friends.
**As promised, this week’s newsletter contains a list of stuff you should do if you want to sort your financial shit out this new year.**
Firstly, a huge thank you to all of you who sent me your thoughts about what ‘sorting out the finances’ means to you. While the existence of money concerns, even among the wealthiest people that have ever lived, ceased to surprise me a while ago, the expressions of those concerns are always enlightening. I’m heartened by those that said even making the small effort to answer the questions I posed was a useful (even fun!) exercise. I was going to share all the Qs and As, but the list got too long, so I’ve stuck to the most universal things.
Secondly, another huge thank you to the (lucky) few who’ve volunteered to let me further into their money worlds. I know talking about money can be super awkward, even when it could [literally be worth millions](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/s1). Bigger returns, smaller fees, and free government money aside, I hope to repay it many times over with all the important stuff that actually moves the needle on turning money into happiness. Failing that, at least we’ll have [saved a life or two](https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/) with the donation ‘fee’.
Onto the clickbait.
Remember, of course, that this is far from comprehensive, not at all tailored to your individual circumstances, and any such list of tactical things won’t solve the stuff that really bugs you. [You can manage your money ‘perfectly’ and still live with money poorly. But if you think about money well, you’ll use it well, you’ll live well, and a lot of the managing will look after itself](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#to-jump-higher-first-bend-lower). And as I wrote [elsewhere](https://oxfordrisk.com/the-problems-with-plans/), the trouble with cool heads is that they make plans for other cool heads, when in fact they should be making plans for an entirely different beast.
Still, it’s a start, none of it is hard, or irrevocable, and the rewards are definitely worth it.
**1. Insure what you can’t afford to replace**
While extended warranties can do one, it’s a bit different if other people rely on your income-earning chops. If they do, you’ll want some income protection, life, medical, and critical-illness cover for core-living costs and to ensure your legacy isn’t a liability.
As an added bonus, first working out what your core-living costs are, and then having to pay to insure them, free from the eyes you think are judging you, but really aren’t, usually makes you define ‘core’ in a saner way.
You won’t do this because you don’t instantly know which provider to pick, and no deal is apparently better than a bad deal.
**2. Stop putting off the legal stuff**
Do this for your parents first.
Wills, [Lasting Powers of Attorneys](https://www.gov.uk/power-of-attorney), and death-benefit nominations for your pension(s) let you choose who gets your stuff, or make decisions for you when you’re as capable of doing so as you were on the evening of your eighteenth birthday, only forever. Not to mention it cuts through potentially hideous amounts of admin at the exact time you or those you care about really don’t want to be doing admin.
You don’t tend to hear about these things except from those that didn’t think about it until it was too late. Their stories are horrifying. Don’t put yourself in the position to tell your own one day.
Stop the Netflix autoplay for a sec, click the link in the previous sentence, and sort it out.
You won’t do this because you think legal stuff is boring and you’re immortal. Channel your inner Brazilian: in Portuguese, ‘legal’ means ‘cool’.
**3. Save up a cash emergency fund**
The amount depends on your financial and psychological circumstances. It’ll be somewhere between 3 and 12 months of spending (not income – another good chance to redefine how much you really need to spend to live happily).
There are three main ways people bugger this up.
First is not doing it. Because something about money being the arbiter of value, and therefore to not spend it is to live a worse life, or something. See also those maverick financial advisers that believe their job is to help people spend their last penny on their last day.
Second is forgetting to stop. Because something about mistaking cash for both short-term and long-term safety, and you can never be too safe.
Third is not using it when it rains. A rainy-day fund loses its meaning when it’s not used on rainy days. I’ve seen too many people over the years save up money to not worry about emergencies, and then when the emergency arrives doing so anyway.
**4. Merge your pensions into one (probably)**
Ultimately, there’s no need to spend more than about an hour a year fiddling with your finances (and that includes thinking time). Part of this is streamlining your admin. And a major part of this for most people is putting all the pensions they’ve accumulated through various employments into one place.
There are reasons this isn’t always wise, e.g. pensions that build up an entitlement to an income, rather than an investment pot; current employers insisting on paying into a particular place; or for some freakishly fortunate few, terrific terms on old pensions that would be lost on transfer.
However, in 99% of cases, it should be done, especially given how completely crappy most pensions set up through employers are in terms of costs and fund choices. It’s also now way simpler than it used to be to transfer assets.
You won’t do this because it’s not instantly obvious how to do it (though unsurprisingly [plenty of providers](https://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/) are keen to make it easy to give them your money). And while it could take ages, it’s only ages in the sense that making bone broth in a slow cooker takes two days: it’s mostly set-up and check-in.
**5. Use your entitlements to free money and free tax avoidance**
If your employer matches your pension contribution, contribute the maximum they match.
Additional pension contributions are usually wise too, but it’d be reckless to be too prescriptive given the lifetime and annual allowance limits, and alternative idiosyncratic sources of investment like personal businesses. This shouldn’t be read as ‘never breach those limits’, because it can be worth doing so in some circumstances.
As for whether it’s better to contribute to a pension or other tax-advantaged investment account (e.g. an ISA for UK people), this depends on all sorts of stuff, a lot of which you have no control over. The ‘best’ snapshot answer depends on legislation which changes all the time. However, hoovering up the free cash is always a wise idea, regardless of such changes.
If you’re in the UK and under 40 and don’t find a way to contribute £4,000 of your £20,000 annual ISA contribution limit to a Lifetime ISA, that’s your choice, but just ensure you’re cool that the benefits to you of not doing so are worth £1,000 of free money (and its accompanying compounding growth).
There are benefits to ensuring your investment accounts (e.g. pension, ISA, Lifetime ISA, or other country-specific equivalents, and an excess in non-tax-advantaged ones) are all in the same place, but it’s not a massive deal if they’re not, especially given the paucity of Lifetime ISA options. As far as the admin goes, it’s more important to make whatever you do habitual and automatic than it is to have all the components of your hifi made by the same brand.
Your post-hoc-justifying storytelling machinery is going to be stretched to explain why you don’t do this. If you ran out of money to take advantage of this year’s free money, maybe 2021 is the time to prioritise free money over wasted money.
**6. Have an investment strategy**
The best part of having an investment strategy that you understand to be as right for you as anything is ever likely to be, is never having to spend another second wondering if you should’ve invested in something else. As with any plan, all your design effort should go into sticking to it when it’s hardest to do so.
This is where I hope to get people who read Part Three of the book. There’s no chance of doing it here, so in the meantime, stop believing in superstar investment managers, stop mentally dividing your savings into different pots, stop believing investment ‘income’ is important, stop trying to time the markets, stop believing that you can ignore the price when deciding if something’s worth buying (as true for trinkets as Tesla shares), and so on.
You won’t do this because you’ll get stuck in a whirlwind of whataboutery. Feel free to investigate all that nonsense later. In the meantime, bet on the accumulated value of the world’s companies going up (via a globally diversified index-tracking fund) and don’t worry overly about which one.
Do this for all your investments (pension, ISA, other). The subtleties of adjusting a strategy depending on where the assets are held is 1000x less important than having a strategy in the first place. And of course by investments, I mean stuff you’re not going to need in cash in the next decade or two.
**7. Invest habitually**
Whatever you decide with where to contribute your cash, make it automatic. Depending on your circumstances, that could be better done via direct debit or a recurring calendar entry with instructions you can follow in your sleep.
You won’t do this because the whole world of money is set up to make us wait for ‘certainty’ in an inherently uncertain world. And because humanity’s track record of setting things up to be easy is terrible at the best of times, let alone when it comes to the mind-melting madness of living with money.
**8. Review**
If you’ve got a decent strategy and proper habits set up, reviewing your finances (checking contribution levels not investment values, ensuring you haven’t missed any new tax breaks etc.) should take minutes per year. Stick some time in your calendar now.
You won’t do this because easier-than-you-think-it-is, and more-important-to-future-you-than-current-you is procrastination’s favourite combo.
**9. Consider getting professional help**
Done properly (i.e. beyond pretending to be able to predict the markets and making some bullshit excuses why it didn’t happen in return for scraping a percentage of crumbs off your investment amount) financial planning is a hugely valuable service. Some situations definitely call for professional help.
Whether you’re better off going it alone or getting help is impossible to generalise. However, in either case, everyone should understand how to go it alone if they had to: otherwise it’s impossible to know what a large part of good help looks like when you’re paying for it.
\*
And finally, none of this is as important as living an examined life of course. But I can’t write about that every week. And besides, you won’t do it because you’ve been sucked into a Netflix wormhole and your rescue mission got distracted by Instagram.
## Money [Maxim](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the week
*Our words are the building blocks of our world. The metaphors that power our language are the myths by which we live. Everybody’s lexicon has a special inner circle. Words, phrases, and theories that ears can’t fail to hear across a crowded room. These* [*Maxims*](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) *are designed to interrupt our unthinking as quickly and as effectively as possible. To stop, challenge, and where helpful, rewire our relationships with money.*
**This week:** [**Trigger #5: Next time**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#5-next-time)
There’s no such thing as next time.
'In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give our heart to the state, to money-making, to sociability, or science merely so as to no longer possess it ourselves, how we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think.’
So wrote Nietzsche in his *Aphorisms on Love and Hate*.
Innumerable financial errors are caused by people seeing their money mistakes (be they to do with investment, spending, or something else) as isolated blips, rather than something systematic. [Whatever our excuses say, we are blocked from doing what we want to do – from becoming who we want to become – not by isolated incidents but by systematic errors](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1#pay-attention). If you continue to think money problems are about money and not mindset, you'll continue to think it'll be different next time, and you'll continue to be wrong.
# #17: How to choose better investments
11th January, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that chooses life with a touch more consciousness than a cult 90s movie poster.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that it’s better to wire your brain for wiser choices than pay a reassuring conman to make idiotic ones for you.
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**Don’t worry about choosing the right investments. Choose the right way to look at investments and the right ones may just choose themselves.**
The blue and purple lines represent investments. They start and end at the same place. Which would you rather have owned?
It’s a question I’ve asked dozens of clients over the years.
‘Lucky you!’ I say, after everyone picks purple, ‘for they’re exactly the same investment!\* The blue line is what you see if you check your investment returns every year; the purple line is what you see if you look every 10 years… so good news! You get to choose which one you own.’
(The good news gets better when you consider the effort expended in the looking… which, if you value your time at all, makes the one-year returns almost as bad as those on rental properties when you capitalise the hassle of owning them.)
**The point: your experience of being an investor in each scenario has nothing to do with the investments, and everything to do with how you choose to look at them.**
But this isn’t always easy. If it were, [Part One](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3) of the book would be rather shorter.
This goes far beyond investments, or even how we live with money in general. As one new-agey writer put it: ‘Everything is a choice. This is life’s greatest truth and its hardest lesson.’
Part of the problem lies in what J.K. Galbraith was talking about when he quipped: ‘In the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.’
The huge advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you choose to look at it!) with money is that you can’t escape those choices. [No one goes for more than a few hours without making some sort of money decision, even if most of the time it’s done so unconsciously](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#thinking-not-thinking-and-unthinking-the-difficulty-of-making-things-easy).
As William James put it: ‘Selection implies rejection as well as choice \[...] the function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.’
When it comes to money, the costs of inattention – of blindness – can take many forms. For example:
**1. Getting stuck on the short-term emotionally salient.** As Charlie Munger said: ‘People make bad choices all the time, usually because of a fundamental inability to operate over longer time frames.’
**2. Believing you’re making conscious choices when you’re not.** As Steven Kaas said: ‘You are not the king of your brain; you are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, “A most judicious choice, sire.” ’ In many ways, this is the point of the book: to open eyes to things being choices that people don’t believe are choices.
**3. Confusing symptoms and states.** [Investing isn’t objectively scary or complicated](https://book.moneyblind.net/#must-money-seem-scary-and-complicated). I don’t find it scary or complicated. Its scary-and-complicated-ness is taken by many to be a state, when really it’s a symptom of something deeper. This is why telling someone it’s not scary and complicated works about as well as telling someone who erroneously believes a sweet tooth is in some way biological rather than neurological (i.e. a story, not a quirky socially-acceptable death-sentence) to just stop eating sugar.
Sometimes symptoms can – and should – be [tackled with psychological nudges](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#your-financial-philosophy-and-your-relationship-with-money). But because money is so intertwined with our worldviews, we need something that seeks to shape our neurology, not play tricks on it: we need philosophy.
Being told to look at the purple line works only if it’s grounded in a philosophy that’s open to understanding what’s relevant and what’s not.
By ‘works’ I mean increases your comfort and confidence with investing, and generally using your money to improve your life. And further that this comfort and confidence comes from competence and understanding… that isn’t simply a deceptive feeling you hide behind because you were trying to either impress or get rid of the guy in the suit you’re paying for reassuring lies about your dreams of ‘financial freedom’.
As another new-agey writer put it, your freedom doesn’t come from your numbers, but the choices they express: ‘\[people] must learn that the entirety of one's adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. It they can accept this totally, then they become free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims.’
If freedom means anything beyond something to shout when covered in facepaint and marching to defend your right to do anything but think freely, it means the freedom to write your own stories.
**The implications of understanding this go way beyond the difference between two arbitrary investment experiences of course. It brings in your entire** [**relationship with money**](https://news.moneyblind.net/6-what-the-bloody-hell-is-a-relationship-with-money-anyway)**.**
Because – like with any behaviour change that you actually want to work – all roads lead back to your brain. And if you act as if they don’t, you’ll be forever spinning around in self-deceptive circles.
The two key points of a focus on [neuroplasticity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1) are:
**1. How you do anything is how you do everything.** Every decision is a vote for a worldview that either makes life better or worse. (See also Maxim of the Week below).
**2. It gets easier.** Every choice makes one neural pathway easier to go down, and another one more difficult. You don’t need to choose the good path for long before it starts to choose itself. But you do need to do it for a bit.
As David Foster Wallace put it: ‘If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently. \[…] It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.’ There are echoes here of Aristotle, and his conception of freedom as directing one’s attention to the same stuff reason rightly recognises as worthy of attention.
**Advice that doesn’t start with neuroplasticity isn’t advice, it’s enablement.**
But neuroplastic changes are the least emotionally salient thing in the world, and short-term fluctuations in money are the most. So while, as David Eagleman wrote: ‘Invisibly small changes inside the brain can cause massive changes to behavior \[sic]’ because ‘our choices are inseparably married to the tiniest details of our machinery’, we choose to ignore them.
Remember, as any good existentialist would tell you: you don’t get to choose not to choose. Existence precedes essence. Who you are (your essence) is the result of your choices (your existence).
You are what you make yourself to be. And your success with money is what you make it too.
There is an alternative, of course. Thinking is hard. There are plenty of [cowboys](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-st-jamess-place-other-cowboys-paul-davies) out there only too happy to let you [pay them more than you pay for everything else put together each year](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/s1) to do your investment thinking for you. It’s your choice.
*\* Stickler footnote: real clients got graphs built from real data depending on their actual portfolio; this works with anything equity-based. I’d then often follow-up with other exciting graphs showing that if you look at investments every day, you’re as likely to see a loss as a gain, but that if you look over a decade, you’d only ever see a doubling in value. Depending on the blah blah blah… This, incidentally, was about as much numbers-based chat as any clients ever got from me. Financial-planning meeting minutes are valuable: they shouldn’t be wasted on numbers.*
## **Money** [**Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) **of the week**
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
**This week:** [**Rule #5: How you do anything is how you do everything**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#5-how-you-do-anything-is-how-you-do-everything)
Skipping a single commitment happens. Sometimes even for good reasons. But it has consequences in your brain that last a lot longer than the next couple of minutes. It doesn’t make it MORE likely you’ll do the right thing next time, it makes it LESS… however hard you promise yourself otherwise.
There’s no such thing as ‘just this once’. Every action makes one pathway in your brain easier to travel down next time, and another one harder. Think of your life as a system, not a series of snapshots: don’t waste your willpower on doing stuff Present You is already sufficiently motivated to do. Use it to give a helping, environment-controlling hand to the Future You who doesn’t have enough.
# #18: You cannot count. This leads you to make idiotic financial decisions.
18th January, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that knows a, b, c, isn't as easy as 1, 2, 3.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that money isn't the universal, objective, instrument of calculation you thought it was.
***To make wiser decisions, recognise that you cannot count accurately***
You may have been doing it since you were three, but you’re crap at counting. Don’t worry, everybody is. Sure, you can add one to any given number, but you can’t count in a meaningful way. Recognising this is key to making wiser decisions.
In terms of how numbers translate to meaning, counting tends to go something like: one, two, three, some, lots, loads. We’ve seen how important precise appreciation of opportunity costs can be to making wiser decisions. Recognising commonly overlooked inputs is crucial, but if you can’t count them properly, your decision-making could still suck.
When it comes to getting a grip on making the most of your resources, it would be great if you could appropriately distinguish between a million and a billion, but you can’t. No one cares 1,000 times more about a billion than a million. They’re both ‘loads’. One is intellectually a bit bigger than the other, but in terms of guiding our actions, one unimaginably large number is pretty much the same as the next one.
This is a problem, because to make wiser decisions, we often need to be sensitive to this sort of scale, but our decisions are driven by feelings that aren’t up to the job. In these situations, we need to find a way to delegate the decisions to the calculators. This often feels weird and inhuman, but not doing so could lead to inhuman actions.
This is felt most keenly in donating to charity, where our gifts tend to be subject to the assertion possibly misattributed to Stalin, that ‘a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’ One ‘identifiable victim’ will forever exert more influence over our wallets than a million otherwise identical souls.
As Nate Soares wrote:
> The loss of a human life with all is joys and all its sorrows is tragic no matter what the cause, and the tragedy is not reduced simply because I was far away, or because I did not know of it, or because I did not know how to help, or because I was not personally responsible. Knowing this, I care about every single individual on this planet. The problem is, my brain is simply incapable of taking the amount of caring I feel for a single person and scaling it up by a billion times. I lack the internal capacity to feel that much. My care-o-meter simply doesn't go up that far. And this is a problem.
This isn’t just about charity (though as we’ll see later, that has a uniquely important role to play in – selfishly – allocating resources towards each individual interpretation of a Good Life). Just as Soares continues, that ‘prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters’, so those living well aren’t those that are better calculators of the opportunity cost of every decision. They’re the ones who’ve learned to better control their decision-making machinery. Who’ve learnt to live examined lives with a view to focusing on what makes their lives better and ignoring everything else. Who’ve learnt, as per our earlier discussion of ‘the two types of financial errors’, to cultivate better filters for problem formulation, and better processes for problem solving.
Alas, the mind-altering drug of ‘more’ makes us abandon any idea of a filter. And it doesn’t matter how great your processing power is if you’re tidying up stuff that should’ve just been thrown away.
There is, however, a potential upside. Our inability to cope with big numbers is bad when thinking about the world, but it could be good if we’re thinking only of ourselves. If we learnt to trust that we were incapable of feeling any different if we hoarded wealth on any part of the ‘loads’ scale, from ‘can easily afford the odd holiday’ to ‘billionaire’, we’d probably waste less of our lives trying to gain more wealth simply for the sake of it and do something a bit more meaningful instead. We may come to understand, as explained by Derren Brown in *Happy*, that ‘while it remains clear that having less than you need is a source of unhappiness, having more than you need does not make you happier.’
## **Money** [**Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) **of the week**
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
**This week:** [**Trigger #10: Rich, 1%**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#10-rich-1)
You're already [rich](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1). You're quite possibly already in 'the 1%'. Unless you think only a tiny percentage of people living in a tiny percentage of the world's (mostly Western) cities are worthy of you acknowledging their existence.
If you're making excuses for the quality of your life because you've confused it with the cost of your life, stop and ask yourself if it's really a matter of money.
# #19: What's your number?
25th January, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that tells you numbers are numbing.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that if your destination is a number, you’re probably a prisoner.
I’d like you to meet Nigel. Nigel was an awkward, miserable, client. The sort of smart-arse pernickety type that made my boss hunt for excuses to not see him. For most financial advisers of the ex-insurance salesmen variety, clients that ask questions are the worst part of the job.
Nigel’s business, which seemed to cause him nothing but grief, and which he stuck with more because he’d built it than because he liked it, was looking like it could be sold.
‘So how much would be enough?’ my boss asked. ‘How much would be enough to do whatever you felt like for the rest of your life?’
‘£2.5 million,’ Nigel rushed back, clearly having calculated it already.
Fast forward six months. Nigel’s back. He’s brought his wife with him, albeit it looks like this was not his choice. He’s sold his business.
‘So how much did you get?’
‘£10 million.’
We’ll see how Nigel’s story ends in a second. The point I’d like to focus on now is the calculation.
How did Nigel come up with £2.5m? He was only 40-something. He’d only really been making adult decisions about money for 20 years, and had dedicated most of those to something he didn’t like all that much and was now potentially not going to be doing. And he was not going to be doing it for maybe another 60 years. There’s a lot of uncertainty in there, before even making any assumptions about inflation, investment growth, or tax rates. And yet he was certain what his ‘number’ was.
A lot of people are.
Some even get competitive about it, apparently believing saying something like ‘Oh no, my number’s much higher – I’m thinking £50m’ makes them sound like anything other than a miserable idiot.
Whether it’s a total asset value, or an income (usually a naively pre-tax one), or even a total asset value ‘calculated’ by multiplying a desired income by 25 because you heard something about a ‘safe withdrawal rate’ of 4% once, most people have an oddly accurate idea of what their ‘number’ is.
I did.
When I was about 25, I was pretty sure how much I ‘needed’. I was also jolly proud of myself for how modest it was. Reader, it wasn’t that modest.
25! I’d been doing my first proper job for less than two years and was doing it precisely because it was the sort of job that kept my options open. When asked upon joining to write a note to ourselves in five years’ time, while everyone else scribbled great essays about titles, and salaries and whatnot, I wrote one word: ‘oops’. No way would I still be there in five years to get that note back! (I left after five years and two days, but to do much the same thing.)
I was so sure of the uncertainty ahead, and yet at the same time ‘knew’ what my number – the cost of dealing with that uncertainty for a lifetime – was, almost to the penny.
But falling prey to the end-of-history illusion – the idea that much as we may have changed before, who we are now is pretty much who we’ll be forever more – isn’t even the dumbest part.
One beautiful bonus of working with those that have accumulated vast wealth is (assuming you’re paying attention to how well it’s worked out for them) it robs you of the idiotic notion that there is a ‘number’, and, by extension, that it should therefore be the focus of your daily endeavours. Idle speculation and calculating certainty out of its opposite is one thing, but [blind fixation on an arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant number](https://news.moneyblind.net/5-idiot-profile-private-jet-guy) is quite another.
In case new or negligent readers need reminding, the value of money in our lives [is always about the narrative, never the number](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path).
These calculations come so easily because they’re not calculations. [They’re stories](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1). ‘Needing’ 20k or 200k a year isn’t because you’ve worked out that’s actually what you need to flourish (aka how needy you are). It’s a slightly less socially obnoxious way of parading how you value life in terms of money – and in every case, high or low, showing that you do, indeed, value life in terms of money.
Challenge anyone on this, and few will admit that yes, they would become a much better person if they won the lottery or moved from earning five figures to six, but we act like it all the same. We are agonisingly self-deceived.
But as long as we’re not actually psychopaths, these self-deceptions can be shifted. All Nigel needed to do so was a nudge from his wife.
‘Wow. Congratulations,’ my boss said on hearing the £10 million offer. ‘So is that it? Have you left yet, or are you still winding down?’
Nigel’s wife smiled. Or rather smirked.
‘No, no. I’m staying on, actually,’ said Nigel. ‘I’ve an earn-out deal that means if I stay for another five years, albeit without a salary – I could get another £15 million.’
Nigel had no plans for this extra money, of course. He’d already got four times as much as his ‘enough to do anything’ sum. In his hunt for justification, he did not say anything about what he’d do with the money, for himself, or others. Instead he bumbled out some noises about stewarding the business, and ‘being there’ for his team. After none of these survived an interrogation that never progressed beyond a gentle tickling, my boss was moved to suggest that whatever message Nigel was struggling to send, the one being received was that Nigel was choosing to spend his time with his colleagues rather than with his wife and two young children.
His wife agreed.
Nigel wasn’t really choosing this, of course. But when a brain wired by a lifetime of unhelpful messages about money met a great big sack of it, he saw only numbers, blind to their more important narrative consequences. Through the narrow lens of ’20 years to make £10 million, and only five more to make another 15!’ there was only one choice. His wife, however, could see other choices more clearly. Ones that would undoubtedly enrich their lives in ways extra money could not.
In the end, Nigel walked away from the job. He still sends my old boss a card every year to thank him for the tickles.
(We’ll look another time at the argument that in the face of such uncertainty, the safe play is to hoard as much as humanly possible, ‘just in case’.)
## **Money** [**Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4) **of the Week**
**This week: Trigger #21:** [**Just in case**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#21-just-in-case)
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
The trouble with phrases well-loved by parents, like ‘better safe than sorry’, is that they get so unquestionably embedded from such a young age that it becomes very difficult to keep them to situations befitting of their pithy wisdom. There are people out there with ‘rainy day’ funds big enough to survive a Biblical flood who still panic about making ends meet. Others clutter their cupboards with more ‘on the off-chance’ stuff than stuff that actually makes them smile. Don’t be one of those people.
Living only ever happens in the here and now. Living that happens in the future is only a dream, inspired by nightmare thoughts of ‘just in case’ or ‘better safe than sorry’. Much of financial planning is about seeking security. Yet poorly done it is more often the security of a stagnant pond, not a beautiful waterfall.
Money worries come from viewing money in a non-natural way, focusing not on the stability of one’s ability to be rewarded with it for the value one provides to the world, but on what would happen if one lost what they had – which leads, inevitably, to believing that one can never have enough.
# #20: 7 magnificent money lessons that have nothing to do with money
1st February, 2020
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that wishes it were a library.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by studying wisdom, not money.
**Becoming wiser with money has almost nothing to do with learning about money. It has a lot to do with learning practically wise lessons from elsewhere.**
A quarter of my degree was based on a paper entitled ‘Money’. I’ve got enough professional qualifications covering the finer points of tax, investing, and financial planning to ruin a civilised dinner party or scare off a first date. They taught me almost nothing of any practical worth when it comes to using money to enhance the Goodness of my life.
Other stuff I’ve learnt, however – from economics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, psychotherapy, sociology, and history – feels more valuable than getting in on the ground floor of the [greater-fool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) GameStop elevator.
These are some big ideas that have transformed my – and I hope can transform your – ability to turn money into a Good Life.
**1. Economics: Everything is a resource-allocation game (aka there’s no such thing as a free lunch)**
Life is a resource-allocation puzzle. Economics is the study of how best to allocate scarce resources. Your job isn’t to accumulate resources, it’s to allocate them. And the more of them you have, the more important it is to allocate them well: the greater your ability, the greater your responsibility.
While as a subject economics is notoriously mostly nonsense, this misses the point that those trained to think like economists tend to think more clearly and creatively than most (there’s actual science on this; see examples in David Epstein’s *Range* if you wish).
We want to avoid the numbers-based forecasting part of the economics world, but we want to embrace an approach to our individual lives that understands that everything is a trade, and that most of the time what we’re trading isn’t money.
Becoming wiser with money is in part a process of [seeing opportunity costs as clearly as monetary ones](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.2-if-less-is-more-then-more-is-also-less#theres-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch). And – because thoroughly analysing opportunity costs with every decision is impossible – of establishing them as the decision-making default.
**2. Philosophy: The unexamined life is not worth living**
Philosophy, before the logic-choppers and librarians invaded, is about how to live. As Pierre Hadot wrote: philosophical knowledge is ‘not just plain knowing, but knowing-what-ought-to-be-preferred, and hence knowing how to live.’ This knowledge is ultimately your only goal (see Maxim of the week below).
What financial philosophy is, and why it’s necessary, is the subject of [this section](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2) of the book, (and indeed underpins the whole of Part One). We also covered the meaning of Socrates’ assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living in [Idiot Money #1](https://news.moneyblind.net/1-the-correlation-between-having-money-managing-it-well-and-living-a-good-life) and the pure idiocy of chasing money precisely to make unconscious choices in [Idiot Money #8](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money).
In the words of [A.C. Grayling](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00548dx): ‘if you don't think about your values, and your aims, your goals, and what sort of person to be, and how to live your life, then you’ve yielded up the direction of your life to chance, and to others, and the decisions that other people make. And then you're no better than an animal being driven about by things that happen around you and you've lost autonomy; you're not the governor of yourself.’
In short: examining your life is necessary to living it well, and examining your money choices is at the heart of this process.
**3. Psychology: Environment control**
Psychology is surprisingly useless at helping us use our money to live better lives. As much fun as it is to point and laugh at the silly things we (or other people) do with money, the psychology of money usually goes no further than describing these silly things, rather than doing anything about them.
When it does move from description to explanation, or even on rare occasions to prescription, it’s usually in the sense of helping us to make better unconscious decisions (via environment control) rather than tackling the root causes that stop us from making better conscious decisions by default in the first place.
However well psychological nudges work, they all start too late. [They save us from symptoms, but do little to cure the causes](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2). Even the best-intentioned behaviour changes are doomed to stumble if the underlying worldview – which is being continually reinforced faster than any behavioural prescriptions can keep up with – remains looking at the world in a distorted, self-deceptive way.
All proper change happens not at the environmental, but at the neurological level...
**4. Neuroscience: Neuroplasticity**
Neuroplasticity – the capacity of your brain to rewire itself and cultivate more useful connections – is the framework for all meaningful success. It’s the magic link between seemingly insignificant actions and the hugely significant shaping of your life story.
If you want to change anything, what you really want to do is make one pathway in your brain weaker, and another stronger. This isn’t always easy, but it is systematic (and therefore simple to do if you care enough) and it’s the only sort of change that’s sustainable.
In many areas, short-term, unsustainable change is fine, but you live with money every damn minute of every damn day. There is no more valuable area for you to take conscious control of how your brain is wired.
As explained in [this section](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1), rewiring your brain is about paying focused attention to what is relevant to the Goodness of your life, in thought and action. As Norman Doidge wrote: ‘Paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change \[…] While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.’
And to any old dogs out there: do not be dispirited! You can learn new tricks! As Michael Merzenich wrote, if an adult brain pays sufficient attention, ‘everything that you can see happen in a young brain can happen in an older brain.’ In short, if you find yourself using ‘that’s just the way I am’ as an excuse for unwise behaviour, you’re being an idiot.
**5. Psychoanalysis: Becoming an editor of your life story**
If you fully embrace your neuroplastic potential, psychoanalysis is of limited use. Because wherever an idea comes from, it looks the same to your brain, and if you can change that look, the origin story is unnecessary.
A psychoanalytic understanding of an idea’s origins may help persuade you how deeply certain stories are embedded, and how they needn’t necessarily be true. But if you can open your mind to the possibility of rewriting those stories anyway, where they came from is irrelevant.
All neuroplastic change involves catching yourself unthinkingly going down one path, stopping, and consciously going down a better one instead. Where psychoanalysis is most beneficial is if understanding unhelpful beliefs (e.g. as wording implanted by your mother or father, or as a symbol of an underlying fear or insecurity) makes it easier to catch them.
**6. Sociology: The difference between society and culture**
We want belonging, connection. In a society, belonging comes from rules; in a culture, it comes from traditions. Rules are something you have. Traditions are something you express, and help to create, or evolve. Where societies are bound together by shared external goods, cultures are bound by shared internal values.
Societies use symbolic possessions to know who is in, and who is out. Cultures identify each other through character. Luxury goods, for example, as symbols of the separation between different strata, are an expensive entrance-fee for playing by society’s rules.
One’s society, as defined by geography, may be wedded to unhelpful worldviews, but societies are wedded to all sorts of nonsense that, assuming one doesn’t live in an authoritarian state, one doesn’t have to choose to sacrifice their wellbeing to.
So screw society, choose culture.
**7. History: Perspective, and ‘**[everything changes, except woman and man](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.4)**’**
History is the world’s greatest ever science experiment, disguised as a series of art exhibitions. While ‘other studies,’ wrote historian Will Durant, ‘may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years.’
It is both our gift and our curse that we can still learn so much from the study of a world that’s been obstinately refusing to do just that since man first put pen to papyrus. We’re living in the richest ever age, and while at the macro level, we’re slowly allocating [better and better](https://www.gapminder.org/), at a micro level, we’re just as dumb as ever.
However we express our struggles with using money to live better lives, they’re all simply variations on an unchanging theme. To study history is to remember this and to get a sense of perspective. For example, if you can’t be happy being one of the richest 0.000001% of humans to have ever lived, your problem probably isn’t money. History prods us to stop and ask: if a belief didn’t work for billions of people, in millions of settings, over thousands of years – for example, equating money with Goodness – is it really likely to work for you?
\*
There’s one deliberately major omission from this list. It’ll get a post all to itself soon.
**Becoming wiser with money has almost nothing to do with learning about money. Knowing facts about money or making money does not indicate any sort of wisdom. But how you use what you know, and what you’ve made, is one of the surest signs of your wisdom… or your idiocy.**
## **Money** [**Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4) **of the Week**
**This week: Principle #2:** [**There is only one goal**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#2-there-is-only-one-goal)
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
Every short-term goal is a subgoal of living a Good Life. Achieving a specific aim is a tree; living well is the forest. Don’t waste time on trees that don’t add to the health of your forest.
It’s amazing how much energy can be directed towards a goal while never stopping to check if it’s actually worth it – if it actually makes your life better.
Partly this is because the specifics of what makes your life better have a habit of changing, and we don’t tend to be fans of that. Partly it’s because we’re also not massive fans of working out what we actually like, versus being told what to like. Mostly it’s just idiocy.
# #21: The merits of money are negative
8th February, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The worst newsletter except for all the others.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that money's usefulness is far from linear.
**We treat money as infinitely useful. It sort of is. But not to each of us as individuals.**
‘The merits of democracy,’ Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘are negative.’ He meant that democracy doesn’t guarantee *good* government, but it protects against the worst evils that pop up when we give power – as we inevitably do – to those maddest for it.
With one major exception, in the hands of a single individual, the merits of money are negative, too. It doesn’t need to be this way. And it shouldn’t be this way. But because of how we’re commonly wired to exist with money, it is.
Thanks to the selfless work of billions of blind idiots and their trillions of well-intentioned but rather panicked transactions, we know that money enables Good Things at best unreliably or fleetingly. But a certain level of money is insurance against Bad Things.
Cheapest usually signifies worst. But most expensive usually signifies waste, and the chance for an insecure idiot to brag about making another poor life choice.
A more expensive hotel could easily set holiday expectations ruinously high, or shield its inhabitant from valuable eye-opening experiences. Staying somewhere so shit even the anecdote gods can’t save it, and where only the truly happy could sleep with a smile, would ruin things in a different way.
If you made my flat any smaller, you’d start to eat into the space to swing a kettlebell; this would make my life worse. But if you doubled its size, there’d simply be more to hoover. And if you made me pay for the extra space, I’d have to work for another couple of decades.
Wearing clothes that are ill-fitting, or emblematic of the Capitol-storming catwalk is bad for you. But their appearance on a more gilded catwalk doesn’t make them good for you. If you can’t feel good wearing not-crap clothes, your problem isn’t the clothes, just as (per [last week](https://news.moneyblind.net/20-7-magnificent-money-lessons-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-money)) if you can’t live well being one of the richest, most opportunity-laden people that’s ever lived, your problem isn’t money.
### The threshold theory of good living
This ‘threshold theory’ pops up almost everywhere money is involved, because (partly for the reasons discussed in [Idiot Money #18](https://news.moneyblind.net/18-you-cannot-count.-this-leads-you-to-make-idiotic-financial-decisions.), among a ton of others) beyond a threshold which is lower than just about everybody believes it is, we’re incapable of scaling how Good we feel with how expensive stuff is.
This isn’t limited to possessions.
One benefit of money is that we *don’t* have to do things *because* of it. If you’re poor (not just broke) every action (and by extension your life) is an expression of your financial situation. Move away from poverty, and you get the opportunity to flip this – to use your finances to express your soul.
For example, having enough savings so you don’t have to take the first (possibly unsuitable) job you can following redundancy is great. But it’s not the same as actually finding work that energises you, rather than work you endure for a few decades in the hope of not having to do it one day.
Given the unique role most people’s jobs play in determining the Goodness of each day (and therefore of their lives) of all the rare opportunities to use money to truly level-up your life, the opportunity to find fitting work is perhaps money’s greatest material benefit. But providing the opportunity isn’t the same as guaranteeing it’ll be grasped.
For reasons we’ll look at another time, there is a depressing correlation between those that have this opportunity and that end up taking work primarily for the money anyway. There’s also a limit. How much runway does anyone conceivably need to find a fulfilling means of earning money? A few years buys time to look. A few decades sells your soul to never looking.
\*
The benefits of money should go beyond this.
We have all invested in things (sometimes possessions, often relationships, usually character traits) that have transformed the quality of our lives, made our souls sing. But in the context of how we think, act, and spend all day, every day, they are the exception, not the rule. Depressingly, our [deep-seated self-deceptions](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#better-money-decisions-step-by-step) prevent us from learning from what worked and what didn’t, even missing the intro course on how the value of the transformation never correlates with its monetary cost.
### The application to advice
This has – I hope obvious – consequences for advice, whether you’re giving it, or receiving it.
Most financial advice is at its best when it sticks to saying ‘don’t do mad things’.
Yet there’s greater value in reminding people of the link between ability and responsibility (to self and others), not making it easier to forget about it.
And there’s greater value still in reminding people of the one major exception I hinted at above.
For much as it’s a bit crap at directly leading someone to live a Good Life, to fulfilling their potential, [money is a great tool](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.2) for the sort of clearer seeing that *does* bring that about. It is the examined life that is worth living, and there’s no easier way to examine your life choices than by checking your credit-card statement.
\*
We should actively want to embrace a process of examination, refinement, and checking what works for us in a constantly shifting set of internal and external circumstances, so we don’t get stuck blindly equating wealth with waste, standard of living with access to comfort, and quality of life with cost of life. (Unless an ultimately unfulfilling life of bourgeois insignificance, sat atop a physically and mentally incapacitating conveyor belt amid a world to which you proudly make damn all difference is actually your thing, in which case, fair thee well, but you probably want to unsubscribe).
Because we want an artistic life, not an expensive one. One that expresses the otherwise inexpressible complexity of us. That is filled with moments like walking on air after truly connecting with or otherwise helping a fellow human. And in which we’ve controlled our environment so that it inspires behaviours that make us smile each morning upon leaving the house. This can include material things too – items that each time we contemplate them remind us of the amazing trade we made that sustainably improved our life, not just insured us against it being obviously rubbish.
## **Money** [**Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4) **of the Week**
**This week: Trigger #6:** [**On average**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#6-on-average)
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
The world isn’t short of happiness research. And while studies can be great guides for experimentation, they’re often awful for prescriptions, especially when it’s only the headline anyone reads.
Cultivating certain psychological traits, owning pot plants or gratitude journals may make people 10% happier on average, but that doesn’t mean: a) you should follow what worked for someone else without examining how well it’s working for you; or b) preach about what does work for you.
You are neither an average, nor a universal representative. Be quicker to run your own experiments than to blindly share the headline results of someone else’s.
# #22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldview
15th February, 2021
**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?**
It is a central theme of [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.1) that money, in the way it is relevant to your ability to live a Good Life, is about stories. About narrative, not number. [Money is integral and instrumental, not merely incidental, to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path).
This is wonderful, in a way. Because we have tremendous capacity to [edit these stories](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3). 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.
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.
As Grosz continues (echoing the story from [Idiot Money #4](https://news.moneyblind.net/4-spending-gbp450k-on-being-bad-parents)):
> 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.’
This is part of why despite ‘[not having to think about money](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)’ 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 [last week](https://news.moneyblind.net/21-the-merits-of-money-are-negative), 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**.
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.
# #23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them
22nd February, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that is still waiting for Christmas.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that extraordinary, instant change is possible, but it requires an extraordinary change of view.
**Stop being frightened about money… start being haunted.**
Behaviour change is a puzzling thing. It’s everywhere in talk, and nowhere in action. No one’s said anything new about habit-making since William James’s 1890 Principles of Psychology, and despite a million more people saying the same things in a million different ways since then, this only makes the gap between intention and action even more ridiculous.
There are many intriguing sides to this problem. The one I’d like to focus on here is why it often takes being truly terrified to bother making a proper stab at changing behaviour – even when that change, as it so often does – boils down to doing nothing other than choosing to see the world in a different way, and can thus (theoretically at least) be done instantly.
Because money is so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, worldview-change is far more important than isolated behaviour-change. Not only do *all* your important behaviours change themselves if you see your world more clearly, but the non-important behaviours become just that… non-important; pesky imps to be ignored, rather than vampires sucking money, time, and energy out of you.
**Because worldview changes are an effortlessly sustainable energising dance, rather than a constantly fatiguing fight, potentially the most powerful behaviour-change book of them all is Charles Dickens’s *****A Christmas Carol*****.**
Ebenezer Scrooge goes, overnight, from hating himself and others to loving them both. And he does it because he sees his relationship with money differently when he wakes up to when he went to sleep.
You can read *A Christmas Carol* as a great novel. You can also see it – and use it – as a symbol. As explained [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage):
> Becoming wiser with money presents us with a quandary. The skills you are trying to acquire to transform yourself are those possessed not by the person you are, but by the person you are becoming. How does the person you are now know what it will be like to become what you could be? How do you know that becoming that person is even a wise move? We need a way of testing before we can’t turn back. Leaps of faith are terribly exciting, but sometimes it’s better to build a bridge.
We need a philosophical bridge that tempts us with an inkling into a more illuminated world, shows us how to get there, and which, when we have travelled across it, becomes part of our expanded, wiser, self. A bridge that allows something to contribute to and inspire our current experience without actually being part of that current experience. This is the function of a symbol – an aspirational spark that illuminates the path of becoming.
\*
[Money Blind](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.1) is about systematically overcoming self-deception around your finances, to see your relationship with money more clearly, so you become capable of improving it, rather than floundering around in the dark, flung from one unacknowledged and remotely controlled addiction to the next.
It’s not a scary message about how you probably aren’t saving enough for retirement. It’s shining a light on the haunting idea that how we use our money is expressing someone we, in some sense, would rather not be, and that every time we use it in an idiotic way – one that doesn’t make our life better – it’s not a minor blip, it’s a vote for making it even less likely we’ll make a wiser, more conscious decision next time.
As psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz explains:
> **Scrooge doesn’t change because he’s frightened – he changes because he’s haunted. We can be frightened of gaining weight, but that alone probably won’t cause us to change our diet. Haunting is different. It makes us feel – makes us alive to – some fact about the world, some piece of information that we’re trying to avoid.**
Haunting makes us alive to [whether we really know what we believe we know](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2). The stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves… are they true? Do they have to be true? What would the world look like if they weren’t? If they didn’t have to be? Are they something that fulfils us and helps us face our fears? Or something that we hide behind?
> What knowledge is Scrooge trying to avoid? \[…] Ultimately Scrooge changes because the ghosts unpick his delusion that you can live a life without loss. They undo his delusion by haunting Scrooge with the losses he has already experienced, the losses now being endured around him, and the inevitable loss of his own life and possessions.
A large part of our resistance to change is clinging to comforting, but disabling, beliefs that ‘that’s just how I am’. **If we weren’t so desperate for certainty, it would be a lot harder to sell it to us**.
If the world woke up one morning and decided to believe *en masse* for just one day that money maybe didn’t need to be an impossibly scary, boring, complicated thing, then all the shysters and financial snake-oil salesmen would either have to get an awful lot better at explaining the value of what they actually do for clients (and actually doing it!), or they’d be out of a job.
> Dickens’ story teaches us another lesson: Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present – change can only take place in the here and now. This is important because trying to change the past can leave us feeling helpless, depressed.
**This will to delusion is, I believe, stronger with money than with anything else**. Sometimes, [even £10 million isn’t enough](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/s1) to take a few hours to grasp the relevant lessons about personal finance.
On the one hand, money is high on everyone’s lists of things to get a better grip on, to behave better with. On the other, have you ever tried suggesting to someone that they maybe, possibly, perhaps, now and then, make dumb choices with their money?
Universally in financial planning, [of all the pieces in the initial information jigsaw that marks the start of a new adviser-client relationship, the expenditure breakdown is always the last one to be slotted in](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1) – if indeed it’s not declared eaten by the dog and gleefully abandoned altogether.
It’s not the homework, but what it reveals that’s unwelcome. I learnt the hard way that asking someone to contemplate what their spending says about their life inspires more terror than asking them to contemplate their or their partner’s possible death.
And yet, assuming you actually traded money for things that made your life better, wouldn’t reliving those moments bring you joy?
Step into Scrooge’s slippers. Embrace your present. Understand that [all behaviour change is brain change](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1). Put down the mouthy but trouserless self-help book, [pick up your philosophical scalpel](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.1) and let your ghosts guide you through your surgery.
# #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
1st March, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that gambles responsibly.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that all investments are gambles, so it pays to understand what you’re betting on.
*This is the first in a short series that dives into the ocean of choosing and managing investments in a way that leaves you neither drowning, nor strangled by seaweed and with a belly full of plastic crap.*
*First, a scene-setting introduction. The framework, implications, applications, and some calculations will follow.*
**All investments are gambles. Internalise the implications of this – learn how to make smart bets – and you’ll defuse the mental minefield of investment options.**
Investing is scary and complicated, right?
You’ve heard you should invest… in something.
You’ve seen the graphs, the maps to ‘freedom’ and become convinced it’s downright irresponsible not to.
You’ve seen the scarcely believable compounding calculations and become a bit annoyed you didn’t start when you were 20, but know the next best time is today.
So after a few more months psyching yourself up, you dare to take a peek.
You’re pretty sure sticking your life savings in something you saw on the news, or in the paper, or on a Reddit messageboard, or entrusting your future financial status to an Elon Musk tweet is probably not terribly responsible.
So instead you go to whatever investing website charges enough to afford the most advertising (you’ll worry about that later – it’s not like fees are the same money that you’re trying to make) and take a look around.
Do you want to invest in shares? Funds? ETFs? Investment trusts? Other?
Shares of what? Apparently there are a lot of publicly listed companies in the world.
Funds of what? There are 4,000 of them too.
Maybe someone told you that Vanguard were the good guys in this story. You filter for them. There’s still 78 to pick from.
And so it goes on.
You watch an explainer video. It makes it sound simple, but it doesn’t tell you what to do.
So you quit. You’ll come back later.
You’d ask a possibly knowledgeable friend, but that would mean [talking about money](https://news.moneyblind.net/13-lets-talk-about-money-baby), which would suggest either you had money, or you didn’t have money, or… whatever. I’m told if I think about this anymore, my brain will melt.
Maybe you hire professional help. You’re not really sure what help it is you need, [so you’ll never be too sure you’ve got it once you’re getting it](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blind-leading-paul-davies/), but best not to think about that. Just make ‘it’ go away. All that scary and complicated choice is someone else’s problem now.
Right?
Wrong.
\*
It’s still your problem. It’s just no longer such a conscious one.
You’ve found the ‘peace of mind’ that every financial adviser’s website promises. But under the surface, something weird is still going on.
> So desperate are we to find it, that we attach the label ‘peace’ to anything offering a hint of temporary external calm. We substitute peace of blind for peace of mind.
The rest of [that section](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#when-is-delegation-dangerous) of the book is worth a read, I think, to understand why this is a problem.
For now, however, let’s turn to [this](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/s1) (true) story:
> **But what if this stuff weren’t all that complicated? What if you could confidently manage it all in 10 minutes a year before going back to something more interesting? What if thoughts of money were rare, calm, and positive?**
The great news is that all \*waves arms\* *this* needn’t be scary. And it needn’t be complicated.
> **Fortunately, all the actually complicated stuff is completely irrelevant for you.** Few children relish the first day of school. But then someone teaches you how to fish, and it all gets better. The only difference in learning about finance is that rather than giving you a textbook, you’re given a blindfold, told that the fish are sharks and are then charged a fortune for keeping Jaws away from your ankles.
As I say in the [welcome page to the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/#must-money-seem-scary-and-complicated), I believe that **everybody already knows the majority of what they need to make the most of the money in their life**… And the rest is ridiculously quickly learned. But it’s hidden.
The best way I know of thinking about it more clearly is not to cede to the temptation to run from the (perceived) ‘risk’, but to face it, and reframe it, to – somewhat counterintuitively – think of all investments as gambles, and go from there.
Understanding investments as bets can make them feel less risky, and set your relationship with them on more comfortable ground. It also cuts out all the needlessly complicated crap.
**All investments are gambles.**
This isn’t a message of fear.
It’s a message of hope.
We’ll see why next time.
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[#28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2](/28-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-2-the-approach)
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## Money [Maxim](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the Week
**This week:** [**Rule #26:** **Know what good advice looks like before you look for it**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#26-know-what-good-advice-looks-like-before-you-look-for-it)
If you don’t know what you’re paying for, you will default to whom you trust the most, which means the appearance of trustworthiness is the most incentivised quality for an ‘adviser’ to possess.
And the people best at appearing trustworthy (because they have no actual product to sell, not even a crappy one) are conmen.
More on this [here](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blind-leading-paul-davies/).
Know how to manage your money yourself before deciding if you want to pay someone else to do it for you. This is why Part Three of the book (How to Invest Like a Non-Idiot) comes before Part Four (How to Get Help that’s Actually Helpful).
# #25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisons
8th March, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that follows teachings, not teachers.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that seeing your real money problems starts with seeing that you don't see them.
*In* [*Idiot Money #20*](https://news.moneyblind.net/20-7-magnificent-money-lessons-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-money)*, I outlined seven big ideas from seven different disciplines that can help you make sense of living well with money. I also hinted at an eighth that was important enough to get its own post… or rather series of posts. This is part one of that series.*
*Trigger warning: yes, this is about Buddhism, but NO! this is not about religion. So if you’d be put off by believing this has anything to do with religion, don’t be! This is philosophy and neuroscience set within a highly practical framework, not dogma or social conditioning. This framework is something to look through, not look at.*
*In the words of another, “All the practices of Buddhism are simply ways of actualizing the potentialities of human existence.” Or, if you prefer, “Fools seek the Buddha and not Mind; wise men seek Mind and not the Buddha.”*
*Also, I’ve read a lot of things about Buddhism and money, and the majority boil down to bullshit like ‘abundance’ and ‘scarcity’ mindsets, or are designed to either tell you what to spend your money on, or allow you to justify hoarding possessions without feeling bad about it. You won’t get any of that impractical twaddle from me.*
**To see money more clearly requires a systematic approach to insightful vision, not mental shortcuts.**
### Poison
‘Ignorance, desire, and aversion,’ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes in *Joyful Wisdom*, ‘are referred to in Buddhist writings as “The Three Poisons,” habits of relating to experience that are so deeply rooted that they cloud or “poison” the mind.’
Ignorance, desire, and aversion are tricky terms. They could be – and Buddhist philosophy in general often is – easily misinterpreted as giving up on passionate fun, just as meditation is often misinterpreted as a lazy giving up on living, rather than a hardcore embracing of it.
On top of that, the very appearance of a ‘Rinpoche’ in a name can be enough to shoot minds towards the conclusion that whatever is being said is inapplicable to circumstances that contain no cave-based sitting or robe-clad chanting.
Such a leap would both entrench the problems we’re seeking to solve, and rob us of a great source of wisdom. So instead, it may help to consider too the terms favoured by clinical psychologist and author of [a great book on the neuroscience of meditation,](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Buddhas-Brain-Practical-Neuroscience-Happiness/dp/1572246952/) Rick Hanson: ‘delusion, greed, and hatred’.
The point – as ever when concepts aren’t directly translatable – isn’t to pick a side, or to damn it all as impenetrable, but to get a sense of what is going on by using the imperfect angles in combination.
Here, that means whatever gives you a sense of being led astray from wiser choices, whether that’s because you’ve failed to think something through properly, or because you’re addicted to either ‘having’ a thing or denouncing it, despite neither doing anything for the Goodness of your life.
### Antidote
A poisoned mind makes for a badly behaved body. And not in a cool, rebellious way, but a makes-life-worse-than-it-could-be way.
[Any investigation of how to use resources to make life better](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro) rather than worse, must inevitably begin with tackling these mind-poisons. There’s little point sowing seeds in [salted soil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth).
The key problem with mind-poisons is that the tool we use to identify them, let alone do anything about them – the mind – is the very thing that is poisoned. **How do you see more clearly if your vision is so caked in mental mud that you can’t even see that you don’t see clearly?**
As Stephen Batchelor writes in *Alone With Others*, a book that draws out the connections between meditating in Indian caves and banging on about existentialism in 1940s French cafes, ‘Deeply enmeshed within the mind, \[ignorance] permeates every thought, emotion, and perception, producing an instinctive sense of oneself and the world which is so familiar that it is never noticed.’
The framework of Buddhist philosophy – and it’s very much a [philosophy in the old-school sense of ‘set of practices to make life better’](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#your-financial-philosophy-and-your-relationship-with-money) as opposed to an academic or theological exercise – is an antidote to these poisons.
It would be easy – too easy – to link these poisons to our relationships with money in a shallow way. ‘Don’t be delusional!’ ‘Don’t be greedy!’ ‘Don’t spend money on things triggered by hatred, of yourself, or others!’
Outside of an iboga-inspired eradication of cravings, such simplistic chat doesn’t change a damn thing. It’s not like people set out to be delusional, greedy, or hating. But it happens all the same. We need to tackle what makes these arise, not howl into the void in our lives created when they do.
The three poisons are causes of suffering, but they’re symptoms of self-deception. ‘Self-deception,’ writes Chögyam Trungpa, ‘is a constant problem.’ The most insidious self-deception occurs not at the level of isolated and incidental investment things, but at as part of your integral system of living with money. Which is why we need practices, not tactics; [clearer vision, not a cleverer app](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4).
The alternative is a constant financial fight; and **not only can you not win a war that never ends, but it’s boring as hell**.
### Editing the poisons out of your story
‘Delusion, the traditional cause of evil in Buddhist thought,’ writes Robert Carter, in his book on the Kyoto School of philosophy, ‘occurs when we mistake the separate objective self for the real or deeper self.’
Recall from [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self) that your ‘self’ is your emergent ‘centre of narrative gravity’. Your story of who you are. A story that **should be enhanced by money, but, because of our self-deceptive beliefs, is instead infected by it**.
Delusion, or ignorance, in this sense, isn’t only a lack of knowledge. It could be. But it’s most poisonous when we mistakenly believe we know something which we don’t, or when we know it in a limited way, e.g. [when we know it only in a propositional or procedural way, not a perspectival and participatory one](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2). Ignorance isn’t such a problem when you know you’re ignorant.
Overcoming craving, or greed, isn’t about denial. Believing it is is [why diets don’t work](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-spend-it). The problem is one of loss of our agency over our stories. Instead, we need to learn to eschew acquisitiveness for the sake of the acquiring, and to want to acquire only the things that make our lives better and avoid those that don’t. By default. With [effortless effort](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#9-cultivate-wu-wei-effortless-effort). Because when you can see labels clearly, who (other than perhaps Dostoyevsky’s [Underground Man](https://fs.blog/2013/03/notes-from-underground/)) chooses to swig from the bottle with the skull on it?
**The typical approach to overcoming aversion is to either denounce the object of hatred harder, or to suppress it. Yet denunciation is just fanaticism for angry people, and suppression is subconscious superglue**. It’s playing the same silly game, only with added sour grapes and throbbing temples. This is the norm wherever we sub in numbers, and the certainty they provide, for facing the fears (and opening ourselves to the opportunities) of an inherently uncertain narrative. We do this to escape the reality we want to embrace. We narrow and dehumanise our view by counting only cash, forgetting that it is character that we count upon.
### If you can’t beat it, channel it
As we’ll see when we come to the second of the Four Noble Truths, these poisons are part of being human. Because they’re shortcuts. And the whole point of the stories which make up our ‘self’ is that they are means of bringing order to a chaos of environmental inputs.
**The same forces that narrow our worldview to write stories at all also lead us to write crap ones**. We couldn’t survive without them. But to thrive, we need to be ready to edit the shit out of them. We need to zoom out and see that a narrowing of alternative explanations for what’s going on doesn’t mean the one we happened to settle on at one point in time is the one we need to be stuck with.
The great news is that this is completely within our control, and we know exactly what to do about it.
We want not to simply change our belief, but to stop playing a game based on a belief system in the first place. Buddhism isn’t the comforting but ultimately unhelpful belief system, money is.
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[#27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview](/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)
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## **Money** [**Maxim**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) **of the Week**
**This week: Rule #22: Know the difference between a sign and a symbol**
The drive to be told what to do when presented with something we don’t immediately understand is so strong that even if you make it the basis of your whole message, like Buddha did, everyone will still go a bit [Life of Brian](https://youtu.be/KHbzSif78qQ).
It’s been explained in countless places that by the standards of the religions that rolled out after them, the Buddha was no Buddhist, and Christ was no Christian. As Jung wrote: ‘That Buddha should have become a model to be imitated was in itself a weakening of his idea, just as the imitatio Christi was a forerunner of the fateful stasis in the evolution of the Christian idea.’
The mistake was that potentially life-affirming symbols got turned into life-denying signs.
As Stephen Batchelor explains:
> Frequently we find glaring discrepancies between the values and aims of the institutionalized religions and the values propounded and lived by their founders. The latter-day protagonists of the religion become more concerned with justifying and defending the particular dogmas and creeds of their faith, than in grasping their existential significance as answers to the basic dilemmas of human life. The true value of any dogma or belief lies in its ability to point beyond itself to a deeper reality which can not be readily articulated in a simple formula or expression.
The same story plays out with money: it should be a symbol to help us find meaning, but we turn it into a sign of meaning, and everything turns to shit.
Symbols help us break past our fixation on beliefs and find, what John Vervaeke described in his masterful [Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ) (especially episodes 34 and 35) as ‘transformatively relevant truths.’
Vervaeke describes how belief systems (be they traditional religion or a screwy money worldview) ‘are attempts to create meaning, but they fail because a lot of your meaning-making machinery is not occurring at the level of your propositional knowledge.’ I.e. if you try to find meaning in money by thinking of it as incidental to your life, rather than integral to it, as a number, not woven into the narrative, as a thing to have, not part of a participatory process of becoming… then you’re buggered.
Money makes claims to fundamental ‘truths’ or ‘answers’ when really it’s always contingent on the circumstances of the life – and indeed, the system of interconnected and interdependent lives – of which it is a part.
Symbols contain incredible power… if you know how to use them.
Like a sign, a symbol refers to something. But symbols go further, because they also exemplify. They get you to participate in that to which they refer, and thereby provide a bridge between your present and a vision of a possible future.
Symbols, like the most interesting bits of language, are metaphors. Metaphor is itself a metaphor, meaning to carry over, or carry across. A bridge by which we can grasp abstract concepts, or see other people’s points. Symbols allow us to hold things in mind, which allows us to think through hard things properly rather than just emoting or asserting. They are the means by which we can expand our worldview from within the confines of our current worldview (which by definition doesn’t include the expanded worldview… so how can we ever grow?)
In this way, symbols change us. Because they make us better able to see abstract, but nonetheless real, concepts like justice, or what it means to live well with money.
But this doesn’t happen automatically. If you see the symbol as a mere sign, or, worse, see the symbol as the meaning in itself, you lose the benefits. You’re too busy looking the other way or worshipping an inanimate object to see, let alone cross, the bridge.
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[#27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview](/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)
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# #26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money
15th March, 2021
*To celebrate this newsletter's six-month anniversary, the story of my favourite symbol of money idiocy, starring St Paul's Cathedral, prisoners rioting because of being made to eat lobster, and taking fruit for a walk.*
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that would rather eat fruit than flaunt it.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that price and value are completely different things... though we often need ridiculous reminders of this.
If you’ve ever been to St Paul’s Cathedral in London, you may have noticed the proud golden pineapples that sit sentry-like [atop the western towers](https://www.sah.org/images/default-source/blog/fig-564523adbac8564e5abfcff0000eafba5.jpg?sfvrsn=37d75e9b_2). Or perhaps you’ve noticed the ones that adorn the [Wimbledon trophy](https://www.wimbledon.com/en_GB/news/articles/2018-07-15/2018-06-27_why_is_there_a_pineapple_on_the_wimbledon_trophy.html). Examples abound of pineapples popping up in contexts unrelated to their fundamental fruity purpose.
When St Paul’s was built the punk-haired pineapple was just about the rarest – and therefore priciest – item around, so its fruit-based function was forgotten in the name of price-based posturing. ‘A single fruit,’ the [BBC reports](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-53432877), could be ‘worth thousands of pounds,’ and ‘often the same pineapple would be paraded from event to event until it eventually went rotten.’
‘Less well-off folk,’ we’re told, could rent them for ‘a special event, dinner party or even just to jauntily tuck under an arm on a show-off stroll.’ Some came with their own security guards. In 1807, a Mr Godding was sentenced to seven years in Australia, one year per pineapple he pinched. ‘For a long time,’ the School of Life [relates](http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-we-need-to-keep-growing-up/), ‘only royalty could actually afford to eat them.’ Poems were written, and temples built, in their honour.
Today, pineapples don’t cost £5,000. A fiver can get you three and still have enough change for a couple of bananas. Stripped of its ability to showcase a wasting of resources – to provide one of the best examples of James Carse’s assertion that [wealth is not possessed, but performed](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#the-conspicuous-consumption-con) – the pineapple hasn’t changed. It’s still just a fruit. People nowadays even eat them before they rot.
To take another example, consider cacti. I’ve a friend that works in a garden centre. They tell me that people regularly come in and ask – without any sense of embarrassment – what’s the most expensive indoor plant they’ve got. It’s usually a bloody big cactus. Cacti grow slowly. That’s why they cost a lot. Not because they’re ‘better’. Better in houseplant terms is a function of how well it fits with where you want it to go and how its care needs fit with your conscientiousness.
Put so starkly as this, it may sound stupid to just pick a plant on the pot’s price tag. But imagine you’ve been given a voucher for a free plant. You can spend it on anything. Without playing silly games involving a second-hand houseplant market, do you go for the £40 one that fits best with your circumstances, or the £400 cactus? You may of course mix in circles where people will somehow think better of you after they know what your cactus cost, however out of place it looks, but who wants to mix in such circles, as opposed to ones that know your place is an awfully silly place for a cactus, and you’d’ve been much better off with a fern, or a palm, or an [elaborate indoor shrubbery with two levels and a little path running down the middle…](https://youtu.be/0e2kaQqxmQ0)
David Foster Wallace [tells of how](http://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2013/11/Consider-the-Lobster_david-foster-wallace.pdf) ‘Up until sometime in the 1800s, lobster was literally low-class food.’ ‘Even in the harsh penal environment of early America,’ he continues, ‘some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.’ We eat lobster, but when we pay for it, we’re being sold a story. That stories can literally make food (and wine) taste nicer is no bad thing. But it’s only a positive when you use the story to save money, to make inexpensive things taste better (e.g. treating dinner-party guests to an extra special bottle by regaling them with tales from the vineyard), not when you do the opposite and shell out for the story, not the substance.
If you eat caviar, you're probably an idiot. If you want eggs, eat those of a hen. They are more nutritious and leave significantly more resources to buy other things with in addition.
Not all ways of wasting our lives in a desperate bid to look as though we aren’t are as silly as having people round to view rotting fruit. But subtlety is more dangerous than silliness; more modern manifestations of pineapple posturings are more pernicious for being less public.
## My Pineapple of Value
*Because everyone needs a kitsch reminder of what really matters... a glimpse inside my life. This ridiculous thing is stuffed with little notes about great things in my life, to be remembered and dwelled upon when not-so-great things are happening.*
## Money [Maxim](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the Week
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
**This week:** [**Trigger #14: Worth**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#14-worth)
What something costs is not what something is worth. Cost is calculated by the world’s supply and demand. Worth is determined by a context-dependent contribution to your life.
# #27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview
22nd March, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that provokes, not panders.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that to see more clearly is the only way to stop the silly game of clamouring for certainty and distraction.
*This is part two of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. The first part is* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)*. This part is an introduction to the Four Noble Truths.*
*Our concurrent series on* [*my favourite simple way to think about investing*](https://news.moneyblind.net/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1) *continues next week.*
**Our self-deceptions lead us to use money as relief from pain, as opposed to freedom from entrapment, and to succumb to the self-destruction it enables, rather than to embrace the opportunities it creates.**
Warning! In case you’re expecting this series to follow a formulaic pattern of: definition, anecdote, and variations on a theme of ‘which is a bit like our relationship with money, if you think about it!’, you will be disappointed.
Not only are such things devoid of meaning, more beloved of Buzzfeed and aspirant bloggers than your brain, but it would be downright crass, and I used up all my crass credits when I did [my Kanye West post](https://news.moneyblind.net/10-if-kanye-west-were-a-financial-adviser). Instead, what I want to focus on is the framework, and using it as a means towards [practical financial wisdom](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3).
\*
Before we dive in to each ‘truth’, we should acknowledge that the typical translation of The Four Noble Truths gives rise to two not-so-noble problems.
First, ‘truth’ is a stupid choice of word. It implies a claim to be believed, which, ironically and infuriatingly, works to strengthen the blind-belief-based way of looking at the world that the framework aims at overcoming. We want to see clearly, not to crave certainty. But alas, we’re so addicted to the latter, that even the dominant clear-seeing philosophy for the last 2,500 years has been infected by it.
A better word, suggested by John Vervaeke in [episode 13](https://youtu.be/vGB8k7jk1AQ) of his *Awakening from the Meaning Crisis* lecture series (still, incidentally, The Best Thing on the Internet) is ‘provocations’:
> We need to understand the Noble Truths as things not to believe, but to help you re-enact the Buddha’s enlightenment. They should be ‘the four ennobling provocations’.
And as Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote in *Joyful Wisdom*:
> The Buddha didn’t present the Four Noble Truths as a set of concrete practices and beliefs. Instead, he offered the Four Noble Truths as a practical guide for individuals to recognise, in terms of their own lives, their basic situation, the causes of the situation, the possibility that the situation might be transformed, and the means of transformation.
Going back to Vervaeke (and indeed [this part of the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2)) ‘Transformation takes place at the perspectival and participatory levels’ – the levels where *your* truth is experienced, not where someone else’s is imposed.
Second, ‘suffering’ – the central word of the four provocations, and both the one thing everyone knows about them, and the one thing most likely to put everyone off engaging with them – is also a stupid choice of word.
Not only is ‘suffering’ a bit depressing, but, like ‘truth’, it can inspire the opposite reaction to the one we want. The point of a provocation is to confront reality. People don’t like to confront suffering. It’s too emotionally loaded. ‘Suffering’ inspires resignation. It also frames the whole journey to enlightenment in an unhelpful way. As if enlightenment were relief from pain, as opposed to freedom from entrapment.
As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche explains:
> When people first read or hear \[suffering], they tend to think that it refers only to extreme pain or chronic misery. But *dukkha*, the word used in the sutras, is actually closer in meaning to terms more commonly used throughout the modern world, such as ‘uneasiness’, ‘disease’, ‘discomfort’, and ‘dissatisfaction’.
‘Dissatisfaction’ is better, because it’s more likely to get people to calmly think about how to face it, and overcome it. However, we can do better still.
Because it’s not even really about ‘dissatisfaction’. While ‘dissatisfaction’ can get people to steadily address issues, in a way that ‘suffering’ can’t, it can also get them to substitute in surface-level symptoms for their real issues. Like believing *having* a new house is the answer to a deeper wanting to become mature. I’m dissatisfied because of *this thing*, or *that set of circumstances*, we believe, rather than tracing the feeling to the only place it can really exist: as an emergent property of the connections in our brains.
The point is to see your reality more clearly, and [if anything feels more like something you have rather than something you are in the process of becoming, it will never feel real](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode).
‘Suffering’ is better read as ‘self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour’. The actions we *choose* (consciously or not) to take and the thoughts we choose to think that, because of a distorted worldview, do not make our lives better.
\*
As an overall framework, The Four Noble Provocations/Truths describe a path, broadly speaking, of:
* diagnosing the problem;
* identifying the underlying causes;
* determining the prognosis; and
* prescribing a course of treatment.
The four elements are, in short:
1. ‘Suffering’ (self-deception) is an inevitable characteristic of humanity.
2. ‘Suffering’ (self-deception) arises from attachment (craving and aversion).
3. ‘Suffering’ (self-deception) can cease by letting go of craving.
4. The path to ceasing ‘suffering’ (self-deception) is The Eightfold Path (we’ll look at this later in the series).
These elements are the spine of a story of humanity responding to anxiety (in the [’core feature of being human’ sense](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear)) by either escaping or succumbing. Yet these routes just make things worse. An alternative path is presented, one of looking directly at our self-deceptive suffering, and seeing stepping stones to understanding, and ultimately freedom from being imprisoned by them.
We’ll see what this looks like in practice, using the incessant and universal medium of our interactions with money, next time.
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[#29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1](/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)
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# #28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2
29th March, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that knows that even if the crowd doesn’t have wisdom, when it makes the price, you need good evidence to bet against it.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding how odds create opportunities.
*This is the second in a short series about how to choose investments in a way that isn't overwhelmingly frustrating. The first part is* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1)*.*
**All investments are gambles, but the house doesn’t have to win.**
I ended [Idiot Money #24](https://news.moneyblind.net/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1) saying that my favourite way to frame the search for an investment philosophy, ‘all investments are gambles’, isn’t a message of fear, but a message of hope.
All investments are, by definition, hopeful. You put aside something now in the hope of getting back something better later.
We’re not talking – as is all-too-commonly, and all-too-dumbly done – about sacrificing current in-the-moment enjoyment in the hope of more future in-the-moment enjoyment. To do so would be to vote for a worldview that confuses consumption with a life well lived and make you sound like one of those idiots who believe spending your last penny on your last day is to somehow win the maths of life.
We’re merely recognising that every use of your resources, be it labelled a ‘purchase’, an ‘investment’, or even ‘yet another bloody meeting’ is an investment. Swapping potential stuff for an actual thing in the hope life is better with the actual than the potential. This goes for whether you’re using money to purchase your first home or your tenth beer, or using your time and energy to purchase that money with a job.
All allocations of all your money, time, and energy, are plays in the grand guessing game of your life.
Your brain is a prediction machine. It allocates your resources in the hope of yielding Goodness. This is why learning to see more clearly is at the heart of all practical financial planning – because while financial forecasts are usually a waste of time, money affects the predictions being made by your brain more than anything else.
Given this, it’s probably better to stop being scared of bets and start working out how to make better ones. Especially in the context of the two big questions of investing: how to start, and what to invest in.
Before we get to the strategy itself, however, we need to take a quick detour via the bookie’s.
### Odds over outcomes
I gambled pretty extensively at university. A lifetime obsession with sports and stats met a communal subscription to Sky Sports and an heroically awful work ethic. I spent more time on betting forums than I did in lecture theatres and opened more online accounts than I wrote essays.
I got pretty good. If I’d had more money to start with, I could’ve paid for more than beer with the winnings. But betting to make money is tremendously boring and takes ages.
The first and most important thing I learnt about gambling was this: it’s not about picking winners. It’s about spotting mispriced percentages. It’s about odds, not outcomes.
You could win 99 out of every 100 bets, but if they’re all priced at 1/100, you’re going to lose money. Conversely, you need win only one in a hundred 100/1 bets to be in the black (because the odds say it won’t happen 100 times for every one it does, and you got one win and only 99 loses).
**Successful gamblers know long-term profit comes from judging where the implied chances of each outcome happening are wrong, not from predicting the right outcome**. Odds are simply percentages written in code. A 4/1 bet means something’s predicted to happen one in five times, or 20%. A 1/4 bet means it’s predicted four times out of five, or 80%. And so on.
In a betting market, the odds, once converted into percentages, will add up to more than 100%. The excess is the ‘overround’ – the bookie’s profit margin. For example, in a two-horse race, a single bookie will never price Horse A at 1/4 and the other at 4/1. They will maybe price them at 1/5 and 3/1 (a profit margin of 8%).
If the odds say there’s an 80% chance of something happening and you reckon it’s got a 90% chance, you play. If you’re right, over time you’ll make money. Above-average returns means above-average subjective predictions, not above-average objective results.
As Howard Marks (the big-shot investor, not the cooler one) [put it](https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/you-bet.pdf):
> The bottom line: the goal isn’t to figure out who the favourite is and bet on it. Rather, the goal is to figure out who the favourite is and whether the odds are fair or not. If the odds are fair, there’s no reason (other than sentiment) to bet on one team or the other. \[…] Success in investing doesn’t come from buying good things, but from buying things well, and it’s essential to know the difference. \[…] It’s not a matter of what you buy, but what you pay for it.
We’ll see why this is so important next time.
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[#30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3](/30-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-3)
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# #29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1
5th April, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that treats you with tricks.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that the same machinery that makes you rubbish with money can be repurposed to make you better.
*This is part three of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See also Parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons) *and* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)*. This part covers the First Noble Truth.*
**All of life is threatened by self-deception. That’s how life works. You get to choose to succumb or see differently. That’s how living well works.**
The crudest, commonest form of the First Noble Truth is that ‘all of life is suffering’, that to exist is to suffer.
[Recall](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview) that as ‘truth’ is better read as ‘provocation’, ‘suffering’ is better read as ‘self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour’; our concern is not to dwell on some sort of ‘pain’, but to do something about the stuff we *choose* to do but that, because of a distorted worldview, does not make our life better. Remember that the journey to enlightenment (financial or spiritual) isn’t about relief from pain, but freedom from entrapment.
There’s a further important objection to the suffering=pain reading. As John Vervaeke [explains](https://youtu.be/vGB8k7jk1AQ):
> Suffering \[read as ‘pain’] doesn’t make much sense, because it is a comparative term and therefore can’t be applied to ‘all’. It is more ‘all is *threatened by’*. \[…] Buddha isn’t saying everything is painful, because if everything is painful, then nothing is painful.
What’s this got to do with money? A lot.
Vervaeke’s reformulation is to recognise that all of your life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour. And of course as per the whole or Parts One and Two of [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/s1), nothing inspires or entrenches this self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour like your relationship with money.
The forces that shape your relationship with money are a constant threat to your sense of agency over your life… and therefore a constant threat of misery. Yet these same resources should be a source of opportunity for joyful, flourishing, fun.
Our self-deceptive tendencies are a complex, self-organising, adaptative system – a system that adapts to try to preserves itself as you try to destroy it. Change it in one place and it reorganises in another to compensate. **Tackle one idiotic expression of unhelpful wiring, and a subtler one will spring up to take its place, as surely as those who’ve lost one faith quickly adopt another, while their underlying faith-seeking psychology remains unmoved**.
Damn.
Loss of agency is not your friend. In the game of allocating your resources to whatever your version of the Good Life is, allocating them to stuff that isn’t Good is a loser move, even if (especially if?) you post a picture of that stuff on Instagram with #winning underneath it.
More fundamentally than the resources we allocate to stuff are the ones we allocate to protecting a given worldview. As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote in *Joyful Wisdom*: ‘This is, perhaps, the essential message of the First Noble Truth: Life has a way of interrupting, presenting even the most contented among us with momentous surprises.’ **Stuff-based contentment doesn’t protect anyone from unwelcome surprises**.
\*
Underlying many money problems is the way we unconsciously use [‘needs’ and ‘wants’](https://news.moneyblind.net/14-new-years-non-idiotic-financial-resolutions#money-maxim-of-the-week-festive-cheer-edition) to describe (or justify) our life choices. Yet one of the oddest things you notice when you pay closer attention to how these are used – and especially if you’ve asked dozens of clients over the years to categorise their expenditure – is how much of the language used to justify ‘wants’ sounds identical to that used by recalcitrant drug addicts.
*‘I’m in control… I can stop whenever I want, I just don’t want to… it makes me feel good…’*
**We each have our own lexicon of phrases we’d never believe to be a true reflection of wants in a crack addict, but let slide when it’s about our supposed ‘sweet-tooth’, video-game addiction, or oddly vehement attachment to Uber**.
**A far more useful categorisation – in the context of living an examined life, in a bid to live a better one – is not ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, but ‘wants’ and ‘addictions’**. Wants being ways of allocating your resources that makes your life (as a whole, it being a life, and you being a human) better, and addictions being ways that make it worse, whether that’s wasting other opportunities, or literally poisoning yourself.
(See also ‘Treat’ in [Maxim of the Week](/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1#money-maxim-of-the-week) below).
You’re an addict if you do stuff in direct opposition to cultivating character, to becoming who you want to become. Addiction is a loss of agency. A self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour. Something’s hijacked your identity. Which is why one of the best ways to beat an addiction is to get out of the environment in which that hijacked identity is played out.
**We fail to beat most of our addictions because we don’t treat them like addictions. Even when they’re trashing our health and raiding our wallets in the process**. Yet asking yourself ‘what would a smoker say?’ is sometimes all that’s needed to admit that you’re bullshitting yourself and get back to a less deceived, more honest appraisal of your wants.
Even among those whose job it is to analyse expenditure, the exercise is often wasted. Because it doesn’t see an examination of expenditure as an examination of the unequivocal accounting record of your life choices. It accepts rather than challenges. Sees surface-level numbers as things to plug into a planning machine, rather than clues to underlying motivations to be uncovered, unconscious trade-offs to be reviewed and refined.
**We fail to challenge our 'wants', despite the facts that, as humans, they’re guaranteed to change over time, and if we really wanted them, we’d invite challenges, not defensively avoid them**.
A major reason we fail to do so is because we forget that they are never the isolated events we kid ourselves into believing they are. That’s not how brains work. How you do anything is how you do everything. Every action makes one pathway in your brain easier to travel down next time, and another one harder. ‘Just this once’ is [the mark of a hopeful idiot](https://news.moneyblind.net/17-how-to-choose-better-investments#money-maxim-of-the-week). [We are all in Plato’s cave](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage). We can choose to spiral upwards, or downwards.
Addictions are like unscrupulous salesmen. Recall from [Idiot Money #8](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money) that a salesperson’s job is to narrow your view – to reduce your perception of possibilities. To get you to compare House A to House B, but neither to working part-time for the rest of your life.
This narrowing of your worldview is similar to the reduction in cognitive flexibility that characterises an addiction. Addicts don’t choose to do the self-destructive behaviour, they just don’t see other options. Which is why comparing your own blind addictions to more obvious ones like smoking can be so useful – because it breaks you out of the addict-environment relationship for a second and allows you to see it from a more useful angle. To challenge your behaviour without feeling like you’re challenging your self… indeed, to challenge behaviour in a way that protects your core values, not attacks them.
**All life is threatened by ‘suffering’ because self-deception arises from the same internal processes that allow us to grow. It’s an inescapable part of being human**. It is not to be succumbed to or denied, but channelled.
This starts with recognising the threats to your agency. Recognising resources that are allocated to addictions. Recognising how you are led astray from who you want to become by the language you use, the tribes you pick, and the way you think (or don’t) about [income and expenditure](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2), [more and enough](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2), [value and price](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3), needs and wants, what you crave and what you denounce.
Money is the strongest spotlight we have to shine on such things… but without direction, it’s also the source of our blindness.
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[#31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2](/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2)
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## Money [Maxim](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5) of the Week
*Train to hear these words and phrases as you do you own name across a crowded room, then stop and check that the belief underlying your automatic reaction is true.*
**This week:** [**Trigger #13: Treat**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#13-treat)
Treat or trick? Treat or poison? Treat or someone else’s attempt to overlook their own troubles? Why is it that everything we traditionally describe as a ‘treat’ leaves us poorer and in worse health?
# #30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3
12th April, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that has better things to do.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that it pays to have a default play.
[*Previously on ‘my favourite way to think about investing’*](https://news.moneyblind.net/28-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-2-the-approach)*, we looked at the importance of focusing on odds over outcomes. This week, we go from probabilities to picking investments.*
**The starting point for choosing an investment strategy is to ask: ‘if all investments are gambles, what am I betting on?’**
Picking investments without a strategy is of course possible, and you’re welcome to faff about with it if you enjoy that sort of thing. However, most people don’t. And if you don’t, then you should really put a value on the time spent faffing and knock it off any eventual investment return. You are human, after all, and **it’s an inhuman idiocy to view investment returns in isolation from the life they serve**. Your time – and indeed your energy – is as much a part of the stake as your money.
So what should you bet it on?
Let’s start simple: shares in a single company?
The internet told you opening an Etoro or Robinhood account and betting your lockdown savings on Tesla was how to wing your way to wealth. It was right, in a way. In a short time period, putting 100% into the thing that goes up the most in that period is the way to ‘maximise returns’ – the mystifyingly stupid clarion call of investment advisers everywhere.
Let’s assume you’re not that silly. Let’s also remember: it’s about odds, not winners. **Amateur investment picks are often more a statement of how much someone likes the company’s products than they are a bet on that company’s future prospects being mispriced. Don’t do this**.
Remember: you’re not betting on a company doing well; you’re betting on it doing better than the aggregated views of the rest of the world’s buyers and sellers think it’s going to do. And of it not turning out to be Enron. Are you happy making that bet?
Moving on from single companies, what about a fund comprising lots of shares in lots of companies (and maybe also some government or company debt)?
Here, you’re either betting on a fund manager to pick shares in a way so good it justifies the fee they charge to do so (which as-near-as-makes-no-difference doesn’t happen, and even where it does, it’s impossible to know beforehand which will, among other problems). Or you’re betting on an ‘index’ of all companies/debt in a given market, say the S\&P500. **You’re betting, in short, on either judgment, or a system**.
What about those indices? Perhaps shares in companies from a single country? Betting on companies in one country is not a bet on that country’s economy. It’s betting on the companies publicly listed in that country. In the bigger ones (like the S\&P500) most of those companies’ profits will come from overseas. A country bet is really a sector bet – for example the US is weighted towards tech stocks because Amazon, and the UK is weighted towards consumer staples and financial companies, because the people with all the disposable income in the UK are alcoholic bankers with big houses.
### **Picking a picker-picker**
Perhaps you’d like to bet not on companies, but on the ability of a stockbroker or a fund manager to have opinions that are consistently smarter or luckier than the rest of the buyers and sellers of whatever they’re buying and selling. Perhaps you’d prefer to pick someone to pick someone to pick shares.
This is the old-school financial-advisory model. You pick an adviser, who then picks a picker for you. **There’s a good reason this model evolved and endures. Because people are frightened fools, and advisers are good at sales**.
The average investor patience for sparkling returns is about three years. If things go awry, and it’s the investor’s adviser doing the picking, the relationship is on the rocks after three years. If, however, the adviser in turn picks not investments, but a picker, each picker gets a separate three years, and investor patience with the adviser doesn’t run out until nearer nine. Not only do investments basically never do badly for that long, but investors are paying both adviser and picker handsomely along the way, regardless of performance. So everybody wins! Sort of.
### **Where to begin?**
Unless you have a particular psychological aversion to investing in anything remotely American, or are especially drawn towards small stock-picking outfits because they’re based in Blackpool (both true client stories), then **the starting point for everyone should be to bet on the value of the world’s companies in aggregate**, through an index fund that owns bits of every country in the whole damn world.
(We’re talking publicly listed companies, of course. There’s not much you can do about the fact that some countries’ biggest companies are private, or raise money from sovereign funds, or bonds, rather than shares, so even a totally global approach arguably underweights countries like China, and Germany).
**A bet on the value of the world’s companies growing in value is basically a bet on capitalism. This is a bet most people are pretty happy making**, not least because if it’s a long-term loser, then you’re going to be worried about a lot more than the value of your investment account.
It’s also where I suggest everybody starts. We know this works. **It’s far easier to start by justifying deviations from this bet than to wonder which of a million other bets to make**.
Deviations could well be justified, depending on your personal circumstances. Circumstances that could be mathematical, e.g. when you want the money back, or non-mathematical, e.g. because you want warm and fuzzy feelings from investing in some sort of ‘ethical’ fund (a story for another day, given the scandalous extent of ‘greenwashing’).
You don’t get a choice in whether or not you’re playing this game. You already are. Inaction and ignorance are just different – and pretty damn dumb – ways to wager. So place your bets, take your chances and don’t forget to ask yourself what you mean by ‘risk’ and ‘safe’ in the first place. **In the long run of your life, thoughtful investing is a safer bet than not playing; to not play at all is often the biggest risk of them all**.
*Next time we’ll look at the implications of this approach, including what it means for cash, property, and those kooky ‘alternative’ investments you heard about in Wolf of Wall Street.*
*(p.s. There’s a way-too-long-for-a-newsletter argument about what happens when the whole world goes ‘passive’. It’s an important discussion, and we’ll cover it somehow, someday. For now, important as it is, the practical implications for most people are at best unclear, so not something worth worrying about… yet.)*
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[#34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics](/34-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-4-betting-beyond-the-basics)
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# #31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2
19th April, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that slows down and suffers to avoid slowing down and suffering.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that the problems of craving are not problems of compulsion.
*This is part four of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See also Parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)*,* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)*, and* [*3*](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)*. This part is an introduction to the Second Noble Truth. Next time will cover specific examples of how ignorance of this truth lead us (and those that advice us) to screw stuff up.*
*On our path to seeing money more clearly, even if we make it over the first hurdle – if we understand that all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour, and realise that this is an inherent problem of humanity because the same mental machinery that guides us through life can also, when under the influence of certain inescapable environments, lead us astray – we may, and commonly do, fall at the second.*
**Attachments to possessions are unhelpful. Attachments to patterns of thinking are dangerous. The most dangerous are the patterns we don’t see because we’re busy congratulating ourselves for not being attached to possessions.**
Of all the ‘noble truths’ (or ‘ennobling provocations’, for the reasons explained in [Idiot Money #27](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)), the second is the one most prone to backfiring, with grave implications for your financial success.
The Second Noble Truth is that ‘suffering’ (by which we mean self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour) arises from ‘attachment’, be that craving for ‘good’ things or aversion to ‘bad’ ones. If you do not see your attachments, or see them in a misleading way, you will remain self-deceived and at risk of nodding off onto your potential’s self-destruct button.
However, we read that ‘suffering’ is caused by ‘attachment’, confidently decide that we aren’t seriously attached to anything, and wonder what all the centuries-long fuss was about. Yet the point is do something about the danger of failing to see the reality that we live in an impermanent world. And financial planning – even in its more well-meaning, and less snake-oil forms – is built on denying this reality.
The Second Noble Truth warns us against a craving for simplicity and certainty. We want to make order out of chaos, but in our desperation to do so, we grasp at illusory means of making the chaos go away (which it can’t) rather than learning to dance with it, and obtaining order through enlightened participation in an ongoing process.
**This ironic attachment to surface-level simplicity is great for gaining followers in the fortune-cookie corner of Twitter, but it sacrifices effectiveness of thinking and meaningfulness of living to do so**.
### What do we mean by attachment?
[Nobody believes they’re rich](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1). For very similar reasons, nobody believes they have a problem with ‘attachment’. Not really. Not beyond joking about addictions in a way that translates to ‘my worst problem is \, which must mean I’m a completely brilliant human being!’ Like using a ‘sweet tooth’ as an excuse for anything, or wearing ‘expensive tastes’ as a slightly bonkers badge of honour.
I’m writing [Money Blind](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1) because **the most costly mistakes we make are the ones we don’t see, and because a decade in financial advice showed me on the whole, when it comes to money, despite its importance, we don’t see shit, and waste our resources because of it**. The cruel fatal twist is that making millions makes this more likely, not less. With potential comes the potential to waste it… and it creeps up awfully subtly.
### Seeing clearly ≠ seeing simplistically
The typical interpretation of ‘attachment’ in the context of what we do with our money takes the form of ‘Don’t crave stuff, or you’ll be annoyed when you don’t get it, or lose it!’ or ‘Don’t waste your time and energy hating stuff, or arguing with people on the Internet!’ It’s often accompanied by a pithy soundbite; #possessedbypossessions.
**This is a problem. For it meets the provocation to examine one’s life with deceptive reasoning not to**.
Nobody believes they’re rich and nobody believes they have a problem with attachment, because nobody believes they’re extravagant: it’s not being in the top 10%, or even the top 1% of global richness that makes you rich, it’s whether you’ve got fewer yachts than the next guy.
Even those that admit to ‘having expensive tastes’ do so as a tangled means of saying they are not extravagant people, for that would obviously be silly. They’re ‘just built that way’. There’s nothing they can do about it, and therefore have no responsibility for their actions. Don’t judge their life choices so harshly! But do of course judge their self worth more highly because of how much it cost to decorate their wrist. (I’ll credit you with not having to spell out the inconsistent idiocy of this.)
The ‘trappings of wealth’ are nothing new, of course. Part of their longevity is because, as the Second Truth indicates, we’re looking at them from the wrong angle – we see numbers when we want to see neurons.
From the East, and the Hindu Upanishads, which talk of ‘that chain of possessions wherewith men bind themselves, and beneath which they sink’, or Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, who notes that ‘The desire to possess is considered by Buddhism to be one of the worst passions mortals are apt to be obsessed with.’
To the West, and Seneca: ‘We think these things are ours when in fact it is we who are caught \[…] These individuals have riches just as we say that we “have a fever” when really the fever has us.’
And later the hippies, e.g. Herman Hesse: ‘Property, possessions and riches had also finally trapped him. They were no longer a game and a toy; they had become a chain and a burden.’
And in case the hippies are a bit soppy, how about some Nietzsche? ‘Truly, he who possesses little is so much the less possessed.’ And, elsewhere:
> It is only up to a certain point that possessions make men more independent and free; one step further – and the possessions become master, the possessor becomes a slave \[…] nailed to a place and incorporated into a state none of which perhaps meets his inner and essential needs.
Focusing on the surface-level ‘possession by possessions’ isn’t *wrong*, it’s just limited, and limiting. **The roots of our acquisitive tendencies run too deep to be tackled with a motivational poster and a five-minute meditation**. Believing otherwise makes it harder to both admit to, and remove them. When both expression of a problem and the way we address it are this uniform, it suggests we haven’t formulated the problem very well.
### Obsessiveness is not about the object
Bertie Russell ranked acquisitiveness as one of four insatiate human desires. It is, he wrote, a motive which ‘has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries.’
In the living of a life, a desire for necessaries has some crucial differences to a desire for superfluous crap, but unless it’s consciously challenged to make its case, a brain wired for acquisitiveness acknowledges no such differences.
**It is not the wealth that traps us, nor the possessions that enslave us, but the inability to see clearly the connection between obviously silly mistakes and their subtler forms**… such that those subtler forms can even feel like they are countering the silliness, when in fact they strengthen it.
**The most common misreading of ‘attachment’ is to believe it’s about compulsive desires. It’s not. It’s about a narrowing of your vision**.
We’ll look next time at how this myopia messes up our money management, the catastrophe inherent in cash-flow modelling, and a spot of dangerous idiocy from Nassim Taleb.
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[#32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)](/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)
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# #32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)
26th April, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that keeps digging.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding the idiotic implications of ignoring the reality of impermanence.
*This is part five of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See also Parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)*,* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)*,* [*3*](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)*, and* [*4*](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2)*. This part covers some implications of the Second Noble Truth, including the idiocy of: using cash-flow modelling as an answer to discomfort with uncertainty, buying experiences, and Nassim Taleb.*
**The choice between moving towards clear-seeing enlightenment or doubling down on blinding addiction is one we all make, all the time. Making better choices starts with seeing the subtler roots of our dumber ones.**
[Idiot Money #31](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2) concluded that the most common misreading of ‘attachment’ is to believe it’s about compulsive desires, when actually it’s about a narrowing of your vision. If you misunderstand the problem, your solution is bound to fail, and you won’t know why. So you’ll keep trying the same dumb thing over and over again, wasting your money, your time, your energy, and therefore your life, in the process… none the wiser why you never became what you could have become.
The framework of the Noble Truths is so helpful because it provokes us to stop this spiral and spin it the other way. It’s a practical process for seeing more clearly, by channelling the very machinery that can otherwise cause us not to.
Recall that all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour because in order to operate in the world at all, we have to take shortcuts… but that same propensity to take shortcuts means we do all sorts of extremely silly things while remaining blind to both that we’re doing them, and that they’re extremely silly.
The extremely silly stuff can provide great entertainment, usually because ‘extreme’ often means ‘most well-funded’, and who doesn’t feel better for pointing out the poor life choices of a bazillionaire? **Just as we learn best from history when we recognise that the people being manipulated by fascists were as ordinary as us, but caught in extraordinary circumstances, we learn best about money when we see that those doing the dumbest stuff with it are playing the same deceptive, destructive game as the rest of us**, only on a bigger screen and with faster Wi-Fi.
However, reflecting on the Second Noble Truth reveals that **the most dangerous mistakes are the deeper ones we can’t see because we’re blinded by the halo we’ve plonked atop our heads for spotting their surface-level expressions**.
Is the bored Qatari kid whose life feels just as flat after purchasing his fifth Ferrari as it did his fourth really psychologically different than the everyday retail-therapy patient with a closet so joyless it’d make Marie Kondo cry? The opportunity-cost-laden consequences to the world of the former are worse, of course, but that’s about the perpetrator’s circumstances, not their core values.
### The compulsion con
The compulsive-desire model suggests that the answer to avoiding being suckered by attachments is impulse control. This cons us into thinking that we can ‘quit whenever we want’. Which of course always works so marvellously well that you definitely didn’t just get a vision of a smoker in denial, or the serial ‘starting Monday’ dieter.
The narrowing-of-vision model, by contrast, recognises that **the very machinery that helps you make sense of the world by filtering the infinite possibilities of every moment into something more manageable also leads you to bugger stuff up**. The myriad expressions of this have a common root: channelling your craving for certainty to persuade you that there is no alternative to the solution for sale.
Making you believe there is no alternative is the dark art of attachment, just as it is of [the unscrupulous salesperson](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money). The darkest version of this dark art is the one that says there is no alternative, not because of the limited range of products available, but because of the limited range of your own being: **the more you believe something is fundamentally *****how you are*****, the harder it is to stop it screwing you around**.
As John Vervaeke explains [here](https://youtu.be/vGB8k7jk1AQ) (watch it all, it’s phenomenally insightful), the key insight of the Second Noble Truth is that suffering (self-deception) can be understood; that it is caused not by ‘having attachments’ but by the *way in which you become attached*.
The difference is crucial.
And the implications affect you, and the world of financial advice, in myriad ways.
### Implicated
When we fail to acknowledge that all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour, caused, not by craving ‘extravagant’ objects, but by a desperate, subtler, craving for an impossible certainty in an inherently uncertain world, **we fail to see** **the subtle dehumanisation at the heart of financial advice**.
**The peril of being attached to objects (both material things, and seeing money as an objective good) isn’t about a fear of being robbed**. It’s about being blind to the existential decay caused by substituting stuff for soul. You cannot fill an existential void from outside. As Paul Tillich wrote:
> **The assuredly empty self is filled with contents which enslave it just because it does not know or accept them as contents**. \[…] The man-created world of objects has drawn into itself him who created it and who now loses his subjectivity in it. He has sacrificed himself to his own productions. But man still is aware of what he has lost or is continuously losing. He is still man enough to experience his dehumanization as despair. He does not know a way out but he tries to save his humanity by expressing the situation as without an ‘exit.’
And as naughty-mouthed novelist Henry Miller identified, we too readily see the object of our attachment as the problem, rather than the wiring that gave rise to it:
> Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages, leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. **Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you**.
It is the crumbs that are the key. Not craving a yacht is nothing compared to the language that moment by moment reinforces seeing the world through numbers-obsessed eyes.
We may not see this root, but we do see its branches. For example:
**1. ‘Goals-based planning’ can be good, but it’s usually useless** – Most interpretations of ‘goals-based planning’ see ‘goals’ as ‘spending targets’. This helps fit them into a neat table in a financial-planning report but it forgets the focus on [the only goal that really matters](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#2-there-is-only-one-goal). Who cares that a conservatory won’t improve your life? It’s specific and measurable! Cash-flow-centric planning that boils down to ‘spend this much per year’ rather than ‘become this’ lures people into the same trap.
**2. Believing the solution is for sale, and that buying is a substitute for growing** – Banging on about not craving stuff because you’ll be annoyed when you don’t get it suggests that if you could ‘afford’ everything then the craving doesn’t matter. Crave away! Forget about focusing on flowing and flourishing. Forget about aligning your resources with what you care about! Just accumulate as much as you can!
This fails to see the circulatory in its thinking. We crave objects because we crave an impossible certainty. ‘Becoming’ wants cannot be met with ‘having’ solutions. Recall too the difference in decision-making value between ‘can afford’ and ‘can’t afford’ from [Idiot Money #8](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money).
**3. The ‘buying experiences’ myth** – Our attachment to certainty also lies behind [how we bugger up ‘buying experiences’](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-buy-experiences) by doing so in a way that turns them into material goods.
**4. Believing simple = best** – This manifests in a million ways. Perhaps the most common short-sighted succumbing to simplicity’s siren call is to label things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and see neither nuance nor doubt ever again. We label things in an attempt to solidify them and then become attached to these labels to blind ourselves to the myth of this solidity in inevitably changing circumstances. Yet, as Robert E. Carter writes, ‘reality is impermanence, and to ignore change is to foster the suffering that results from not seeing things as they really are.’
As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche explains, the essential lesson of the Second Noble Truth lies in understanding impermanence, and acknowledging that all conditions are bound to change; for this encourages us to approach each moment with a bit more clarity and confidence, relaxing into it rather than resisting it or being overwhelmed by it. We see this suffering of change with the common conditional view of happiness. I will be happy when… I’ll be happy if… Yet of course you can be happy here and now or not at all. As Rinpoche continues:
> No matter how much we’d like to, we can’t stop time or the changes it brings. We can’t ‘rewind’ our lives to an earlier point or ‘fast-forward’ to some future place. But we can learn to accept impermanence, make friends with it, and even begin to consider the possibility of change as a type of mental and emotional bodyguard.
**5. The ‘It’s only a problem if you go too far’ mistake** – We commonly fall victim to the same mistake Nassim Taleb makes when he writes: ‘Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.’ As if it’s good to crave stuff for a bit, as long as you know when to stop.
You’ll never see when to stop when you don’t see that the thing that got you started was never the stuff, but your self-deceptive patterns of thinking. Taleb should learn from Genghis Khan: ‘It will be easy to forget your vision and purpose once you have fine clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women… \[in that case] you will be no better than a slave, and you will lose everything.’
The point is not to know what your ‘number’ is, but to forget about the ‘number’ entirely, and cultivate the conditions that provoke you to remember what you care about.
**6. Denouncing money is to be as obsessed with it as worshipping it** – Denunciation of extravagance, or even ‘finances’ in general is attachment to certainty. Denunciation leads not to detachment, but to a surreptitious strengthening of attachment. To be against something is still to be defined by that something. To denounce money is not to have a healthy relationship with it; it’s a different sort of abusive one. Frugality for the sake of it misses the point. While it may rid someone of the false belief that quality of life equals access to comfort, it is still defined by equating cost of living with standard of living.
### If there’s a spiral down, there must be a spiral up
If you’re still reading after all that cheeriness, you’ll be glad to hear that there is a positive side to this. If there’s a spiral down, there must be a spiral up. **The same forces that mislead us down into addiction and attachment can be channelled to lift us up towards enlightenment. And once we’ve recognised the subtler expressions of our attachments, and the common self-deceptive roots of them, it’s actually pretty easy**.
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[#35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3](/35-the-abc-of-money-part-6)
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# #33: The six financial stress responses: what's yours?
3rd May, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that faces its fears.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that given money can be stressful, and we respond to stress in individual ways, it pays to personalise your preparation.
**Money is stressful. We respond to this stress with predictable, mostly unhelpful, patterns. Our responses get no better when we stay blind to their brain-pattern nature. But we can train our brains, improve our responses, and make stress instructive, not destructive.**
My life got better when I learned that there were not two instinctive stress responses (‘fight’ or ‘flight’) or even three (‘fight’, ‘flight’, or ‘freeze’), but six. Felicitations, ‘fawn’, ‘fatigue’, and ‘flood’; welcome to the club.
I am a fatiguer.
Understanding this upped my productivity, and even improved my squash game.
When faced with work that required the brain to be on, my body’s typical response was to tell me I needed a nap. Something inside me tried to pass this off as self-care, but given that without the work I was usually ready to run around like a child on Christmas morning, this always felt like a con.
A similar thing happened when being outsmarted on the squash court. Why, when others could summon up so much fight they smashed racquets and sometimes heads into walls, did I tell myself that it just wasn’t my day, and start looking forward to the post-game stretch, often after only a handful of points? The con this time was to call it stoic, when all along it was actually stress.
I’d spotted the correlations, but the stress-response label made the connection.
Now, when my body suggests a nap, I can double-check: ‘**am I tired, or terrified?**’ I can then override the instincts that, like an overprotective mother, believe they’re nurturing growth, when really they’re stopping it. Before too long, they stop being so instinctual.
In the [intro](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro) to the book, I note that whatever we’re doing with money, we reliably do it not only worse than we could, but in a way that compounds stressful thoughts, rather than eases them.
And in [this bit](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#when-is-delegation-dangerous), I explain how our self-deceptive belief that money is a cold, detached number rather than an integral and deeply emotion-laden part of our life’s narrative, leads us irresponsibly astray.
> We forget how emotional money is, so we don't change. As French philosopher-monk Matthieu Ricard explains, ‘When we emerge from that moment of blindness during which we are completely in the grip of a strong emotion, and our mind has been freed from its disruptive emotional burden, it is hard to believe that an emotion had dominated us to such an extent.’
We do dumb shit when stressed. But when we reflect on our mistakes – and see only the expression, not the underlying wiring – we simply don’t believe we could be that silly. So we end up doing the same dumb shit again, and again, and again. **We don’t learn from our mistakes, because we’ve made a further mistake in mis-identifying the actual mistake**.
Seeing your personal financial stress response more clearly is the first step to getting unstuck from repetitive and debilitating dumbassery.
(For the benefit of those who’d otherwise stop scrolling here, the second step, for which the first is a prerequisite, is dramatically more important. Keep going!)
### The six financial stress responses
Because money is so darn emotional, wherever money is thought about, one of these responses tends to be on show. It’s worth noting that your financial stress response needn’t be the same as your ‘typical’ stress response in other domains.
**1. Fight** – You aggressively make money the ends, not a means. Everything to do with money is about ‘winning’. Money, even if you’ve got millions, is a constant fight that you choose anew every day, despite the fact you can’t win a battle that never ends. Your money-based model of success is a straight-line down which you gallop as quickly as possible (with blinkers firmly in place. Make more first, ask questions later.
**2. Flight** – You denounce money as evil. You want nothing to do with it, even though unless you decide to go live as a hermit, or a Smurf, this isn’t something you can control. Flight does not indicate a lack of energy: you’re still running, just in the opposite direction. [Mental suppression is subconscious superglue](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.1). The only people that get as energised about money than those that denounce it are those that worship it.
**3. Freeze** – When faced with a money decision, you spin in mental circles, but take no physical action. For example, you know you should invest, but you stay in cash. Where the flight person refuses to even engage with the concept of investing, you’ve engaged to the point of acknowledging its potential, but are paralysed. You continually think about it, but do nothing.
**4. Fawn** – You submit to an adviser. In a testimonial for their website, you even praise them for taking all the decision-making stress away from you (and lo! how much more common this is than testimonials praising an adviser for being so good they make themselves redundant!). Sometimes this is wise. But it’s highly context-dependent. As I covered [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#when-is-delegation-dangerous), one study on financial decision-making showed that taking advice made people turn off the bit of their brains that thinks for themselves. In an industry still awash with cowboys and conmen, this is basically asking to be ripped off. ‘Trust, but verify’ requires being able to trust yourself to do the verification.
**5. Fatigue** – You put financial stuff off. You congratulate yourself for not ruminating – however much money ‘stuff’ you have going on, it never affects your sleep; in fact, it sends you to sleep. You don’t see this as a problem because naps are always good. Unlike the freeze people, you’re not paralysed. You do the bare minimum, but don’t engage. You don’t delay setting up a pension, for example, but you put working out what it’s actually all about on the ‘pretend I’ll do this later’ list. If you examine your spending, you use your credit-card company’s or your adviser’s cash-flow categorisations, rather than ones that are at all meaningful.
**6. Flood** – Finances trigger an emotional overwhelm. You try to engage, but every time end up deciding that you ‘can’t deal with this now’. This turns off your saner faculties and leaves you prone to manipulation, spending too much, and gambling it all on anything that looks like ‘the answer’. Perhaps the commonest manifestation of this is in money-based discussions between spouses.
### Stress free(dom)
**All these responses are ways in which we crave certainty**. This is part of why I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about how we can leverage the framework of Buddhist philosophy to get better at not doing this.
More directly, **I think there are two main options for working with your stress response rather than simply succumbing to it and subsequently being beset by whatever silly things it leads you to do**.
The first is that **because a stress response is a *****response*****, we can choose it**. Are you a freezer, but you’d rather be a fighter? In the same way the [Maxims](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2) section of the book is designed to rewire your money worldview by helping you catch yourself doing one thing, and then choosing a better option, so you can catch yourself freezing, and remind yourself to fight (perhaps helped by some earlier environment control). Each time you do this, the next time gets easier until it happens automatically.
However, there’s another – much better – way. **Because you don’t have to choose any of those six**. There’s a heavenly seventh option.
**7. Face**.
Recognise what the reactive response is trying to do for you, thank it for its input, weigh it up, but follow it only when it feels wise to do so.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro#becoming-wiser), emotions aren’t to be ignored. **Rationality isn’t about not feeling. It’s about a more refined appraisal of inputs into our predictive model of our place in the world – and feelings are very much part of these inputs**.
Give your stress a hug.
Embracing uncertainty is one thing, but embracing the demon that represents your attachment to it – perhaps even literally if you encounter it in a lucid dream or psychedelic journey – is quite another.
As with anything that involves cultivating clarity within your brain, **this isn’t as difficult nor as daunting as it may first appear**.
As I wrote in relation to the stressy couple in [Idiot Money #4](https://news.moneyblind.net/4-spending-gbp450k-on-being-bad-parents) whose substituting of money for meaning was leading them to spunk almost half a mill a year (and all sorts of emotional energy besides) on being worse parents, we should aim not for lower stress and lower shoulders, but for the sort of environment that ensures such things as side-effects.
And finally, **be careful not to use being aware that you need to be aware with actually being aware**. You do not become de-stressed by declaring you are, or even knowing how to become so.
In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh (and me in square brackets):
> Mindfulness can only help reduce our stress and tension if it provides us with insight. Meditation isn’t just a temporary place of refuge to help you stop suffering for a while. It’s much more than that. Your spiritual practice has the power to transform the roots of your suffering \[i.e. your self-deceptive wiring] and transform the way you live your daily life. It is insight that helps us calm our restlessness, stress, and craving.
# #34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics
9th May, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that gets the basics sorted first.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that alternative investments are more spthecial than special.
*This is part 4 in a series. See also parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1)*,* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/28-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-2-the-approach)*, and* [*3*](https://news.moneyblind.net/30-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-3)*. For a ton of reasons, this is a fleshing out of the grounding framework we’ve been building up, and not direct investment advice: inspiring thinking, not doing it for you. The only direct advice of any sort you should ever take from a newsletter is not to take any direct advice from anyone speaking to more than one person at once.*
**Betting on investment options beyond the basics can be worth a punt, but please gamble a little more responsibly, and a hell of a lot more thoughtfully than most who place such bets do.**
So far, we’ve seen that:
* **All investments are gambles**: you put aside something now in the hope of getting back something better later. Every use of your resources, be it labelled a ‘purchase’, an ‘investment’, or even ‘yet another bloody meeting’ is an investment – swapping potential stuff for an actual thing in the hope life is better with the actual than the potential.
* **The first and most important thing about gambling is that it’s about odds, not outcomes**. Your long-term success comes not from picking winners, but from spotting mispriced percentages.
* **The starting point for choosing an investment strategy is to ask: ‘if all investments are gambles, what am I betting on?’** A bet on the value of the world’s companies growing in value is basically a bet on capitalism. It’s far easier to start by justifying deviations from this bet than to wonder which of a million other bets to make.
So what about those deviations? We’ve already looked at deviations within the confines of companies and countries that want to raise money in public somehow. What about deviating beyond the ‘equity’ universe? The three most commonly considered options are:
* cash;
* property; and
* ‘alternatives’ (including hedge funds, commodities, collectibles, and crypto).
Start-up companies owned by a friend or a bloke you met at a thing one time also deserve a mention. Things like structured products and other investment equivalents of processed ‘food’ do not.
When are these worth a punt that justifies deviating from your core bet on capitalism?
### Cash
If you’re investing to beat inflation, as most are and all should be, cash obviously isn’t an ‘investment’ or a safe storehouse for your long-term money. But it does have a role to play, and if even one person reading this stops using cash returns as a benchmark when judging their cowboy adviser (please: don’t do this) then it’s worth a few words.
Cash has five possible roles:
* **Near-term spending** – Don’t invest cash you are likely to spend in the next three years or so.
* **An emergency fund** – Of between 3 and 12 months of spending (not income) depending on your financial and psychological circumstances. Just remember to actually use it when emergencies pop up.
* **Volatility damper** – The defensive role in a portfolio is traditionally played by bonds (specifically big-country government, and not emerging-market / high-yield ones), but sometimes it’s easier to do it with cash.
* **Optionality** – For seizing opportunities, be they investment-related or helping out in a crisis, for example.
* **Emotional insurance** – Because it makes you ‘feel’ ‘safe’ when you can’t be bothered getting your head around the investment stats that would achieve the same thing without forgoing potentially millions in compounded returns.
### Property
I could write a whole bunch of articles explaining why we’re so drawn towards investing in property (commercial or residential), the overblown benefits and hidden costs of doing so, and why so many so stubbornly refuse to see these. It’ll be in the book eventually. For now, just note that for a bunch of reasons, many of which you’ve probably already worked out yourselves, and many of which you probably haven’t yet, we’re misled into vastly overrating property as an investment option. It involves all sorts of big-ass, concentrated bets, and usually involves tons of time, admin, and borrowing money to make them.
### Alternatives
**Hedge funds**. It’s quite easy to get quite cross when talking about hedge funds, especially when you consider how much pension and charity money is invested in them, so I’ll say nothing and just share three quotes instead:
* If you had invested $1,000 in the shares of Berkshire Hathaway when Buffett began running it in 1965, by the end of 2009 your investment would have been worth $4.3m. However, if Buffett had set it up as a hedge fund and charged 2% of the value of the funds as an annual fee, plus 20% of any gains, of that $4.3m, $4.0m would belong to him as manager and only $300,000 would belong to you, the investor. – [Terry Smith](https://www.fundsmith.eu/news/2010/2086-fund-management-fees-two-and-twenty/)
* Between 1998 and 2010, investors made $9bn from investing in all listed hedge funds. In contrast, their managers (and their consultants) made a staggering $440bn – 98% of all profits. – Simon Lack, *The Hedge Fund Mirage*
* "We earn half the performance of index funds, charge 30 times the fees of mutual funds, pay half the income tax rates of school teachers, have triple the ego of rock stars, and fewer disclosure requirements than the NSA. We're basically a conduit between public pension funds and Greenwich real estate agents." – [Morgan Housel](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/18/two-hedge-fund-managers-walk-into-a-bar.aspx)
**Commodities (e.g. gold and silver), collectibles (e.g. wine and art), and crypto.** Not creating anything much more than mischief, these are almost all bets on the greater-fool theory. This could well be a bet you’re willing to make, and one that could pay off better than anything else in your lifetime. There are a lot of very great fools out there.
But in terms of having a place in a long-term portfolio that you’d quite like to live off for a long time, based on the data we have, there’s bugger-all economic rationale, and their role as risk-diversifier is better met by more accessible alternatives.
They could make for fun speculative bets, though, and if making such bets with whatever you can truly afford to lose makes you less likely to lose your head with the core part of your portfolio, then YOLO-ing away may be a smart bet (or at least a sort of FOMO insurance).
### Start-up companies
The most lucrative form of betting, as any member of the Cabinet will tell you, is leveraging insider knowledge. And if you can leverage *that* with corrupt funds, all the better. Getting in on the ground floor of a start-up that successfully grows up is an almost unbeatable bet.
Lots of people even expect a major role of financial advisers to be sourcing such private investment opportunities. This is arguably as much about the prospective returns as it is about idiotically nurtured beliefs in rich-people circles that private is always better than private, and that being rich makes the rules of the investing game different, somehow.
**Having discovered that having loadsa money doesn’t automatically make them happier, plenty of rich folk cling comically hard to the idea that their cash must at least open doors to the ‘best’ investments like it does the ‘best’ clubs**.
This doesn’t happen, of course. Not least because any adviser worth taking advice from is going to struggle to evidence how *any* private investment opportunity: a) should be accounted for in the long-term planning you’re paying them for; and b) is a suitable short-term recommendation over and above the alternatives… the due diligence costs of a proper review are instantly prohibitive.
This isn’t to say such investments don’t have a role to play, but it’s the same one lottery tickets have: the benefits are almost 100% psychological, and if a payoff comes, great, it can – and should – change your life, but don’t plan for it.
### Bet on boring
Done right, investing, like gambling, is boring. The major advantage of investing is that because you’re playing over such a long timeframe once you’ve done the boring bit (assuming you’ve done it wisely) you’re set for a decade or more.
Understanding the basics of what you are – and aren’t – betting on, and why you are and aren’t betting on them, is a necessary part of doing it wisely. It’s also crucial for being less stressed about money (in any of the ways we looked at in [Idiot Money #33](https://news.moneyblind.net/33-the-six-financial-stress-responses-whats-yours)) and for not being ripped off if you buy advice.
And finally, more important than what to bet on beyond the basics is why you’d want to do so. **If the return from the easily available, almost-zero money-, time-, and energy-cost option has left you wanting to risk additional money, time, and energy chasing something else, it’s at least a tiny bit possible that the problem you’re trying to solve has sod-all to do with the return**.
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[#36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing](/36-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-5-cost-benefit-investing)
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# #35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3
17th May, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that figured it was about time for some good news.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that you can put a stop to self-deceptive, self-destructive beliefs.
*This is part six of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See also Parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)*,* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)*,* [*3*](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)*,* [*4*](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2)*, and* [*5*](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)*. This part covers The Third Noble Truth, including the cheery news that we’re not all completely doomed.*
**The biggest problem with money is acknowledging the self-deceptive, self-destructive beliefs we’ve built up that determine how we live with it (because, of course, the point of self-deception is that we’re sure it’s only a problem for other people). After acknowledgement comes better news: these bullshit beliefs can be overcome.**
That the same human machinery that enables greatness commonly leads us to spiral into a meaningless abyss is a bit annoying at times, but an infantile and inhuman division of the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has never done anyone any good. No abyss would mean no greatness; only vampires cast no shadows.
Still, even if you’ve grown out of being afraid of the dark – by acknowledging the inevitable and incessant threat of being led astray by your own maps – dwelling there does start to drag. Fortunately, this part and the next – covering the Third and Fourth Noble Truths (aka [ennobling provocations](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)) – aim at something cheerier.
For the Third tells us that the cessation of ‘suffering’ (self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour) is possible, and the Fourth tells us how to bring it about.
To make the most of this marvellous news, recall from the [First Noble Truth](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1) what this self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour is; namely, a loss of agency – a narrowing of one’s view of who they could become, or how the world could be. Acting like an addict, in other words.
> The forces that shape your relationship with money are a constant threat to your sense of agency over your life.
This is important, because it is only when we treat the things we do that we deep down don’t want to do as addictions that we can hope to stop doing them. The alternative – brushing such acts off as quirks – leaves us so confused that the solutions we try never work that we keep on trying the same idiotic ones to the same idiotic ends, reinforcing unhelpful behaviours rather than rescuing ourselves from them.
Remember too that:
> Our self-deceptive tendencies are a complex, self-organising, adaptative system – a system that adapts to try to preserves itself as you try to destroy it. Change it in one place and it reorganises in another to compensate.
We saw some examples of this in [Idiot Money #32](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5), where surface-level solutions act not as *inspirations* to dig deeper, but as *substitutes for doing so*. Like believing you’re dealing with uncertainty by slamming some numbers into a cash-flow model.
### Monstrous cookies
There’s an undignified trend in certain circles for the word ‘complex’ to trigger a reactive ‘you just don’t understand it well enough’ accompanied by a motivational-poster meme suggesting nuclear physicists are all wasting their time because they’d be better off reading a couple of Richard Feynman books.
Sometimes this is welcome. For example, as an antidote to the belief the finance industry invests so much in maintaining – that investing is scarier and more complicated than you could possibly imagine – so even when it takes half your future growth without you knowing, you end up thanking it for doing so.
But most of the time it’s garbage. As I went into in [Idiot Money #3](https://news.moneyblind.net/3-your-relationship-with-money-is-complex.-but-it-neednt-be-complicated.):
> True complexity is irreducible. When people see scary numbers-based ‘complexity’ in finance, what they are seeing isn’t complexity, but complication. Because people are either being stupid or trying to sell you something, simple things are made complicated such that we praise those who cut through the crap, rather than blaming those who put the crap there in the first place. While complications can be dissolved, to ‘simplify’ a complexity is to distort it, resulting not in simplified, but simplistic. It’s comforting, but crap.
**By all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.**
You don’t need a degree in Dynamic Systems Theory to make better financial decisions, but you do need to stop acting as if existential addictions are cured with fortune cookies.
This is where the Third Noble Truth comes in. Because it tells us how to deal with the irreducibly complex, self-organising, adaptive, dynamic system that is you, and all the silly things you do, while trying ever so darn hard not to.
The First Noble Truth told us that our human machinery leaves us constantly threatened by a loss of agency over our lives. The Third Noble Truth tells us that we can recover this sense of agency. How? If a killer Twitter thread isn’t the answer, how *do* we deal with a complex dynamical system that is operating against us?
Remember from The Second Noble Truth that [if there’s a spiral down, there’s also a spiral up](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5#if-theres-a-spiral-down-there-must-be-a-spiral-up): the same forces that mislead us down into addiction and attachment can be channelled to lift us up towards enlightenment.
Which is to say: we need to cultivate a counteracting complex dynamical system that is operating *for* us. The Fourth Noble Truth is that this counteracting complex dynamical system – the means to dissolving self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour – is The Eightfold Path.
We’ll cover what the Eightfold Path can teach us about being better with money next time.
### The act of grasping matters more than the thing being grasped
Before we go, it’s worth noting that embedded in the lesson of The Third Noble Truth is that ‘suffering recedes \[…] to the extent that we let go of the whole framework of grasping.’ (Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche). The forces that deceive us are overcome not by fighting, or by swapping one addiction for another, but by unhooking from the whole addictive circus.
Anyone who’s ever transitioned from treating meditation or yoga less like a CrossFit workout to more as a means of connecting with their body and their breath will understand the difference between relaxing into rather than resisting. You can hold a pose by struggling, or surrendering. One is both less stressful and more sustainable.
To be truly transformative, this letting go needs to go beyond not buying garish new wallpaper. It needs to operate on the level of your character, instead of what you have, or even what you believe.
To let go of worries – be that about money or anything else – requires more than being told to chill.
It requires letting go of the framework that generated those worries, and will continue to generate new ones, and relaxing into a less friction-fuelled framework instead.
You don’t do this by denouncing the objects of your or other people’s obsession. For that is to keep the object as the focus: denunciation is still stuck in the framework of grasping.
You do it by playing a completely different game.
That’s the subject of next time.
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[#37: The ABC of money, part 7: financial nobility, step 4](/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4)
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# #36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing
24th May, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that values its time.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that the costs of investing don’t stop at the last page of your statement.
*This is the fifth and final part of our series on my favourite framework for investment decision-making: all investments are gambles. See also parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1)*,* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/28-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-2-the-approach)*,* [*3*](https://news.moneyblind.net/30-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-3)*,* *and* [*4*](https://news.moneyblind.net/34-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-4-betting-beyond-the-basics)*. This week: a quick round-up, and crushing the calculations of a client with a property-owning obsession.*
**Every investment is a gamble. It should be judged according to a cost-benefit analysis, not by its outcome. If you’re investing in service of your life, the time and energy costs are just as important as the monetary ones, and often vastly larger.**
Which investment would you prefer? Assume the investment risk of each choice is the same.
A – Returns 10% per annum for five years net of tax and monetary costs (so every £1,000 becomes £1,611). Takes 10 hours a week to manage, and you think about it a lot outside of that, which stresses the heck out of you.
B – Returns 7% per annum for five years, net of tax and monetary costs (so every £1,000 becomes £1,403). Takes one hour a year to manage, with no additional thinking or stress.
If you chose B, how much would the difference in return have to grow to make A worthwhile?
\*
Carol was in many ways a typical client of a mid-sized financial-planning firm. Via earnings, inheritance, and divorce, she had responsibility for a million or so in a standard portfolio of shares and bonds. However, she wasn’t interested in these.
In helping her move the portfolio away from a bunch of cowboys, it felt like the stories that had stuck with Carol in doing so weren’t the positive ones about what she was now invested in, but the ones about the shysters she’d escaped from. She just about trusted her investments were ‘sorted’, but it would’ve been a brave move from her adviser to ask her to explain how. And, one felt, it wouldn’t take much for someone else to persuade her that *all* stock-market investments were a con.
Carol did, however, like to talk about her five rental properties. She was seriously considering cashing in the share portfolio to buy a couple more.
While she claimed to be completely flummoxed by all things ‘financial’, she flat-out bragged about the spreadsheet that managed her properties and calculated their returns.
It was not explaining the usual relative disadvantages of property (liquidity, fees, tax, etc.) that stopped Carol in her tracks. Nor was it highlighting the disconnect between seeing borrowing money to invest as unthinkably risky, but making multiple leveraged bets on the housing market in one part of one city as totally fine.
*Adviser: Those returns are certainly excellent. Congratulations. Do you know many hours a week you spent dealing with the management company, the tenants, playing with the spreadsheet, etc.?*
*Carol: Oh, not exactly. A few I suppose. Sometimes none. Sometimes it takes over a weekend. On average, maybe three or four hours per property per week, so 15-20 in total?*
*Adviser (judiciously not asking about extra time spent stressing about it): Do you enjoy it?*
*Carol: Gosh no. But it’s a small price to pay. I mean, it’s worth it for the returns.*
*Adviser: Out of interest, when calculating those returns, do you capitalise the value of those 15-20 unenjoyable hours and deduct it?*
\*
For all the increasing focus on financial fees, time and energy are the costs everyone still overlooks. And of course it’s [not only property](https://twitter.com/dougboneparth/status/1390307066888081417).
**When we forget, or rather pretend, that the role of money can be accounted for on a spreadsheet, we drift dangerously close to seeing ourselves as robots keeping our humanity warm until the circumstances are right for it to hatch**. Sadly, even those that one day figure out that life isn’t lived in the future after all, often delay so long that when the circumstances are finally deemed right, the humanity has decayed.
We’ll return the perils of this ‘[arrival fallacy](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#13-beware-the-arrival-fallacy)’ another day. For now, the concluding points of this series on how to choose investments are:
1. **You and your money are part of the same pool of resources, all aimed at the same thing: living a Good Life**. Divorce the two, and you divorce your relationship with reality. This rarely ends well. Gambles without a cost-benefit calculation are idiotic. And the better life already is, the better your investment return must be to justify its non-monetary costs. Glittering promises should trigger not Pavlov-dog-like salivation, but a simple question: [Does it work?](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#the-strange-silence-of-does-it-work)
2. **When comparing investment returns, you should capitalise your time and energy costs and factor them in**. You are investing to make money. You wouldn’t take a job to make more money if the benefits didn’t justify the costs. Until you’re investing millions (or if you really happen to enjoy the whole investing process) then the main costs are your time and energy.
3. **Stay alert for the subtle manifestations of your craving for simplicity… they’re sneakier than you believe**. Cost-benefit calculations are trickier than reactively leaping from ‘sounds good’ to ‘take my money’. This is no reason not to do them. Consciousness in everyday decision-making (and nothing says everyday decision-making like money) is a bit like nose-breathing during exercise: tough to start, but the more you do it, the easier it gets, until eventually you do the exercise with greater all-round ease, and no drop-off in performance. In finance especially, to jump to a conclusion is often to plunge into a con.
4. **In short, have an investment philosophy**. This is something you think yourself into, not get sold on by someone else. The aim is [to think yourself into a position that requires not-thinking, or effortless effort (rather than blind unthinking)](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#thinking-not-thinking-and-unthinking-the-difficulty-of-making-things-easy). All investments are gambles, so understand what you’re betting on. A philosophy is key to this. Get comfortable with placing simple sensible long-term bets on things you understand, and where the odds are in your favour… then forget about it. Doing this is not only a way to make money with next to no ongoing costs, but it’s also an effective antidote to FOMO.
Much as I’m sure some will read it as such, this post isn’t about whether property or the stock market makes for a better investment. It’s about grounding whatever decision you make on an investment philosophy.
**Philosophy isn’t a strategy, it’s a way of seeing.** Besides, confidence doesn’t come from a calculator. Not least in this respect because it’s been demonstrated by statty folk ‘that you would need 25 years of experience with a strategy to determine with 95% accuracy whether or not it had a statistically significant chance of outperformance.’
There’s a reason investment ‘alpha’ gets a one-word definition in Jason Zweig’s Devil’s Financial Dictionary: ‘luck’. True confidence comes from understanding what you’re betting on – your chances of winning and losing, and being happy with risking the latter to gain the former.
[The book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3) as a whole is about the importance of philosophy in your general relationship with money. An investment philosophy is a microcosm of this.
But simply telling someone to ‘have an investment philosophy’ when they see investing as scary and complicated (and when they *don’t* see the screwy ways their relationship with money is written in their minds) is unlikely to go very well.
Which is why you need to find a framework. One that guides you towards more conscious decisions, not tempts you away from them.
# #37: The ABC of money, part 7: financial nobility, step 4
31st May, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that tells truth to the power inside itself.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that paths don’t always mean progress.
**Bonus news:** Want to read someone else on the same sort of stuff I write about every week, but through the lens of having lost millions of dollars in leveraged Bitcoin bets? My friend Vincent’s [got you covered](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vincentdaranyi_a-story-about-loss-1-a-week-ago-i-lost-activity-6804040795646128128-GKpL). Great reflections in strange and intense circumstances.
*This is part seven of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See also Parts* [*1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)*,* [*2*](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)*,* [*3*](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)*,* [*4*](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2)*,* [*5*](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)*, and* [*6*](https://news.moneyblind.net/35-the-abc-of-money-part-6)*. This part covers The Fourth Noble Truth, including a dig at millennia-old marketing I’m in no way qualified to make.*
**If your problem is craving the certainty of narrow paths, it’s better to expand your view, not pick a different path.**
I’m not sure who coined the ‘path’ bit of the Eightfold Path, but I’m guessing they worked in PR, not the philosophy department. People love paths. There’s a certainty to a path. A path combines a fairytale narrative with an IKEA instruction sheet. Self-improving self-assembly fun for all ages.
The Eightfold Path’s aim is to help people see more clearly. Especially regarding those bits of their lives they’re pretty damn sure are doingjustfinethankyouverymuch (despite not being examined with the sort of challenge that strengthens the already wise and obliterates the idiotic).
**Path, however, is a misleading metaphor**. For in playing to the crowd, it plays along with the very parts of the crowds’ stories that the philosophical system of the Eightfold Path seeks to edit. **This is important because it’s also the main problem faced when trying to become wiser with money**.
There’s a lot to be said for ‘meeting people where they are’, and ‘giving them what they (believe they) want’ but **at some point, the personal trainer who promises you pizza is going to do a worse job of helping you get what actually want than the one who kindles a kinship between you and a big-ass kettlebell**. This isn’t about ‘tough love’, it’s about simply not enabling soul-annihilating addictions.
### Systems beat steps
The Fourth Noble Truth (aka [ennobling provocation](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview)) is that the means to ending ‘suffering’ (self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour) is the Eightfold Path. **The key to the Eightfold Path is that each element is interdependent**. It’s a web-like network, or an ecosystem that you cultivate in conjunction with changing circumstances. **Yet ‘path’ suggests some sort of staged escape from alcoholism**.
Understanding this beyond surface-level semantics is crucial to making use of this centuries-old framework for thinking and seeing more clearly, whether about money specifically or the life it serves more generally.
Recall that:
1. [The First Noble Truth](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1) is that all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour (**key point**: you cannot rid yourself of this, because it is a side-effect of the same machinery that enables all the cool parts of being human too).
2. [The Second Noble Truth](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2) is that this self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour arises from the way in which we become attached (**key point**: this is not about the objects of your attachment, but the way your mind is set to ‘become attached to anything that looks like it won’t change’ mode, and how it literally loses itself – its sense of agency – in a distorted vision of reality).
3. [The Third Noble Truth](https://news.moneyblind.net/35-the-abc-of-money-part-6) is that we can recover our sense of agency; we can overcome this complex dynamical system that is working against us. (**key point**: you don’t get around the irreducibly complex, self-organising, adaptive, dynamic system that is a human with a simplistic substitute for philosophical examination; you need to let go of the whole system of grasping rather than grasp at a different sort of simplicity).
4. **The Fourth Noble Truth** is that you overcome a complex dynamical system that is operating against you by cultivating a complex dynamical system that acts for you, and that The Eightfold Path is such a system.
**The key point of the Fourth Noble Truth is that what you want is not a series of steps, but a system**. Which is why advertising it as something (a ‘path’) most commonly read as ‘a series of steps’ isn’t terribly helpful (outside of click stats, I suppose).
The ‘path’ metaphor plays into the misleading pattern of thinking that leads those that blindly crave certainty to live as if the Goodness of a life were measured by a weighted average across a bunch of isolated domains. Health a bit sketchy? No worries! Offset it with more money! Career in a rut? Focus on your relationship! Social life sucking? Use the time and money to redecorate!
**You don’t need to be a maths whiz to get to grips with personal finance. Possibly the most important bit of numerical knowledge you need is one you already have: if you multiply anything by zero, you get zero**.
Recall too, that by all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.
**The sort of wishful thinking displayed by the ‘offset’ cultists is what leads people to stick with jobs they don’t like for money they don’t need to ruin the health and relationships they do**. Or to try to fix family problems by taking them to a different postcode. Or, more abstractly, to know money only ‘[propositionally](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#1-propositional-knowing)’ – as a series of independent, incidental, isolated trades – rather than in a more realistic ‘[participatory](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#4-participatory-knowing)’ way.
Being nudged to waste less money, say, is of limited use if a mind stays unconsciously wired for waste; and it’s no good at all if the avoided waste was seen as a denial, which is then compensated for elsewhere.
### Human-centred beats client-centred
There is another sense in which ‘path’ is a crappy metaphor: calling it *the* path, not *a* path.
We are led to believe there is *one* way, and when we drop our discipline, when we ‘stray from the path’, we are ripe for self-recrimination.
Going ‘off the rails’ can send people into ‘fuck-it mode’, and double-down on the self-destruction, all the while slave to the unconscious belief that the one, perfect, way is possible. **This is how religions ruin philosophy. And financial advisers can be just as bad as religious zealots when it comes to this sort of approach**.
A sound philosophical worldview, by contrast, denies neither our humanity, nor the way our brains work. Perfection may be the prize of the permanent path, but it’s an irrelevance to an impermanent ecosystem.
**The key point of the framework of the Noble Truths, culminating in the cultivation of a complex dynamical system that works for you, is that it is not a blind belief-based mode of living, but a practical, human, philosophical one**. You may crave flat-pack fairytale certainty, but you want to live in harmony with uncertain reality.
You want a philosophy, in the sense described [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#your-financial-philosophy-and-your-relationship-with-money): something that is lived, not possessed; something that is deeply practical, not confined to a bookshelf; something you look through, not look at; an encouragement to live an examined life, [not an excuse for doing the opposite](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money).
**You want to see ‘suffering’ not as a setback, but a stepping stone: an entreaty to** [face fears](https://news.moneyblind.net/33-the-six-financial-stress-responses-whats-yours)**, and learn from them**. ‘Suffering’ is not something to wish away, but the catalyst of an investigation that, in the words of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, ‘ultimately leads to discovering the source from which it springs. By facing it directly, we begin to use it, rather than be used by it.’
Acknowledging and examining our self-deceptions, and controlling our environment to [catch their common expressions](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3) with a view to converting them into better ones is how we get our machinery to work in our favour, to [spiral up, not down](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5#if-theres-a-spiral-down-there-must-be-a-spiral-up).
\*
When we stop fobbing ourselves off by pretending these expressions are isolated, independent, incidents, we start to see the flow of life, not the stagnation of an object.
When we stop running from money because we see it as scary, complicated, and boring, we start to realise [it’s none of these things](https://book.moneyblind.net/#must-money-seem-scary-and-complicated).
When we begin to see our unhelpful resource allocations as addictions, we begin to treat them as such, uncloud our vision, and move towards enlightenment rather than entrenchment.
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[#39: The ABC of money, part 8: The Eightfold Path and interdependence](/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence)
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# #38: The best diet advice and the best financial advice are the same
7th June, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that denies nothing.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that telling (yourself) a wiser story renders clever tactics redundant.
**Diets don’t work for the same reason relationships with money are so screwed up: because selling magic beans is easier than editing life stories.**
If you’re ever in the mood to really piss someone off, I know a fabulously reliable way, which I shall demonstrate with a little rant about dieting.
\*
Empathy-inducing Emily (EE) is dining with Virtuous-bastard Ben (VB).
EE: ‘You’re so lucky. You don’t like dessert. **I, however, have such a sweet tooth**.’
VB: ‘You know that, **biologically, there’s no such thing**. I know you know, because I’ve told you before.’
EE: \[grouchy mumbling; translation: ‘fuck you’]
VB: ‘I know nobody likes to hear that, but it’s true. And it’s also **the key to understanding why diets basically never work**, despite the “best” intentions of the dieter, especially the one that’s “tried everything” and concluded that they’re just one of the unlucky ones.’
VB: ‘For what it’s worth, once upon a time, I too believed I had a “sweet tooth”. Basically everybody does. Parents are suckers for shutting little bastards up by stuffing them and their malleable minds with sweets. And while those glucose-hungry prediction machines we lug around inside our skulls are pretty damn smart, a bit of them is still essentially a geriatric granddad raving away in the corner, living in a black-and-white world that’s still at war, and where sugar is still scarce.’
EE: \[here-we-go-again eye-roll]
VB: ‘Eventually, however, I grew out of that belief. It wasn’t as easy to overwrite as some other infantile bullshit like being scared of strangers or an American-esque division of everything into “awesome” or “evil”, but eating is important, life is long, and I am lazy… so of all the things worth caring about, learning to like the sort of food the body actually wants made a pretty compelling case.’
VB: ‘**A sweet tooth isn’t special; it’s just an addiction like any other: an unhelpful pattern of wiring that leads us to “choose” something to make the next 30 seconds easier at the expense of making everything after that 30 seconds harder**. Did I mention that I’m lazy?’
EE: ‘You’re not la—'
VB: ‘The day it really sunk in that everything is a choice was the most wonderful day of my lazy-ass life. You’re right, in that it’s “lucky” to genuinely favour broccoli over banoffee pie, but you’re wrong that the luck has anything to do with my unconscious biology. Rather, it’s about conscious manipulation of my neuroplasticity (not that I had a damn clue what neuroplasticity was when I began exploiting it).’
VB: ‘I remember reading somewhere that if every time you thought about a certain food you could vividly conjure up the sight, smell, and taste of vomit, you’d very quickly not want to touch said food again. **So I tried it. And it worked**. Stupidly, I tested the theory on bananas, so had to undo it. But it was a lesson well-learned. I then started thinking about what else I could do with this new-found ability to very literally change my mind about stuff.’
EE: ‘That may be easy for you, but—'
VB: ‘You don’t overcome addictions by clicking your fingers, of course, but a few elimination diets here and there – *experimenting* with avoiding a particular suspect food for a day, then two days, then four days, then a week, two weeks, a month, etc. – leave far fewer scars than the psychological bloodbath that happens when your will, your guilt, and your addictions clash swords.’
VB: ‘The great thing, of course, is that you’re fighting your [addictions, not your wants](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#4-needs-wants-addictions). You can’t win a fight with your wants, and nor would you, er, want to. **If something’s genuinely good for you – if you do really ‘want’ it, then if you go without it for two months, when you eat it again, you’ll feel fab. If, however, it isn’t good for you, your energy will plummet and you’ll want to throw up.** Feed me sugar now, and within a minute, I’ll do a good impression of a ghost who’s been socked in the stomach by an angry bear.’
EE: ‘Like that time in Morocco—’
VB: ‘Precisely. If I really “wanted” the sweet things still, I’d’ve reacted just fine. **The better you are at remembering such reactions the next time a craving arises, and consequently acknowledging them without acting on them, the quicker those cravings will simply stop arising**. Took between a couple of weeks and a couple of years for me, depending on the food, but they’re all gone now.’
VB: ‘Whichever one of the infinite ways of exploiting it you pick, the main point is that **you can’t win a battle that never ends. Diets based on denial not only don’t work, but *****cannot***** work**. Yes, you can summon up enough will – or environment-controlling psychological tricks – such that you never eat granulated poison again, but a) you’ll probably crash almost on schedule, and b) even if you don’t, the demands of the denying will ensure it’s no damn fun along the way.’
VB: ‘If you never change the story you tell yourself that you have a “sweet tooth” then however long your diet lasts – however “well” it goes – it won’t work. Because it turns life into a constant fight that’s so hellishly fatiguing that you’ll be making dumb-ass decisions all over the place. Having to “deny” yourself every time you’re presented with dessert, because you still believe it’s what you “want” is no way to live. Far better to just align what you believe you want with what you actually do. This is the only way that really works.’
**The moral:** the same is true of the bullshit stories we tell ourselves about money. This is why cravings for the ‘just tell me what to do’ answer, from the ‘[I want money so I don’t have to think about money](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)’ crowd are so sodding stupid. Because however ‘well’ you can kid yourself they ‘work’, your story remains [in need of a damn good edit](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3), and given you *are* your story – [your centre of narrative gravity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self) – it is the quality of your story that determines the quality of your life, not your capacity for joyless constant cognitive discipline.
# #39: The ABC of money, part 8: The Eightfold Path and interdependence
14th June, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that’s really part of a library.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that nothing evolves in isolation.
*This is part eight of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**Your money does not exist in isolation from your life. Your life does not exist in isolation from the lives of others. Yours and others’ lives do not exist in isolation from the world. Wise financial decisions are made in accordance with this understanding.**
A neuroscientist, a spiritual novelist, a mathematician, a theoretical physicist, and the naturalist-botanist-zoologist-philosopher Father of America’s National Parks walk into a newsletter.
* Although we typically feel independent, each of our brains operates in a rich web of interaction with one another – so much so that we can plausibly look at the accomplishments of our species as the deeds of a single, shifting mega-organism. \[…] All of this social glue is generated by specific circuitry in the brain: sprawling networks that monitor other people, communicate with them, feel their pain, judge their intentions, and read their emotions. – David Eagleman
* It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’ that we can truly possess the world in which we live. – Aldous Huxley
* This interconnection (or accommodation) of all created things to each other, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe. – Gottfried Leibniz
* A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison. – Albert Einstein
* When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. – John Muir
You don’t need to be an Eastern mystic, or even an evolutionary biologist to know that nothing evolves in isolation. Though if my personal and professional experience is any indication, you may, perhaps, here and there, now and then, need a nudge to see why living this truth is crucial to doing less idiotic stuff with your money.
Something I’ve learnt while writing this newsletter is that those that are interested in money are not (save for some surface-level summaries ‘optimised’ into triviality) interested in thinking more clearly (in the ‘enlightenment’ sense); and those that are interested in a more enlightened engagement with life are positively put off by any talk of money (one hopes such aversion is somehow deliberately ironic).
This is frustrating. Because central to becoming wiser are:
* **living an examined life** – and what better tool do we have than the unequivocal accounting record of our life choices provided by our credit-card statements?;
* **understanding that everything is connected** – both within ourselves, and between ourselves and the world (pull one bit of life in one direction, and the rest will react); and
* **cultivating a way of living that affords caring *****for***** what you care *****about***, rather than being blindly led astray by your addictions.
When we treat money as an isolated object, or means of acquiring objects, seeing its value – and by extension our entire worlds – primarily in numbers terms, we counteract all of this.
### Stop pursuing the trivial
The trivial version of this newsletter, ‘**Eight Secret Steps to Financial Success: Manifest a Million with Mindfulness – number 4 will shock you!**’, would run through the eight ‘steps’ of The Eightfold Path and link each one, however tenuously, to an idiotic way we live with money.
Right effort: Don’t waste time reading the finance pages!
Right livelihood: Don’t take a job just for the money!
Right speech: Don’t say ‘better’ when you mean ‘more expensive’!
Like most fortune-cookie ‘wisdom’, such an article wouldn’t be *wrong*. The last one, for example, is literally my [Trigger #1](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#1-better). But it would suffer from [The Michael Pollan Problem](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-dangers-of-simplicity): on its own, its usefulness would be severely limited.
It’d be like writing about ‘8 steps to lose weight’ and expecting anyone in the world to actually integrate them into their lives (as opposed to something like [this](https://aeon.co/essays/hunger-is-psychological-and-dieting-only-makes-it-worse) encouraging you to examine why [diets based on denial not only don’t work, but can’t work](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same)).
And in the context of The Eightfold Path, it would work *against* the exact message being sent. To return to the problem of the ‘path’ metaphor [highlighted last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4), **if you give someone a list of eight things to make their life better, and they reckon they’re doing better than par, they’ll turn their thinking off, not on**.
The Eightfold Path is better seen as a bridge between philosophy and your brain.
### Neuron nirvana
Recall from [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4) that ‘the key to the Eightfold Path is that each element is interdependent. It’s a web-like network, or an ecosystem that you cultivate in conjunction with changing circumstances.’ Its value is as a worldview, not a set of tactics. **It’s a way of living for a human with a mind, a body, and a soul, not a set of instructions for a robot**.
How you choose to earn and spend money both shapes and expresses your ‘[centre of narrative gravity’](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self) – the story you tell yourself about yourself that determines what that ‘self’ is. **If what you do ‘for a living’ leaves you with poorer physical and mental health and worse relationships, ‘living’ feels like an inappropriate term**.
The Eightfold Path is commonly talked about using the sort of Sanskrit terms that can easily make it feel like it’s got zero applicability outside of an ashram. ‘I want to make money, not feel like I’m on a yoga retreat!’ you cry. To put the ecosystem of The Eightfold Path to use in improving our relationships with money we want to put nirvana in the language of neuroscience.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes:
> Samsara may be more accurately understood as a point of view to which we’ve become attached in an effort to define ourselves, others, and the world around us as we travel a realm characterized by impermanence and interdependence. \[…] Release from this sort of mental and emotional recycling is commonly referred to in Sanskrit as nirvana.
**In money terms: we do dumb shit with money because we’re attached to a deceptive, distorted, view of money, which affects the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world; these distortions are characterised by wishing money were some sort of ultimate certainty in an uncertain world**.
The purpose of the Eightfold Path is to overcome the self-deceptions that keep us locked in this psychological prison. This simply doesn’t happen with ‘nudges’, or amusing anecdotes of people doing silly things with money.
### You cannot take the water out of the wave, or the wave out of the water
Difficulties that arise from [the reality of uncertainty](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-siren-call-of-simplicity-and-succumbing-to-substandard-substitutes) are better met by living in a way that equips you to fit yourself to the uncertainty, rather than trying to fit the uncertainty to your fixed wishlist.
The reality of impermanence and interdependence means the ‘perfect’ solution to your ‘problems’ is impossible. Because you can’t fix a flow, and when you redirect the flow in one place, it changes it everywhere else.
We think this is a bad thing.
It’s actually a really good one.
**Because when you grasp that the ‘perfect’ solution is impossible, you stop wasting your life chasing it**. You stop playing unwinnable games of comparison and [consumption](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#the-conspicuous-consumption-con). You open up from a narrow vision that sees only crappy ways of playing the same silly game, to remembering that there are not only alternative ways of playing, but alternative games. You open up to seeing things in a [perspectival and participatory fashion](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2) – in context, and in service of meaning.
**Dedicating your life to catching something you cannot catch, and that even if you could would turn out to not be what you were after anyway, is no way to live**.
When you grasp that everything is connected, you begin to see more clearly how your money connected to your life – and therefore how to make more of it.
And you begin to see how all your choices are connected to each other – that how you do anything is how you do everything.
As noted in [Idiot Money #20](https://news.moneyblind.net/20-7-magnificent-money-lessons-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-money), this neuroplasticity is the key lesson we can take from neuroscience. It’s also the bridge that links the abstract framework of Buddhist philosophy to the [practical wisdom](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3) of living better with money. More on that next time.
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[#41: Building a better money brain (the ABC of money, part 9: neuroplasticity)](/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity)
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# #40: The dance of becoming wiser with money
20th June, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that dances like nobody’s watching.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that while most investment answers are simple, a craving for simplistic answers is idiotic.
**There is no conveniently straight road to better financial decisions. Because life isn’t a race, it’s a dance.**
Say yes to everything!
Say no to everything!
Say yes to everything when you’re young and exploring, then say no to everything when you’re exploiting your exploration!
\*
Get on the property ladder!
Climb the career ladder!
Check your ladder’s against the right wall!
\*
Great, life-changing advice, right?
### A race for rats
Amid the fun of [high margins](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.1#how-much-are-you-unwittingly-and-unknowingly-wasting) for [low morals](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blind-leading-paul-davies/), face-to-face financial advice frequently faces a fascinating conundrum. **How much do you risk pissing someone off for their own good?**
Financial advisers are in the perfect position to leverage knowledge of what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to financial decision-making. Before, during, and after such decisions, the financial adviser has a unique all-access pass into the heads of those making them.
Yet staying in this privileged position can require shirking its major benefits.
It’s one thing to suggest to someone that they’ve made – or been sold on – some dumb investment choices that can be fixed with a few sign-here tabs. It’s quite another to prompt them to consider if decades of career – and indeed life – choices, were as smart as they could’ve been (and continue to be)… even if that someone has spent the last two hours whining about the (non-financial) consequences of those choices. [Mental mirrors can be uncomfortable to look at. Rear-view ones that force us to reflect upon what we’ve done with our lives are all the more so](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2).
The winner of the rat race, is, of course, still a rat. People pay advisers tens of thousands a year to brag about the winning bit, not be reminded of the rat bit. Or even to be asked what it is they’ve actually won.
**Yet by far the most valuable transformative experiences I’ve seen advisers enable have been by encouraging an examination of what ‘winning’ actually means, and even if ‘winning’ is remotely appropriate language to apply to living well**.
Actually helpful advice, that inspires examination rather than offering appeasement, takes time. Because those most in need of it don’t believe it applies to them, and get most enraged when you suggest it.
As I wrote in [Idiot Money #2](https://news.moneyblind.net/2-dont-know-where-to-begin-sorting-out-your-finances-its-not-where-you-think-it-is):
> We believe in financial orthotics. But that's an inhuman crock of shit. We need to build strength in bare financial feet, not pay for padding to temporarily numb the pain. The self-deception of confusing 'quality of life' with 'access to comfort' is the world's slowest and silliest suicide note.
The problem with the rat-race game is that no one truly believes they’re playing it, just as [nobody believes they’re rich](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1#the-1-is-surprisingly-subjective), or [extravagant](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.5-enough-is-more-than-enough#worldview-change-outranks-behaviour-change).
Stats, however scary, do not penetrate subtle stories.
As we saw in [Idiot Money #23](http://invalid//), there’s a crucial difference between being frightened and being haunted. Frightening people is a sales tool. Haunting them is a therapeutic one. Fears can vanish in the blink of a bank transfer (especially those invented by the transferee). But ghostbusting is ultimately a DIY job.
**People don’t seek advice to be guided to the work they have to do. They seek it to be told the work is all taken care of. Which is why fortune-cookie crap about yeses and noes and ladders remains so popular**.
Yet when it comes to life choices, decisions made for you are about as rewarding as [cheating](https://news.moneyblind.net/9-idiot-profile-an-oligarch-with-a-gun) – the real value comes from becoming a better decision-maker.
### Making better decisions
Making better use of your money is a subset of making better decisions.
As detailed in [this bit](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3) of the book, the two ways to improve decision-making are improving your filtering (how effectively you choose what to bother thinking about at all) and your processing speed (how efficiently you think about what’s left over).
Misunderstandings and fallacies are therefore the two ways it goes awry.
> Misunderstandings are about problem formulation: a mistake in coming up with the question – asking a bad one, or asking the right one in a bad way.
> Fallacies are about solution reasoning: a mistake in getting to the answer – using flawed logic, or an inefficient method.
To combat misunderstandings, we need to cultivate ‘active open-mindedness’: an ability to quickly integrate new information into our beliefs, and a willingness to change our beliefs when that new information suggests we should. To combat fallacies, we need to cultivate wisdom.
When saying ‘yes’ to everything works, it does so because it’s a shortcut to open-mindedness. However, this open-mindedness is commonly not active, but blind.
‘No’ isn’t magic either. It’s just a filtering constraint. Constraints are the key to getting shit done. However, **the problem with getting shit done is that sometimes what you get done is, well, shit**.
### ‘Correct’ is defined by context
Like other fortune-cookie trivialities like ‘goals-based investing’ or ‘[buy experiences](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-buy-experiences)’, the ‘say yes/no’ sort of advice isn’t necessarily *wrong*, but it is limited.
You could tell people to say yes when it was better to say yes, and no when it was better to say no.
That would, by definition, be better.
But it would also basically boil down to ‘be wiser’.
If telling someone to be wiser worked, it’d be great advice, but it doesn’t, and isn’t. Wisdom, [like attention](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#how-does-money-fit-into-meditation), is something you train as a side-effect.
**You become wiser as a side-effect of a way of living. A way of living defined by the exact sort of consciousness fortune-cookie trivialities work against**.
Suggesting to someone that they’re not as wise as they could be is haunting, not frightening. It’s a much harder solution to sell.
### To complexify is human
Tying this together, we can see that much as many believe otherwise, there’s nothing special about the mechanics of *financial* decision making. **Your brain doesn’t care if what’s in front of you is a bag of cash or** [**a plate of cookies**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#profound-or-trivial).
The only thing that’s special about money is that it gets everywhere, so if you’ve mental blocks associated with the mere mention of it, they’re that much more important to do something about.
A lot of financial advice consists in helping people win a game while also making it look and feel like they’re not actually playing it. It’s quite a skill.
It’s simpler to always say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ than it is to admit that the point of life is to continually increase your capability to master increasing levels of complexity.
It’s simpler to argue over definitions of ‘rich’ or ‘wealthy’ or how to grow either than it is to live in a way that makes any definition irrelevant and unimportant. **The ‘goal’ is to become better at turning your money into a Good Life, not to win the ‘define wealthy in five words or fewer’ competition**.
It’s the job of this newsletter neither to pander to such comforting crap, nor decry those that peddle it, but to inspire you to turn unhelpful illusions into something more illuminating. That shines a light not on a path, but on a process of becoming [competent enough to deal with increasing complexity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#wire-yourself-to-want-not-simplicity-but-complexity-when-its-worth-it).
\*
Any idiot can climb a ladder. Non-idiots check it’s against the right wall. Wiser folk still, right wall or not, wonder if perhaps climbing the same simple steps for all eternity is really the best metaphor for living in the first place.
Life isn’t a race, it’s a dance.
# #41: Building a better money brain (the ABC of money, part 9: neuroplasticity)
28th June, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that’s scrubbed up, with scalpel in hand.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that how money is mapped in your brain determines how well it serves your life far more than how you spend or invest it.
*This is part nine of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
*Buddhism isn’t about sitting in a cave chanting om. It’s about brain surgery. Don’t believe me, ask a brain surgeon.*
**Wise use of the plastic in your wallet is determined by how you harness the plasticity of your brain.**
I’ve often been asked for tips on how to prepare for a first-time ten-day silent meditation retreat.
Tip number one is don’t seek out any reports of others’ experiences. Expectations of any sort are not your friend.
Tip number two is read *Buddha’s Brain* by Rick Hanson ([UK](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Buddhas-Brain-Practical-Neuroscience-Happiness/dp/1572246952) ǀ [US](https://www.amazon.com/Buddhas-Brain-Practical-Neuroscience-Happiness/dp/1572246952?pldnSite=1)). I wrote [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence) that to improve our relationships with money we want to put nirvana in the language of neuroscience; this book does exactly that.
If you’re anything like me – and most seeking such tips are, at least a little bit – you’ll probably find spending 10 hours a day doing literally nothing but focusing on the sensations of your upper lip much easier if you have a vague understanding that you’re really sculpting a better brain.
This is fundamentally what [this series of posts](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly) has been about.
We’ll cover the specifics of what meditation looks like when applied to money next time.
For now, know that when we talk about ‘meditation’ we’re not talking about some cute thing you do by listening to a soothing voice on an app telling you to relax your eyelids and think happy thoughts for five minutes. Nor are we talking about calming your nervous system in a healthier way than lining your lungs with tar.
We’re talking about a means of training your attention… about paying attention to how you pay attention. This is, as I wrote last time, how we build the bridge that links the abstract framework of Buddhist philosophy to the [practical wisdom](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3) of living better with money.
**The aim of any half-decent financial planning is to align what you** [care for with what you care about](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#i-can-see-clearly-now). To allocate your resources with what you want, rather than what you’re addicted to. This is basically the aim of what the Greeks called *phronēsis* – practical wisdom: not only how to choose a path to an end, but how to choose the end most consistent with the aim of living well overall (see [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3) for more, including the accompanying Aristotelian footnote).
The second bit is crucial. You can hack your habits to make you more productive at doing anything, but it’s kind of pointless if you’re still trapped in a worldview that thinks personalised numberplates are a sign of class. **It doesn’t matter how well you can afford things if those things don’t afford living well.**
The problem with getting good at getting shit done is that sometimes what you get done is shit.
### A detour into death
‘[Of the 800,000 people who kill themselves globally each year 20% die from pesticide self-poisoning](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/leah-utyasheva-pesticide-suicide-prevention/).’
If you were to ask someone what causes suicide, chances are high that motive (being very depressed) would spring to mind before opportunity (having easy access to a means of doing the deed).
As the excellent link above explains, one of the most effective ways of reducing suicides is simply by making it harder for farmers at risk of very low (but passing) moments to get their hands on a deadly drink.
There are plenty of less morbid parallels to this.
In the time before takeaways, it was much harder to turn a temporary craving for crap food after a hard day at work into a rather less temporary choice of body-fat percentage. See also retail therapy, and the rise of the smart phone – the feelings that lead us into myopic cravings for crap and distraction almost certainly haven’t increased; but our means of appeasing them have become deadly effective.
### Pay attention to how you pay attention
**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**. Especially when the ultimate attention-stealing device lives in our pocket.
Blaise Pascal once quipped that ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’. That was in the 17th Century.
Most of humanity’s efforts since then have aimed at enhancing not our ability to sit quietly and pay attention to how we pay attention – to counter the distraction death spiral of modern life and the existential confusion it inspires – but to make it easier not to.
This is especially inconvenient when you consider the brain’s built-in ‘negativity bias’.
Seeing more dangers than exist in reality made evolutionary sense when those dangers led to being eaten. Now, however, this bias leads (in the words of *Buddha’s Brain*) to a
> ‘background of anxiety \[that] fosters anger, sorrow, depression, guilt and shame; \[that] highlights past losses and failures, \[that] downplays present abilities, and \[that] exaggerates future obstacles.’
In a world where we equate money with security, this distorted, fearful interpretation of reality leads us to make some very silly life choices. We [accumulate rather than align](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-accumulation-and-alignment), and waste resources building fortresses to keep out pain that’s already inside us.
As Buddha’s Brain states:
> Developing greater control over your attention is perhaps the single most powerful way to reshape your brain and thus your mind \[…] The simple truth is that how we focus our attention, how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits, can directly alter the brain's activity and its structure.
There’s a reason the ‘[You are a brain surgeon](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1)’ section of my book is so near the beginning.
And why Part One ends not with trivial tips and tricks from financial fortune cookies, but with an [attempt at harnessing your neuroplasticity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4): by catching crappy indications of money idiocy, and consciously changing them with the sort of attention that alters the money maps in your brain.
Because as we covered earlier in this series, **the worst thing about money – its ubiquity in our decision-making – is also the best thing about it**. Because the same machinery that spirals us down when we don’t attend to it spirals us up when we do.
Learning to divorce events from the meaning we attach to them and see not obstacles, but stepping stones, is key to becoming wiser. The Buddhist philosophical framework is a structured approach to doing this. As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote:
> The radical goal of the Buddha’s treatment plan is not to solve or eliminate problems, but to use them as a basis or focus for recognizing our potential. Every thought, every emotion, and every physical sensation is an opportunity to turn our attention inward and become a little bit more familiar with the source.
**The best intentions are pointless if they’re forgotten when they’re needed. The fact you don’t live in a meditation hall makes a money philosophy rather important**. Because a philosophy is a way of living, and if you’re living something, it’s with you in everything you do.
### Become such as you are
‘Our life is shaped by the mind; we become what we think.’ So said the Buddha. There’s an important subtlety here. You are not what you think or do. You are what you’ve thought and done. You *become* what you think and do… what you pay attention to.
If you want to become wiser, pay attention more wisely.
The *practice* of meditation is a way to train your attention and improve your brain.
Or at least it should be.
But it’s usually done terribly.
As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote:
> Many people look at meditation as an exercise, like going to the gym. ‘I’ve gotten that over with! Now I can go on with the rest of my life.’ But meditation isn’t something separate from your life. It is your life.
We’ll look at how to do it properly and how money fits into meditation next time.
(or could read [this](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#how-does-money-fit-into-meditation) now. It’s really good. And not very long)
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[#45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t](/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt)
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# #42: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 1)
5th July, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that reckons it’s time to move on.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that choosing to live in a world where money excuses a lack of wisdom, character, and virtue is far from wise.
**A first-class way to be dumb with money is to believe that having money means you aren’t dumb.**
Winston Churchill famously quipped that the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Similarly, the best argument against the idea that wealth is a decent proxy for wisdom is a five-minute conversation with a wealthy person.
Yet few myths about money are quite so persistent, nor quite so consequentially catastrophic. The most costly dangers are the ones we don’t see, and most believers in the myth like to deny they believe in it at all.
And while with democracy – as Churchill would remind us – all the other ways are worse, the same is not true about how you choose to construct your money worldview.
### Whither wisdom?
I distinctly remember growing up in a world where to insult the intelligence of a rich person would meet with a reply along the lines of ‘They must be doing something right…’ even if they’d merely been born into it.
Or ‘They can’t be completely stupid…’ even if they were, very obviously, right there and then, adding to a scarcely believable track record of doing things which, on any objective measure, were completely stupid.
The message was clear: whatever someone’s faults, having money offsets them.
**We live in a world where money excuses a lack of wisdom, character, and virtue, and therefore one in which on some level we believe it must be a substitute for those things**.
Someone making millions through immorality? Reward them with public honours and positions on boards so they may protect the system that got them there.
Someone making less than millions but more than peanuts in a job that’s mentally and physically destructive, both inside work hours and out? They’re ‘[doing well for themselves](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#17-x-has-done-well-for-themselves)’ and would thus be mad to quit.
Someone making dumb spending decisions? Doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make their life better, they can afford it.
And then there’s politics.
This belief so poisons minds that it can lead to otherwise semi-respectable people, having weighed up their options, to vote people into high office despite their chief ‘qualities’ being a knack for corruption, a contempt for those that would vote for them, and a creepy attachment to their nanny, despite being (culturally at least) 105 years old.
If the conflagration of consequences were limited to the governance of the most powerful countries on earth that would be pretty bad.
But it gets worse.
The ways we’re ruled over by others has nothing on the way we rule over ourselves.
**Which brings us to the dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in a personal-finance book**.
### The dumbness
In Daniel Crosby’s *The Laws of Wealth* he casually writes:
> As of the writing of this book, the median wage in the US is $26,695 and the median household income is $50,500. Let us suppose for illustrative purposes, however, that you are four times as clever as average and have managed to secure a comfortable salary of $100,000 per annum.
(Incidentally, the second and third dumbest things I’ve ever read in personal finance come from the same book. More on them another day.)
I suspect if you challenged Mr Crosby on this, he’d deny that he believed there were a direct link between salary and intelligence, and maybe say something about word counts being more important than nuance, and that the point being made was something else entirely anyway. Maybe he’d say he meant ‘clever’ in the [Dan Brown](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-dangers-of-simplicity) sense, i.e. ‘best at giving the people what they believe they want’.
Either way, it doesn’t really matter. Because there’s only one world in which such a comment can pass so easily into print, regardless of the excuses that defend it. And when it comes to living better with money, that world is not a helpful one. Yet we each continue to choose to construct it every damn day.
It’s not only America that believes cleverness = salary. An all-too-common refrain among those in the UK that have done nothing to ‘earn’ their wealth save being born or being in business in a lucky place at a lucky time, is that such inequality of opportunity is fine because intelligence is the only ingredient needed to stop being poor. This is heard from both those born into castles and those who, having hustled their way over the moat become hell-bent on hauling up the drawbridge once they’re in.
### Opportunity wasted
Dumb becomes dangerous when we believe that while it may be wrong – an exaggeration here, an inevitable overlooking of nuance there – it’s mostly harmless.
This has nothing to do with the statistical correlation between IQ and income. Such a thing does exist, but it’s irrelevant here.
**The most costly dangers are the ones we can’t see. We see the world through the lens of our language. And our lexicons can con us into living in a worse world than we could**.
Bigger problems await us when we look at a failure to recognise the role of luck in making money, or that often the most intelligent people – *because* of their intelligence – are working on things that make no money, and see only an isolated laziness of thinking, rather than the building blocks of a world that’s optimised for [wasting opportunities](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste), rather than creating magic with them.
We’ll continue this story next week, including why what the rich won’t tell you tells you a lot about being rich.
# #43: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 2)
12th July, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that really should've lined up its happiness doesn't depend on external circumstances post earlier.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that seeing money as a proxy for what you were praised for as a child is a sure-fire way to waste it
*See also* [*part 1*](https://news.moneyblind.net/42-the-dumbest-damn-thing-ive-ever-read-in-personal-finance-part-1)*.*
**What the rich won’t tell you tells you a lot about being rich.**
[Last time out](https://news.moneyblind.net/42-the-dumbest-damn-thing-ive-ever-read-in-personal-finance-part-1), I claimed that a casual – likely unconscious – linking of one’s salary to one’s cleverness is both dumb and dangerous.
It’s worth repeating that this has nothing to do with the statistical correlation between IQ and income. Such a thing does exist, but it’s irrelevant here.
Because the danger comes from the way the belief constructs a worldview that makes it less likely you’ll make non-idiotic life choices.
### Opportunity rich
**The best thing about face-to-face financial planning is that it provides an expertly facilitated place for people to pay serious attention to the role of money in their lives**. Given the inescapable contribution money makes to all our life choices, making the most of it without such serious attention is basically impossible.
In a world that’s so terrible at talking about money, this facilitation is obviously great for the people with oodles of money.
It’s also great for their advisers.
Many financial advisers will tell you theirs is a brilliant job because of the high margins and low need to do much actual work.
I, however, think it’s brilliant because few professions offer such an opportunity to help people live more meaningful lives, and by extension help the world better allocate its resources.
No one else comes close to being in the position to dig so deeply into an individual’s money worries.
(And if you think money worries go away when you have lots of money, you don’t understand money, or worry, and to do so, you should start [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1).)
That position presents the opportunity – and the responsibility – to identify and share the insights that emerge from doing this for multiple individuals… to bring to public light lessons otherwise kept in the darkest and most private prisons.
**You can sometimes unwind the problems poor life choices create, but you can never unmake those choices**. Investing in making better ones therefore always pays off. Someone with expert knowledge of what’s worked and what hasn’t for other people (and who can remind you of what’s worked and what hasn’t for you, when you’re so damn keen on ego-editing your own memories) is a great place to start.
**Because of money’s role in life choices, becoming wiser with money is fundamental to making wiser ones**. Unfortunately, because of how we, and society, are set-up to make money so screw with our minds, and to flee from the [reality of uncertainty](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-siren-call-of-simplicity-and-succumbing-to-substandard-substitutes) rather than give it a rom-com airport hug, life’s unrelenting rush of responsibilities is more likely to feel terrifying than empowering.
All those decisions on how to allocate money, time, and energy!
All those lives that could be led!
All those mistakes that could be made…
…and whose consequences could be catastrophic!
What a wonderful thing, therefore, that there are people who can help us learn from the experiences of others.
Who can help lessen the chances we’ll do something dumb…
…like prioritising our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us over the real fulfilment of our potential to flourish…
…or sacrificing decades, and health, and relationships, and dreams, to a joyless job, the redeeming feature of which is the ability to buy expensive things that con us into believing they [justify the sacrifices made to acquire them](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#the-conspicuous-consumption-con).
### The private world of rich regrets
As I wrote last time: **We live in a world where money excuses a lack of wisdom, character, and virtue, and therefore one in which on some level we believe it must be a substitute for those things**.
On a societal level, a world that so casually uses money as a proxy for wisdom, character, and virtue elects idiots to high office. On an individual level, it leads people to make the sorts of choices with their lives that, when they finally stop to consider them, make them wonder what the fuck they were up to.
One of the reasons I left the world of one-on-one (usually – and better as – two-on-two) advice was because there are few things more frustrating than seeing your friends make the exact same choices your clients – the people who have what your friends (and so many others) believe they want and are dedicating their lives to obtaining – come to regret.
Especially so as **the same world that leads people into these regretful choices also keeps the regrets private**.
I imagine doctors feel a similar frustration when, upon looking at someone’s ‘one off’ food choice, they can’t help but see a patient they’re going to be diagnosing with diabetes in a decade’s time.
What’s going on here?
We live in the richest, most opportunity rich time in the history of humanity. And while at the end where money does make a difference, we’re doing a relatively [wonderful job](https://www.gapminder.org/) at creating opportunities for those who have none, at the other end – the end where everyone already has all the opportunity they could ever need – it’s fair to say we could be doing a smidge better.
Why?
Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the damned dumbness of using wealth as a proxy for wisdom. Which is why I’ve turned one casual quip into two weeks’ worth of newsletter.
### The pet theories
At first, I wondered whether this bonfire of opportunities was simply another example of [costly signalling](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#are-you-being-eaten) taken too far.
Then I thought there’s an element of not believing in luck. **Believing wealth correlates with wisdom is so much more comforting than it correlating with luck**. We believe in our *bad* luck, of course. Anyone unfortunate enough to hear me make excuses for my cricket batting average knows I am far from immune from this.
**But we don’t like to believe in our good luck, not really. And no, wibbling on about how ‘blessed’ you are in a gratitude journal doesn’t count**.
Possibly this is because admitting to all the luck we’ve already got from living in this golden world of opportunity – and comparing it to what we’ve done with it – doesn’t tend to end well. And because when we profit from even more of it – as we surely will – we won’t want to admit it was down to anything other than our unique fabulousness.
We also, of course, live in a world constructed around the collective canonisation of self-interested motives. As Peter Singer wrote in The Life You Can Save:
Many of us believe not only that people are generally motivated by self-interest, but that they ought to be – if not necessarily in the moral sense of ‘ought’, then at least in the sense that they would be foolish, or irrational, if they were not self-interested.
Everyone in a developed society is constantly being bombarded with messages about how to save money, or earn more money, or look better, or gain status – all of which reinforce the assumption that these are things that everyone is pursuing and that really matter.
There’s so much more to be said about this, that I’ll save it for another day (and you should read Singer’s book immediately).
The most important point is that **we believe other people are drastically more self-interested than they are… so we publicly praise self-interested motives (and denigrate their absence) to fit in *****not***** with others but with the collective myth**. We’re all on the [road to Abilene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox), in the dumbest of all possible ways.
For a while I settled on the ‘impressionable infant’ answer.
Because ‘intelligence’ was the chief source of judgment in the formative years before people began to be distinguished by anything else, accusing anyone of being an idiot is bound to piss them off. What luck that money – which any idiot can get hold of – can be used as a proxy! As I wrote in [Idiot Money #22:](https://news.moneyblind.net/22-the-psychoanalysis-of-money-or-how-to-screw-up-your-childrens-financial-worldview) The child’s inevitable aiming for praise becomes the adult’s inevitable aiming for money.
If you’ve ever seen how quickly a chest-beating business alpha gets defensive when rather than responding to their bragging with ‘ooh, nice’, you ask them if their choices were as smart as they could’ve been, you’ll have seen how sensitive everyone is to accusations of idiocy, regardless of what else they have to brag about.
However, I think this is a bit limited.
There’s something deeper at play.
**Intelligence, like money, and other resources, creates opportunities. But what we really want is not to have them, but to make something of them, of ourselves**. From hyperpalatable foods, to easy access into high-paying careers for the comfortably educated, sometimes *having* opportunities gets in the way of *becoming* someone on the back of them.
What we want is not money, nor even intelligence, but wisdom.
(See [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#intelligence-rationality-and-wisdom) for the difference between intelligence, rationality, and wisdom, as I use them in the book.)
### Opportunity lost
**We want to live well, not expensively. We want the Good Life, not the appearance of it**.
This requires seeing clearly what *our* Good Life actually is. What we actually want at the level of our souls, not the level of our ability to respond to adverts.
And when it comes to that, we’re all basically drug addicts claiming that we ‘want’ a fix. It makes us feel good! And while we acknowledge it comes with some side-effects, we’re perfectly capable of dealing with them when we arrive at the magical world of ‘later’.
As I wrote in [Idiot Money #41](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), **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.**
Specifically, how we pay attention to how we construct the worlds in which we make our life choices.
The point of addiction, as we saw when we looked at [the Second Noble Truth](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5#the-compulsion-con), is that it narrows our worldview so we see no alternative – so we substitute in some self-destructive addiction for what we actually want, but can’t see because our vision is all messed up.
This is why a casual conflating of having a higher salary with having become wiser is so damn unhelpful. Because it identifies (in some way) what we want and then sells us a useless, but all-too-tempting substitute for it. We get stuck in a world that while it could be worse, could also be a whole lot better.
We want to not be led astray by such [shitty self-deceptive beliefs](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3).
**As the private regrets of those that have made the choice would show, if only they were more well-known, you can’t start to play the better game until you’ve stopped playing the worse one**.
# #44: A story of lions and loss
19th July, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that YOLOs, but not like that.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that living in the future is an oxymoron.
**You only live once. And sometimes not even that. Remembering this should be a spark to living more consciously, not less.**
Of all the clients I ever worked with, one will always have a special place in my heart.
Roger.
This week’s newsletter is dedicated to him. It’s a sad tale, in more ways than one. I hope that by sharing it, it helps you, or someone you know, sidestep potential sadness of your own.
### Choose chuckling
Always engaged. Usually double-breasted. Never late. Roger and his indomitable smile lit up every meeting room and dining room they entered.
Where other clients chuntered away about the injustices of the world (despite being among the richest people to ever have lived in it), Roger chuckled.
Where other clients chose to worry, Roger figured it made more sense not to.
Yes, he’d studied hard, worked hard, and taken the risk of setting up his own firm, for which he’d been rewarded with more than just money. But he knew others had studied, worked, and risked way more, and not got nearly as lucky… Lucky in location, timing, intelligence, relationships, and so on.
He knew it wasn’t the making, but the making the most of, that counted.
Like most clients, Roger wasn’t inherently interested in the intricacies of the investment stuff. That’s part of why he and Maggie had hired someone to deal with it.
But he was smart enough to know that getting over the initial inertia was a great way to leverage the investment he’d made in this advice, **to derive greater comfort and confidence than could be got by hoping delegation was the end of confusion, rather than the beginning of understanding**.
Besides, it wasn’t like he needed to engage with more than the two basic processes that controlled the flow of lifestyle funding – the investment and withdrawal strategies that helped him and Maggie make the most of their money.
### Once in a lifetime
Roger and Maggie aren’t gazilionnaires. They’re not going to be taking a holiday to the moon any time soon. But they’re just as far from the gutter.
A common retired-client scenario is to ask about ‘objectives’ or ‘goals’ and get a typical ‘oh, you know, tick along, continue with our current lifestyles’ as an answer, with maybe a ‘fund the grandchildren’s education’ thrown in here and there.
Ask a silly question, get an unusable answer.
‘Is there anything you’ve dreamed of for so long that you can be pretty sure it’s more than just a passing fancy, or a convenient way to bat away awkward on-the-spot questions about “goals”?’
‘Perhaps something that you’re confident would make the sort of memories that outlive you, but that you haven’t done yet because it feels more like an idle dream rather than an actively possible part of your and other people’s future reality?’
For Roger, the thing he thought would make the most magnificent memories was going on a Lions tour with his sons. New Zealand, Australia, or South Africa, it didn’t matter which. Fly over in comfort. Stay somewhere fun. Go to all the games. By any measure, a better use of the money than the boys inheriting the cash later on.
He lit up just describing it.
Okay… so how much would this cost?
Roger didn’t know. He’d never done the calcs. It was just a dream.
Well, let’s see… the meeting rooms have Internet access…
The next one is in New Zealand (this was about 2015)… business-class flights to New Zealand… hotel rooms for a month… plus a month’s worth of eating, drinking, and bungee-jumping…
You can 100% afford it. Barely a blip on the cash-flow-planning radar.
By the time the New Zealand tour happens you’ll be 77. So realistically you’ve got that, maybe South Africa in 2021, maaaaaaybe Australia in 2025.
So which one will it be?
### A lifetime, once
After leaving the world of face-to-face advice, I kept in touch with Roger. Not least because he’s the reason I’m a member of the MCC, and I think about him every time I gambol through the Grace Gate.
I’d often accompany such thoughts by sending a message to thank him.
He always replied.
Or at least he used to.
When one time he didn’t, I asked my old boss – still Roger and Maggie’s adviser – if something were up.
It was.
Dementia.
Did he ever make it out to see the Lions with his boys?
He didn’t.
### Are you making immortal memories, or building a live-in mausoleum?
Maybe it won’t be dementia. But something *will* happen. Heck, such is the current state of the world that the 2021 Lions tour is partway through and they still don’t know if it’s actually on or not.
Opportunities, potential, *life*… their impermanence is the *source* of their value, not something to try to remove, be it through hoarding, believing happiness comes from [*having rather than becoming*](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode), or pretending life is lived tomorrow.
And no matter [how hard we believe in the pot of gold at the end of the certainty rainbow](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3), the only thing we get by waiting for it to magically appear is decay.
I share Roger’s story not as a wordy substitute for a motivational poster telling you to ‘seize the day’.
You can hypercorrectively leap into [YOLO land](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money) if you want, of course.
Though it strikes me that if you only live once, then the thing to do is to take more conscious care over your decisions, not less. Remembering, naturally, that conscious care does not mean ‘abundance of caution’.
Equating YOLO with ‘don’t think, just do’ only works in a world where we’re so terrified of thinking through what we really want to do with our lives, that we’re sometimes better off not thinking. Frightened humans gonna make frightful decisions.
It’s undoubtedly true that we regret more what we didn’t do than what we did.
But we often regret what we did too.
We never regret doing what we deep down know we want to do. Regardless of the result.
### It’s all too easy to live the high life in a very low mood
Many people believe – for reasons related more to the language their parents used than the size of their bank balance – that they can’t afford things, and deny themselves the realisation of their dreams because of it.
It’s one of the great roles of the financial adviser to persuade them that they can, and hopefully rewrite the unhelpful underlying story in the process.
But there’s a danger here too.
Because ‘buy stuff that makes your life better’ has a strange way of morphing into ‘the way to make your life as good as possible is to aim to spend your last penny on your last day.’ **Which is about as idiotic a take on the value of money in a life as it’s possible to have**.
Yet proffer this pseudo-profundity to people (and I’ve seen it plenty, especially in a financial-planning context) and they’ll probably nod along in agreement.
I don’t know if you’ve suggested to many people that they spend their money only on things that make their life better. The reaction is rather different.
As I wrote in the [very first newsletter](https://news.moneyblind.net/1-the-correlation-between-having-money-managing-it-well-and-living-a-good-life), when unpicking Socrates’ assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living:
> Socrates is saying that he would rather die than live a life governed by self-deception. He is on trial for seeking wisdom, for trying to understand what is real and living in alignment with it; for seeking to establish a rational basis for what to care about, and what to do. For seeking to express his authentic soul through his societal self.
> **Aligning what we do with what we (deep down, undistracted and undeceived) care about, rather than with what unreal deceptive influences tell us to care about, is what joins up having resources with living a good life.**
> It was so important to Socrates that he rather died than be prevented from doing it. So should it be for the rest of us. There’s bugger-all benefit in being rich if you use those riches in a miserably misaligned manner.
**If you’re driven by what you can afford, rather than what you care about, you’ll be taken for a ride to places you don’t care to go. And at some point, it’ll be too late to turn around.**
# #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
26th July, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that tunes in, not turns off.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that better financial decisions, and even better financial decision-making is of negligible value relative to better decision-making machinery.
*This is part 10 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
*Meditation, or mindfulness, is the bridge between the theoretical framework of the Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and the practice of living better with money by channelling the miracle of your neuroplastic potential to your, rather than the advertisers’, advantage. But the way most people think of meditation or mindfulness, for all their other benefits, can enable the very self-deceptive behaviours we’re trying to improve.*
**If you want to have a better relationship with money, you need a more mindful relationship with the life, and the world, that money is part of. This requires a dance of tuning in, not a fight to turn off.**
I ended [Idiot Money #41](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity) saying that ‘If you want to become wiser, pay attention more wisely.’ And ‘The *practice* of meditation is a way to train your attention and improve your brain.’
However, before you rush to your cushion, it’s crucial to know what we mean by meditation (or mindfulness – for our purposes they are interchangeable), especially in the context of how we live with money.
Meditation – as a means of dissolving self-deceptions, seeing your reality more clearly, and generating enlightening insights – is a bridge from the framework we’ve been constructing over the last nine posts in this series to the practicalities of living better with money.
But it’s embarrassingly easy to get trapped by tactics so that rather than seeing more clearly, you double-down on the self-deception with clever-looking but unenlightening crap.
### Meditation isn’t an isolated exercise
As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, whose delightful book *Joyful Wisdom* has guided us through this series, wrote:
> Many people look at meditation as an exercise, like going to the gym. ‘I’ve gotten that over with! Now I can go on with the rest of my life.’ But meditation isn’t something separate from your life. It is your life.
Lunchtime mindfulness sessions may be all the anti-rage in workaholic-enabling offices, but they reaaaaaaally miss the point.
If your job sponsors your slow suicide by keeping you simmering with stress and [sedentary for more than six hours a day](http://breakingmuscle.co.uk/uk/fitness/move-it-or-lose-it-how-to-sit-less-move-more-and-feel-better-1), making it a bit easier to stay there for 10 hours a day isn’t a plus point. **Padding, whether it’s on a shoe or in a cell, doesn’t treat pain, it incubates it**.
Having a salad for lunch on Wednesday in between a catch-up drinks, leaving drinks, Thursday-is-the-new-Friday drinks, Friday drinks, Saturday drinks, and Sunday-lunch-drinks does not a healthy lifestyle make, however much you tell yourself such weeks are one-offs.
**Being better with money isn’t about winning decision battles, or even the better decision-making war. It’s about choosing to live in a more peaceful, less war-torn world**.
### Meditation isn’t relaxation
As Mark Manson wrote in *Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope*:
> Most modern Westerners know of meditation as a relaxation technique. \[…] But actual Buddhist meditation is far more intense than just destressing oneself with fancy apps.
There’s nothing wrong with plain old relaxation. You should do it now. Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw. Breathe into your hips, not your sternum.
But meditation (for our [neuroplastic](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), better-living, purpose) is different. Not least because if the only time your shoulders are dropped, your jaw unclenched and your breathing deep and horizontal is when you remember to sit on a cushion for ten minutes every now and then, then… well, I shouldn’t need to spell out why that’s perhaps a touch troubling.
Rewiring your world is an active, participatory, process. A constant cascade of choices to remember to live your life in [becoming not having mode](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode), to continually refresh your interest and your intention in aligning what [you care for with what you care about](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#i-can-see-clearly-now).
### Meditation isn’t contemplation
I’m as big a fan of [thinking stuff through](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#thinking-v-unthinking) as anyone. It’s central to more or less the whole book.
But **in our game of generating insights, meditation and contemplation are cognitively opposing processes. They’re not synonyms**.
(For the full explanation from your favourite cognitive scientist, see between [18:14 and 25:39 here](https://youtu.be/jkWNBdBDyoE?t=1094).)
Contemplation is scaling up your attention. Seeing more deeply into the world. Meditation is scaling it down. Seeing more deeply into yourself.
You contemplate the world by looking *through* your mind. The way your mind frames things determines the world in which you live. Like someone who wears glasses sees the world as constructed through the lenses in them. Distorted or unclear lenses, distorted or unclear vision.
Meditation is looking at the lenses – looking not *through* the way your mind is framing things, but *looking* *at the framing*. It’s getting a better grip on how you make sense of and indeed contribute to constructing your world, to become better at constructing it more consciously.
To build a better brain through living mindfully is to optimise the flexibility of your attentional scaling – your ability to zoom in and out, to see both things and the things you’re seeing them through at the same time.
It’s like seeing words and letters and their emergent meaning at the same time. You automatically read in context. Vervaeke’s ‘the cat’ example from the pic at the top of this article is illustrative here.
You instantly know the first of the indistinct letters is an H and the second is an A. Because of the words in which they sit. Yet the words are formed of those letters. Hmm.
You cultivate your ability to see more clearly and deeply into the big bad world by finding patterns in the small things within it and being conscious enough to integrate the two. By bringing into consciousness that which is normally unconscious, breaking it down, taking it apart, having a good look at it, and seeing if it’s helpful or not.
**This is a process of de-automatising your cognition, and it’s helpful because so much of the automaticity comes from completely crappy places**.
This framing is worth holding in your mind when you think about the role of money and the supposedly ‘one off’ financial decisions you make, and the passive absorption of all the money messages you encounter every day.
We’ll come back to the distinction between meditation and contemplation next time, when looking at the interacting role of each in generating insights.
### Meditation isn’t paying attention
**You can get really good at paying attention. But if what you’re paying attention to is pointless, then so what?**
There’s a reason the [Eightfold Path](https://news.moneyblind.net/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence) contains not ‘concentration’, but ‘right concentration’ (and why it’s distinct from ‘right mindfulness’).
‘Mindfulness,’ as Vervaeke teaches [here](https://youtu.be/EWumJSBqXa8?t=1094), ‘isn’t about concentration; it’s about getting the right kind of concentration. It’s about constantly renewing your interest and refreshing your intention.’
> [Mindfulness is a purposeful act, in a way that attention need not be. \[…\] Mindfulness in this sense is calling to mind the right things at the right time, which is the core of all effective behaviour change techniques](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#how-does-money-fit-into-meditation).
Living an examined life obviously requires paying attention. But just as the key to meditation is returning to (renewing your interest in and refreshing your intention on) the breath, rather than focusing on the breath itself, **it’s the process of examining, not the fixation on arriving at a conclusion, that makes the examined life the one most worth living**.
### Meditation isn’t turning off, it’s tuning in
**In summary, it’s a common error to think of meditation as a ‘turning off’… What we really want is to tune in.**
Turning off from what’s irrelevant can help us tune in to what’s not, but if the focus is the turning off rather than the tuning in, you’re most likely to simply replace one irrelevance with another, in a doom-laden spiral of passively-absorbed distractions.
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[#46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is](/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is)
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# #46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is
2nd August, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that’s a distraction from distraction.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that looking at your relationship with money is the way to see through it better.
*This is part 11 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
*After last week’s ‘what meditation isn’t’, this week: what it is.*
**You see the world *****through***** your relationship with money. Therefore, if you want an easy, flowing life rather than to be swept along by a flow of easy distractions, there are few more valuable things you can do than look *****at***** your relationship with money.**
### Meditation is attention-paying training
Wait? What? Didn’t I say [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt) that meditation *wasn’t* paying attention?
I did.
Meditation *isn’t* paying attention. But it is paying attention to *how* you pay attention.
Think of the difference between making a conscious spending decision and being conscious of how you make spending decisions. The difference, in the context of your life – which is probably the context in which you want to think about life choices – is huge.
A common complaint when I talk of using a relationship with money as a means of living an examined life is that being so conscious every time you whip out your credit card is unrealistic. No one’s got the capacity for such constant cognitive vigilance.
I agree.
But to agree isn’t to endorse dashing to the other extreme, where [so many chase more money in order to not have to think about it at all](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)… despite that leaving the effectiveness of their money decisions in improving their lives completely to chance.
The neuroscience agrees.
See, for example, the discussion about deliberate and effortless mindfulness [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-bW1gxjtwI), which echoes the importance of attentional flexibility in becoming wiser that we touched on [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt#meditation-isnt-contemplation)).
**If you want to make better decisions by default, the answer isn’t to pay greater attention to every decision. It’s not even to make your decision-making better, e.g. by carrying around a checklist that you crack out on special decision-making occasions. It’s to make your decision-making *****machinery***** better. To develop flexibility of attentional scaling, to zoom in and zoom out at the same time, to enable you to better remember what you actually care about and continually refresh your attention on it, and your intention to align your resources with it.**
Just as a child learns a language less by formal language lessons and more by living in a world shaped by that language, you improve your decision-making machinery less by specifically training your brain and more by living in a world shaped to do the training for you.
Fortunately, the shaping of your world is far more of a choice than just about anybody believes.
### Meditation is awareness training
To make better decisions by default, in a way that more readily accounts for each decision in the proper perspective of your relationship with it requires a more ready awareness for that perspective.
Specifically, the awareness of [how you know yourself, others, and the world](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2) in an integrated way.
**Without awareness of the life-context in which it sits, paying attention may improve your knowledge, and your know-how, but it’s not going to do much for your wisdom**.
### Meditation is insight-generation training
We want insight. Specifically, **we want insight when it’s needed. We want the right solution to pop up when we’re tackling the right problems**.
Better insight = better [problem formulation and better problem solving](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3) = better life choices = better life.
In the words of John Vervaeke, from [episode 9](https://youtu.be/jkWNBdBDyoE?t=1094) of The Greatest Thing on the Internet:
> Mindfulness is training a flexibility of attentional scaling so we can intervene effectively in how we are framing our problems and increase our chances of insight when insight is needed.
Because [all of life is threatened by self-deception](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1), and because every decision is a vote for living in one world over another, in a way that maps that world in your brain, and because the deceptive forces and their societal support are forging unhelpful pathways all the goddamn time, I would argue pretty darn strongly that if you want to live a better life, insight is needed every time you make a decision that shapes who you are, the world in which you live, and the interaction between the two.
And **because of its unique role in our decisions and the thoughts that drive them, there’s no better conduit to conscious, examined-life, world-construction than money**.
‘Being present’ – the poster-child of living meditatively – trains you to be more insightful. But it doesn’t work by you toddling off into nature and Instagramming the shit out of some sun-splashed woodland; #shinrinyoku.
It works because when you scale down your attention, you train your mind to be less representational and inferential – i.e. to jump to fewer conclusions in a way that means you are paying less attention to everything.
Just as we saw when we looked at the noble truths, the machinery that makes us wise also leads us astray. **If you keep breaking stuff down, you’ll never make anything. If you keep zooming out, you’ll jump to conclusions**.
For example, when you’re playing sport, whether it’s running, or swinging a tennis racquet, or taking a penalty, the most sure-fire way to screw it up is to think in that moment about what you’re doing – what part of your foot you’re landing on, the angle of your elbow, the rotation of your hips, etc.
All that jumping to conclusions is a necessary cognitive labour-saving device, without which you would die from indecision with a burnt-out brain.
But just because it’s helpful at allowing you to function at all, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also unhelpful when it comes to gaining mastery over your problem-framing processes, and therefore the quality of your default decision-making machinery.
### How to stop suffering (especially when you don’t even know how you’re suffering)
Half of this [series of posts](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly) so far was spent understanding Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. Because understanding the framework of these ‘ennobling provocations’ enables us to understand both ‘suffering’ (by which we mean self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour) and how to dissolve it.
We learn to live better lives when we understand the problem is not the ‘suffering’, but the fact our lives are constantly threatened by it *regardless of our circumstances* (because it is *self*-deception). **Fail to see that, and you’ll waste your life focused on trying to change your external circumstances, despite this not really making a damn bit of difference to its quality**.
As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
> Mindfulness can only help reduce our stress and tension if it provides us with insight. Meditation isn’t just a temporary place of refuge to help you stop suffering for a while. It’s much more than that. Your spiritual practice has the power to transform the roots of your suffering and transform the way you live your daily life. It is insight that helps us calm our restlessness, stress, and craving.
**Yes, meditation can help you calm down, destress, relax, and temporarily get you into a state where you’re less likely to medicate with your chosen poison, but viewing it as such is ultimately pointless compared to becoming calm and in control of your decision-making**.
Insights arise when we break the frames through which we’re so used to seeing the world we forget we’re even looking through them, and look through new ones. **If you’re looking how you’ve always looked, you’ll see what you’ve always seen.**
This is both how therapy works and how wisdom grows.
As Vervaeke explains:
> Insights appear when we free an event from the meaning we attach to it, which we do by foregrounding and backgrounding different aspects of our attention, not turning them on and off. \[…] When we talk about wisdom, we’re not talking about an individual insight, but a systematic set of insights that are mutually related to a fundamental transformation of the person’s existential mode.
**You don’t get insights from contemplation or meditation. You get them from dancing between the two. Breaking the old frame is meditation – scaling down your attention. Building a new one is contemplation – scaling it back up**.
\*
With that foundation in place, next time we’ll look at what living meditatively with money looks like in real life… and what all that attention-paying, awareness, problem-formulation, problem-solving, and insight-generation means for our grand neuroplastic and philosophical adventure.
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[#48: Living mindfully with money (the ABC of money, part 12)](/48-living-mindfully-with-money-the-abc-of-money-part-12)
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# #47: Idiot Profiles: Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction, Teenage Ozymandias, and me
9th August, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that’s at war with waste.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that choosing to make money the exception to the rule that it’s better to get the same output for less input is a pretty dumb way to live.
**Living well and living expensively are not the same thing. If you spot yourself bragging about the latter to try to impress upon people the former, it’s a sign that something needs to change.**
We measure living well differently to doing anything else well. Why?
In every other walk of life, doing something well is signalled by putting in less effort for no shortfall in the quality of output – doing something more quickly, more neatly, more efficiently, or more elegantly.
Yet when it comes to living a Good Life (which is the only thing we should ultimately care about), we act as if achieving it for £10,000 per month is better than doing it for a tenth of that.
### 1. Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction
> ‘Sorry, did you say £10,000 a *year* for jewellery?’
> ‘No, a month.’
> ‘Oh.’
The first I came to know of Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction (real title, poetically licensed surname) was being asked to do the maths to prove quite how badly they’d been screwed by being suckered into signing up with [St James’s Place](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-st-jamess-place-other-cowboys-paul-davies/).
At first, they cared only about the swirly writing on SJP’s marketing material and how it spoke to their aspirant insecurities. Later, they came to care about the detail.
However, they didn’t care about the details because they were worried how much money they’d spunked on slick sales patter.
They didn’t want to know the sums. They just wanted them to be wrong.
Heck, if you’d offered them a chance to *pay more* to magically make them wrong, they’d probably have taken it. If you think St James’s Place advisers are good at selling their shit, you should hear the defences of the people they’ve sold that shit to.
**There are few things more frustrating than seeing people sacrifice better future decisions for want of admitting the imperfections of their past ones**. In financial planning, this frustration is monumental, because a core part of the job (when done well) is turning the very thing a client is bragging about into the object of challenge.
No harm, right? After all, if someone were genuinely proud of something, they'd welcome the challenge... wouldn't they? ;)
If Lord and Lady Jewellery Addictions’ defence of the exploitative ways of their erstwhile advisers was one thing, their defence of their own spending habits was quite another.
Apparently **being ennobled doesn’t come with the realisation that you don’t tend to get defensive about stuff you’re secure about**, and that therefore attempts to promote an identity rather than let it emerge are always an instant, affectatious, and frankly ignoble backfire.
The oddest part of Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction’s jewellery addiction wasn’t the quantum. It was the pride in that quantum.
The message was clear: ‘The more I spend on jewellery, the better my life is, and the more you should respect, revere, and quite possibly worship me. How very dare you even ask if it “[works](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#the-strange-silence-of-does-it-work)”? If it didn’t work, why would I keep doing it?’
### 2. Teenage Ozymandias
> ‘I spend £4,000 per month.’
> ‘On what?’
> ‘Oh, I don’t know, really. I like nice clothes. And I like to go out and have a good time. I don’t even really drink myself. It’s mostly for other people.’
> ‘Is it?’
> ‘Is it what?’
> ‘A good time?’
Being young and South Asian, the only surface-level thing Teenage [Ozymandias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias) (aka Crazy Rich Entrepreneur Kid) had in common with Lord Jewellery Addiction was that they both went to business school.
Yet underneath, there it was again. The pride. The need to impress and the blindness to the truth that **the harder you try to be impressive, the less you are. We show-off only our insecurities**.
There was – inevitably – a whole history behind the fears. The fear of being seen as ‘cheap’ by his peers. Or not good enough by himself. Or an inefficient converter of gifted resources into something ‘worthwhile’ by his parents (with ‘worth’ strictly limited to the sort of stuff that could be certificated and stuck on a fridge).
I was lucky enough to have a longer and more meaningful chat with Teenage Ozymandias than I ever did with Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction.
He wasn’t an idiot.
When I questioned how he’d react were the costs and benefits of his proudly quantified lifestyle a case study in a business-school textbook, he not only got the point before I’d finished making it, but welcomed it too.
‘Man, if my life were a business, and I the CEO, I’d fire myself.’
### 3. Me
> ‘My average monthly cocktail-bar cost is higher than my rent was when I moved to London a couple of years ago,’ bragged 25-year-old me.
> ‘Oh, I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more in restaurants and bars than rent since the second I started working,’ responded one of 25-year-old me’s equally unenlightened colleagues.
> ‘It’s okay when you’re aware of the numbers, though, right?’
**I may even have claimed to have ‘expensive tastes’, just to ensure I sounded like a total twat**.
I’m an idiot in many ways. 25-year-old me was an idiot in even more.
However I liked to dress it up then – paying for objective quality, aligning my expenditure with what I cared about (it wasn’t the drinks, it was what they expressed!) – it’s an inescapable and embarrassing fact that by bragging about the ‘average monthly cocktail-bar cost’ I wanted to impress people with numbers.
Naturally, I didn’t consider it bragging. Using the numbers was simply making an objective point! Given I had the evidence, it would’ve been weird not to share it to support the conversation!
Tracking, however, is not the same as seeing.
It doesn’t even really matter what those numbers were spent on. I was choosing to construct a world where they were the measure of something that the subtext claimed had meaning, yet in reality it was a total myth.
Tracking is necessary for trade-offs, but if your vision is shot, it can mask insights as much as highlight them. **The point of examining your life is to get to a place where you are no longer examining, but living an examined life**.
As reliably as poison doesn’t become a ‘[treat](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#13-treat)’ just because that’s what those with the most poisoned bodies call it, so a shared myth of ‘meaning’ doesn’t become meaningful just because it’s shared.
Sharing Good things makes them better, but sharing silly things just makes them sillier… and you more likely to do silly things in future, by reinforcing the muddiness of your and others’ vision; it may increase connections, but it decreases the quality of them.
I suppose there may be people out there that are genuinely impressed by Veblen lifestyles (those built around goods whose expense is counterintuitively a *cause* of their demand) and hear numbers-based bragging as a cry of triumph rather than a cry for help. But I’m not sure choosing to try to impress such people is ever wise.
**It is a mark of quality company that the circumstances in which the dance of companionship takes place are** [**borderline irrelevant**](https://news.moneyblind.net/7-what-fund-managers-can-teach-us-about-what-really-matters).
### The punchline
‘What does it matter?’ the likes of Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction would ask, when challenged on their spending decisions. ‘We can certainly afford it,’ they’d probably puff out under noses trying to sniff the moon.
Well quite, what do they matter?
Life in financial advice is one long story of people feeling good when they’ve done Good with their money and Bad (in a gnawing, existential 'bad faith' sense) when they haven’t. And yet mostly failing to connect the dots.
**Allocation is far more important than accumulation**. But we so desperately want to believe the accumulation is the aim. So we spend money [only to justify the sacrifices made to acquire it](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#instincts-often-lead-our-wallets-hopelessly-astray) – **we print money, without caring that the printer is hooked up to a paper shredder**.
# #48: Living mindfully with money (the ABC of money, part 12)
16th August, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that's best viewed through a wide-angle lens.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that money could be the best catalyst for conscious living, but we choose to make it the worst.
*This is part 12 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
*After parts 10 and 11 looked at what meditation is and isn’t, this is an attempt to talk about what living mindfully with money looks like in practice, despite that being completely impossible.*
**To live well with money requires remembering that you are a human, not a robot – you operate according to a philosophy in an inherently uncertain, impermanent world, not according to an algorithm driven by a simplistic set of numbers. Alas, that the narrow view with which we choose to look at money persuades us otherwise.**
To recap: in Idiot Money [#45](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt) and [#46](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is) we saw how meditation (or mindfulness, or *sati*, or callitwhatyouwill), if it’s to help us become wiser with money, needs to be a practice of paying attention to how we pay attention… how we generate insights through an awareness of how we know ourselves and the world, and how they dance together.
We saw how mindfulness is a way of life, not an isolated exercise. A conscious means of making better decisions by default, by choosing to construct a world that affords greater opportunities for making meaning, by tuning in, not turning off.
Unfortunately, **like sex or psychedelics, this is something too ineffable to fully grok from simply reading about it**.
Which is why we have to dance around the core concepts like our [propensity to grab for shitty substitutes for what we really want](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3) in the hope that one day the penny drops, the eyes pop, and a new, more helpful reality emerges. Somehow.
Money should be the best catalyst for this sort of consciousness. Except the worlds we’ve chosen to construct around it, and which society is only too willing to reinforce, make it nothing of the sort.
Yet because our relationships with money, and the world-building consequences of them, are within our control, we can choose to become wiser with money, rather than blindly hoping that making it, spending it, and investing it with something like blind abandon (largely unconsciously, but [sometimes deliberately so](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)) will somehow result in us making the most of it.
### What does living mindfully with money look like in real life?
A way of life? Building a better brain through conscious choices? Becoming wiser?
All that sounds an awful lot like training in [practical philosophy](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3) and [neuroplasticity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1) as an antidote to the [self-deceptive forces](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2) that mess up our money-saturated worldviews.
**For all that mediation is and isn’t, the two most important points to grasp if you’re to do more than escape from the drama of deadlines and diapers for a minute or two are**:
1\. **Living mindfully is philosophy training**. If it isn’t improving your life, you’re doing it wrong.
2\. **Living mindfully is neuroplasticity training**. [How you do anything is how you do everything](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#5-how-you-do-anything-is-how-you-do-everything). If you don’t instinctively and clearly see the links between your anythings and your everything, you’re playing life on ‘unnecessarily hard’ mode.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#how-does-money-fit-into-meditation):
> We rewire our brains by taking conscious control of the story we tell ourselves and the world about who we are, by shaping our centre of narrative gravity with our thoughtful virtues, rather than letting it be an unthinking slave to other’s vices. We take this conscious control by paying attention in the right way to the right things, by being aware of the building blocks of our stories – our internal and external language – by knowing ourselves, and our environments and the ongoing means by which they interact and influence each other.
Living mindfully – and using your relationship with money as a brilliant means of remembering to do so – is a practice of doing what neuroscience tells us we can, and want to do.
Of internalising the difference between events and their interpretations until it’s instinctive, and instructive.
Of knowing the right thing to do without needing to ‘know’.
Of not reading Socrates, say, but of [thinking more Socratically](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage).
Of not examining your life, but of living an examined life.
**Living meditatively is a way of remembering the implications of being human in a world set-up to encourage you to believe that where money is involved, you become a robot**.
It’s a way of remembering the [being (or becoming) mode](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode).
> Our relationship with money is shaped with our purchases, our words and our thoughts. There is no standing still. No chance to wait and deal with it when we’re more ready. Our brain doesn’t stop sucking in inputs from the world, and spinning them into a protective, predictive web of stories to conjure a ‘self’, to determine its place in the world, and how to navigate its way around. Amid this incessant dance between environment and response, we can choose to ascend towards real-life monetary enlightenment, or down into a cave of complexity and shadowy illusions.
### Meditation is a symbol
What the expletive does this have to do with meditation, you may ask?
Aside from the attention-scaling training we noted [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is), recall from the footnotes to [Idiot Money #25](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons#money-maxim-of-the-week) how meditation, if it’s to be practically useful, needs to be seen a symbol.
Money should be a *symbol* to help us *find* meaning, but we turn it into a *sign* of meaning *itself*, and everything turns to shit.
Money makes claims to fundamental ‘truths’ or ‘answers’ when really it’s always contingent on the circumstances of the life – and indeed, the system of interconnected and interdependent lives – of which it is a part.
In meditation, the breath is a participatory symbol of the impermanence and interconnectedness of things that helps us understand how ‘I’ am impermanent and interconnected. You don’t own pain, for instance, so much as participate in ‘paining’.
Symbols help us temporarily inhabit expanded versions of ourselves, by offering us a hint of what the world could look and feel like if we possessed skills which we don’t yet possess, but which, *partly because we don’t possess them*, we may well not be able to see we even want.
By *consciously* looking *at* our relationship with money, [*rather than blindly looking through it*](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is), we can get a better glimpse of what our worlds are like, and more importantly could be like if we lived them in a more examined them.
### Improving your life story is a meditative process
As per the message of [Idiot Money #44](https://news.moneyblind.net/44-a-story-of-lions-and-loss), **personal finance isn’t about making the most money. It’s about making the most out of your money**.
Tell people this, however, and chances are they’ll reply with something about how they have to make it first, and how pretty much any sacrifice, be it time, energy, relationships, or morals, is justified because of how incredibly awesome ‘the future’ will be once the money has been made.
(Before they go back to spending the money *now*, in a way that both [‘justifies’ those sacrifices](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#instincts-often-lead-our-wallets-hopelessly-astray) and pushes ‘the future’ further into fantasy land.)
**Such silly slowly suicidal sacrificial living is a result, not of the unfairness of existence, but because of the unhelpful stories we tell ourselves about existence**.
Living more mindfully is a process of [editing these stories](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4). Get this right, and your relationship with money – and consequently your ability to use it more wisely (i.e. in a way that more reliably makes your life better) – improves as a happy side effect.
> This is a meditative process. A process of deconstructing unhelpful narrative experiences into sensory ones and subjective views into objective ones, before building back up a more conscious and enlightened whole. As the meditator translates their river of thoughts into the coming and going of bodily sensations, so must we see the stories that subconsciously determine who we are as mere transitory drafts, ready for refinement. You inescapably are a narrative; you can consciously choose to be its author.
**We fail to** [really know](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2) **money beyond its features and function and into its fittedness with our worlds and end up wasting god knows what because of this**.
### Seeing more clearly
Living mindfully, or living philosophically (or whatever label you prefer) is to live in a way dedicated to seeing reality more clearly, on the understanding that we live better when we align more closely with reality than deceptive, delusional, takes on it.
Those that have made a stack of cash often end up wondering why it didn’t leave them feeling like they were dancing on a rainbow.
Because despite all the hints along the way, making the stack is often the only way it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that the numbers-based belief system that had been guiding their life choices was false.
**If there’s one thing I would love to magically extract from the heads of millionaires and share with the world, it’s probably this**.
**It’s so sad that it often takes making millions for people to stop and really think about what they’re making it for (and most don’t stop even then)**.
As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in *The Art of Living*:
> Sitting in stillness like this allows us to see things as they truly are. When the body is relaxed and the mind comes to rest, we can see clearly. \[…] As long as we’re restless and the mind is unsettled, we won’t be able to see reality clearly. We’ll be like the lake on a windy day, its surface troubled, reflecting a distorted view of the sky. But as soon as we restore our stillness, we can look deeply and begin to see the truth.
As we saw way back when [we started with the four noble truths](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview), seeing more clearly is about dissolving our self-deceptions, for it is these that are our ‘suffering’, (almost) regardless of our circumstances.
As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche wrote in *Joyful Wisdom*:
> To meditate is to look deeply and see the things that others cannot see, including the wrong views that lie at the base of our suffering. When we can break free from these wrong views, we can master the art of living happily in peace and freedom.
### Breaking old frames to build better ones
Seeing more clearly involves breaking old frames and building back better ones.
This is why, behind the many layers of bullshit that usually accompany such statements, going to India (say) to ‘find oneself’ actually sort of works. Or at least has a chance of working.
To the extent it does work, it’s because you break the link between your circumstances and your predictions of what contributes to the quality of your life. When you take yourself out of that old story, you allow a better story to come through.
**Living mindfully is a constant challenging of these stories – the ones that survive are better for it, and the ones that don’t are better for being discarded**.
But constant challenge of the role of incidental circumstances in the formation of the integral parts of your identity [isn’t everybody’s idea of a fun way to spend a weekend](https://news.moneyblind.net/47-idiot-profiles-lord-and-lady-jewellery-addiction-teenage-ozymandias-and-me#1-lord-and-lady-jewellery-addiction), so it often gets more comfortably rolled up into a ‘retreat’.
**There’s a special kind of awareness that happens (perhaps only) when you sit in what’s probably thought of as ‘formal’ meditation, but it’s not necessary for the bulk of the benefits**.
As the cognitive science demonstrates, paying attention to how you pay attention is the key.
As Matthieu Ricard wrote in *Happiness*:
> Rather than distinguishing between emotions and thoughts, Buddhism is more concerned with understanding which types of mental activity are conducive to one’s own and others’ well-being, and which are harmful, especially in the long run. This is actually quite consistent with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and emotion. Every region in the brain that has been identified with some aspect of emotion has also been identified with aspects of cognition.
Mental activity and money are inescapably intertwined. It makes no sense to pretend otherwise.
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[#54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment](/54-the-abc-of-money-part-13-financial-enlightenment)
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# #49: Give, give, give, me more, more, more
23rd August, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that pretends it has friends.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that the game you choose to play is more important than how you play it.
*This week, a guest post. Jack, your temporary author, writes: ‘Paul’s been a friend of mine since school, but he lives in a fantasy world. Banging on about how great it’d be if we constructed a new world with our conscious choices overlooks that despite many having dreamed of doing such a thing, as far as I – and I suspect you – can tell, no bugger’s actually done so. Dreaming doesn’t pay the rent. Paul’s writing an entire book about seeing reality more clearly, while bafflingly talking of a worldview that matches the reality of precisely zero people’s practical, lived existence. So I offered to treat you to a dose of something far more sensible.’*
**In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man may be king, but he’s also a pariah. It’s wiser to belong to popular idiocy than to live in line with unpopular wisdom.**
### The benefits of blindness
Let’s start with the title of [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/). Money Blind.
Think being blinded by money, and blind to how it greases our grooves is a bad thing? Nonsense. It’s humanity’s greatest achievement.
The story of human history isn’t some few noble souls keeping alive a ‘wisdom tradition’ in the face of the mindlessness of the mob. It’s the mob’s mindless – and natural – recognition that all the wisdom stuff is bunkum.
We are all ‘wasting’ our lives. The wisest reaction to that isn’t to pretend you can do something about it if only you could see the patterns of waste more clearly. It’s to shut your damn eyes. If all is a waste, nothing is wasted.
**The single best thing about money is that it allows us to remain constantly blind**. The idea that money contributes to a lack of meaning is bullshit. Money is synthetised meaning… a neat blue pill of purpose. It’s imperfect, sure, but what isn’t? Know how many people actually have a perfect purpose? Ever tried getting out of bed in the morning without a purpose? We’re not toga-wearing aristocrats with nothing to do but philosophise our way through the day.
You could quote any psychoanalyst you like to point out that the blindness is a feature, not a bug. Humans can't cope with their "true" nature, whatever that is, so we make shit up to run away from it. Money makes making shit up easier.
**Money makes the world go around**. ‘Money makes the world go around’ is usually heard in the context of its function as a facilitator of trade: money moves goods. But there’s a more important interpretation: money moves humans.
Money is both a universal medium of exchange, and, like God used to be, a universal motivator of human actions. And, like Nietzsche’s warning about God, if you remove the motivation too recklessly, you risk a nuclear explosion of nihilism.
Kill God in a God-worshipping culture, and you kill many people’s reason for doing, and ability to derive meaning from, *anything*. Kill the deification of ‘having loadsa money’ in a money-worshipping culture, and much the same would happen. There’s no point freeing yourself from the shackles of Mammonism if the first thing you do with your freedom is lurch into the nearest abyss.
If you remove the motivating destination, however much life it may be wasting, you may remove the motivation to move at all, and with it all the *life* it was imperfectly creating.
The motivation to ‘arrive’ at ‘having loadsa money’ (or one of its myriad manifestations) may be flawed, but it has some handy side-effects.
Not only do buildings get built and products get produced, but even if you’re into a ‘more real’ exploration of reality, I doubt there’s a more effective means of persuading somebody to actually start examining the meaningfulness of their lives than making a ton of money and realising it was a better distraction than a reward.
**There’s a reason Kipling’s poem is called ‘If–’ not ‘When’**. It would be wonderful if global society’s incentive structure prioritised the sort of virtuous stuff you’d hope outranked your CV when people talked about you behind your back or at your funeral, but thinking doesn’t get much more wishful than that.
Wishing your life away is *even more wasteful* than spending it doing something you don’t like to try impress people you don’t care about.
### The future is now
**All of life is distraction**. Life, for everyone, all the time, is a process of inventing ever new and exciting ways to distract us from the fact it will end. Everything is inherently pointless when you think about it. It’s all well and good to talk about acknowledging that, to listen to your soul or whatever, but then what? Folk have been doing that for millennia, and they’ve left rather more evidence of envy than enlightenment.
It’s theoretically possible that the happiest people are the ones that aren’t making headlines with their hustle or their hedonism, and who aren’t spewing their every pithy thought into the Twittosphere, but is that a gamble you want to take?
**Being motivated by money makes everything so much easier**. And what is the tale of human existence if not a striving to make everything easier? What is more human than ‘[confusing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2)’ access to comfort with standard of living? Everybody *may* feel better about life when they’re self-propelled, but give a human a motorised scooter or a sedan chair and what do you think they’re gonna do?
**Very little of the philosophical stuff is incompatible with choosing to make money your God**. Care for what you care about is a fine message. Given that what you care about is a choice (because everything is) it must be most sensible to choose to care about money, because then what you care for is automatically aligned with what you care about. Who has a why can endure any how. Make money the why.
**Denialism tells its own story**. Humanity has spent countless centuries worshipping some deity or other. Why not switch our unthinking allegiance to money? Worship of money has a bad rep only because the masses are projecting their jealousy. If money weren’t so worthy of worship, people wouldn’t decry and denounce those who worshipped it the most; they’d just ignore them like any other crackpot. In a world without any means of measuring objective Good, democracy has to win. And democracy says [read Dan Brown](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-dangers-of-simplicity). Or better yet, watch cat videos.
**Money = options. In a world where no one knows what they want, options = good**. No one knows what they want, and what we want changes over time. That must mean exploring options is good. Some will say that after a period of exploration, some ‘exploitation’ is the way to live. But is it? Those that witter on about life being the journey not the destination mistake the subtle truth behind the ‘[arrival fallacy](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#23-when-x-is-sorted-then-i-will-be-able-to-do-y-and-feel-z)’ mode of existence. Chasing a destination, be it a mansion or simply more money, isn’t about arriving. It’s about dreaming.
Most importantly, it’s about participating in the same shared dream as everybody else.
Living in the future doesn’t create disappointment, it avoids it by being, quite literally, ‘living the dream’. Living in a dreamworld is the apotheosis of how to live in a fundamentally meaningless world wired for waste and distraction.
Some could counter that constant exploration works better when you explore the cheapest-but-not-so-cheap-it’s-actually-bad options, because that allows you to explore even more. This is naïve. The point is to explore expensive things *because they are expensive*.
The best way to keep the popular game going is for everyone to keep pushing its boundaries. Your screen flashes up ‘Game over’ either when you die or when you win. Either way, it’s not something you want to do.
**More expensive isn’t a perfect proxy for better, but it’s still the best we’ve got**. I’ve flown first class, had a meal in Mayfair, and a drink in Dubai. I know the relationship between more expensive and better is often not only not perfect, but completely crackers. But overall it is at least vaguely positive, and saves a shitload of research and thinking energy, which very probably means it’s still worth it in absolute terms.
Besides, how do you know you’ve properly explored something unless you’ve tried the best version of it?
**The fact that life is uncertain isn’t an argument for becoming adaptable (whatever that means), it's an argument to build the biggest damn safety net you can**. To point out that millionaires are often as miserable as everybody else above the poverty line is to focus on the wrong thing. Being loaded isn’t about unlocking some secret level of happiness. Only the truly stupid still believe in that myth. It’s about avoiding the very real misery of having nothing. It's far easier to fall into the gutter from the pavement than the penthouse.
**Reducing risk without reducing expected return is the holy grail of investing, and of life; a blind belief in money as a measure of worth is the only way to do this**. Smart people think in probabilities. We all face a million risks every day, from crossing the road to popping pills. We happily ignore these risks not because they're not real, but because their probabilities are tiny.
Chasing more money is a means of reducing the probabilities related to financial risks to a level you can forget about them. At some point, of course, those financial risks all become vanishingly small, but given perceived risks always outweigh real ones by many orders of magnitude, everyone’s got a fair amount of runway left here.
### Chasing rainbows
**If you can pretend to be happy, you’re not really miserable**. I read somewhere \[[here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1#the-link-between-being-rich-and-living-well) – Ed] a Bertrand Russell quote along the lines of ‘what’s the point in making everybody rich, if the rich are miserable?’ If there’s one thing you can guarantee about someone who’s insecure enough to preach about how damn happy or blessed they are, it’s that they’re at best bipolar. People who preach about being happy are just people too stupid to send the same message on the sly, say by living in a mansion, or driving a car that cost enough to lift a small village out of poverty.
**Blind ambition is better than short-sighted settling**. Were the antidote to blindly chasing ‘more’ an enlightened examination of enough, you could make a better argument against the typical hustler’s tunnel vision. But it’s not. No one lives in that world. Nobody’s on the road to enlightenment, because everybody’s stuck faffing about watching the shadow-puppet theatre in [Plato’s cave](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage).
In this blind world, everybody’s game is dumb, but the game of settling is dumber than the one of ambition, no matter how cleverly the settlers defensively explain why where they happened to settle was perfect.
**Humans want to grow. Money may be an imperfect measure of growth, but it’s a damn sight harder to hide behind than all that hippie crap**. A focus on money as the ultimate measure of worth may flirt a little too hard with living in the future rather than the present, but is that so bad? Isn’t it a sign of ambition to grow? Aren't humans supposed to want to grow?
Who said chasing more had to be about the destination? Can’t it be about the journey, but a more exciting, high-powered, effective one? You can criticise the [model of straight-line success](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-flawed-model-of-straight-line-success) all you like, but when it’s the model everyone is voting for, democracy rules, and to denounce it doesn’t sound revolutionary, it sounds bitter.
**Humans want to make order out of chaos.** What gets measured gets managed. Money gives us a measure for life, and therefore a way of managing the infinitely discomforting angst of being finite beings in an infinite world.
**More than they want to grow, or make order, humans want to *****fit in***. It’s better to be wrong with others than right alone.
**Mimetic desire isn’t a bad thing**. For eons, man has sought belonging. Money translates belonging into something even bankers can understand. Does it really matter that it’s a bit inefficient? What isn’t? Thanks to its universality, worship of money is the great unifying force. It’s the ultimate form of belonging.
**Balance is a myth**. Being really good at something makes people happy. To be really good at anything requires an obsession of sorts. Balance is a myth. Something's got to give. You can't be great at your job and your health and your relationships, etc. And if you think you’re being clever by saying ‘you can be really good at balance’, you’re not.
### Money = meaning
To sum up:
**The history of human life is a history of trying to deal with being meaning-seeking beings in an inherently meaningless world**. This, of course, is why Nietzsche warned us of the dire consequences of killing God... because for millennia religion gave most people unchallenged meaning. But bugger me! what happens when you take that away?
Enter money.
**Money doesn't really provide meaning, but then neither does anything else**. The great thing about money being everywhere and always being able to chase more of it, is that it's the best possible source of distraction from existential crises. We’ve spent so long fixated on ways of fleeing from these fears. Finally, we’ve landed on a damn good one.
It’s all very well pointing to [Socrates and his ‘examined life’](https://news.moneyblind.net/1-the-correlation-between-having-money-managing-it-well-and-living-a-good-life) and saying something terribly worthy sounding about how it’s better to die wisely than to exist blindly, but that overlooks the fact that he did, in fact, die. And he died because he didn’t belong. He was murdered as a defensive reaction to his appearing to be so damn happy to play a different game, to live in a different world.
When people would rather become murderers than play a different game, inviting them to play – however much better that alternative game may be – can hardly be called wise.
### It’s a mad, mad, world
As I said, I went to school with Paul.
I remember one maths lesson where the teacher asked everybody what the answer to some problem was.
The most popular kid in class – and no mean mathematician, as far as these things go when you can still count your age on your fingers – promptly stuck his hand up and said a number.
I forget what it was. Let’s call it 20.
Cue numerous nods and ‘yeahs’ and whatever the seven-year-old equivalent of ‘hear, hear’ is.
The teacher asked if anybody had an alternative.
Some clown yelled out ‘305’ or something else obviously wrong. He got his laugh, and we moved on.
Then Paul piped up.
He explained how he thought 20 had been arrived at, via a tempting-but-incorrect method, and the actual answer was 19 (or whatever).
The teacher asked for a vote. Was it 20, or 19? Despite young Paul’s explanation, every hand bar his went for 20.
The dumbest thing was, he thought the teacher confirming it was 19 meant he was *right*.
# #50: Our most costly money problems are the ones we don't see
30th August, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that isn’t above doing a clip show.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that spaced repetition isn’t only for learning languages.
*Because spaced repetition is cool (and because apparently I'm not above doing a clip show) for this, the 50th edition of Idiot Money, a recap of some stuff from the early days.*
### 1. We’re blind to the real role of money in living well
\[from [Idiot Money #1](https://news.moneyblind.net/1-the-correlation-between-having-money-managing-it-well-and-living-a-good-life)]
* We fail to see the disconnect between knowing we want growth, not stagnation, and our actions being guided by a self-deceptive belief that money’s role is about access to comfort.
* There is no correlation between having money and living well. However, when it comes not to what people *have*, but how they *are* with what they have, there sure as shit is.
* Aligning what we do with what we (deep down, undistracted and undeceived) care about, rather than with what unreal deceptive influences tell us to care about, is what joins up having resources with living a good life.
* The slow suicide we don’t see – that hides in the unexamined, unchallenged, wiring of our minds – is far more dangerous than the big money mistakes we do.
### 2. We’re blind to the primary importance of money mindset over money maths
\[From [Idiot Money #2](https://news.moneyblind.net/2-dont-know-where-to-begin-sorting-out-your-finances-its-not-where-you-think-it-is)]
* Everyone acts as if managing their money begins with knowing which investment to hold in which account, and worrying about mindset changes later. This is why everyone fails to make the most of the money in their life.
* It's possible to have perfectly organised finances and live a shitty life. The opposite isn't true. Sort your relationship with money – wire your brain so it's not baffled or scared – and you'll organise stuff as a side-effect.
* You got stuck, or into a half-arsed – or even totally shitty – mess with money because of your mindset. Paying someone to set a few things up for you doesn’t change this mindset. It enables it.
* It wasn't a lack of financial knowledge that meant your financial life was subpar. And it won't be more knowledge that saves it.
### 3. Paying for complexity is stupid, but blindly paying for simplicity is too
\[From [Idiot Money #3](https://news.moneyblind.net/3-your-relationship-with-money-is-complex.-but-it-neednt-be-complicated.)]
* Whenever you hear someone praised for being ‘good at explaining complex ideas in simple terms’ what you are hearing is a piece of crap. Grasping why is fundamental to financial advice.
* People seek financial advice because they think – or rather believe – that finance is complex, that the complexity is numbers-based, and that therefore it’s worth paying someone who understands the numbers to make the complexity go away. This is thrice-flawed.
* What you do with money is irrelevant unless it’s making your life better. You can get rich and stay deceived, and those riches won’t mean shit. Think about money more clearly, and not only will you use money more meaningfully, but you’ll get richer as a side-effect.
* Believing simplicity automatically equals sophisticated is dangerous. It deceives us into perceiving profundity when presented with triviality, and teaches people to [’optimise for solving easy problems in ways that make it harder for them to think about the hard ones’](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchallenged/).
### 4. We’re blind to how to buy happiness
\[From [Idiot Money #5](https://news.moneyblind.net/5-idiot-profile-private-jet-guy)]
* Money can buy happiness, so having more of one should lead to more of the other, but we’re wired for waste, not wisdom.
* We say money can’t buy happiness as an excuse to shirk the responsibility of having it, before trying our little hearts out to buy it anyway, blind to the reasons it didn’t work last time being the same reasons behind what we’ll try next time.
* Retail therapy is a short-term shelter from psychological storms, but it doesn’t eradicate problems, it incubates them. We level-up the cost of our lives without levelling up the quality, and we bolster the very blindness that got us into trouble in the first place.
* Bad news is better in batches, but good stuff should be drip-fed. It’s not the jets, but the little stuff, that shapes us. We act as if we’re capable of feeling a million times better when something costs a million times more. We’re not.
### 5. We’re blind to how we construct the stories of ourselves and our relationships with money
\[From [Idiot Money #6](https://news.moneyblind.net/6-what-the-bloody-hell-is-a-relationship-with-money-anyway)]
* The growth in the use of ‘relationship with money’ is not matched by an understanding of what it is, and the importance of its implications. It is not a nice-to-have woo-woo supplement to more quantifiable concerns, but the practical hardcore root that determines if you’ll use the money in your life for good, ill, or churning in mediocrity.
* Telling someone to improve their relationship with money by cultivating an ‘abundance mindset’ is cute, but when our problems are ones of self-deception, comforting labels are more likely to enable unhelpful behaviours than change them.
* Mindset flaws are harder to correct than technical ones. From tribal politics to sports performance to investing, deeply engrained mental patterns aren’t rewired by reading a punchy op-ed.
* Rewiring requires work, but because the changes happen slowly and unconsciously, we don’t do it, and because we believe changing our minds is as simple for us as it is impossible for everyone else, we don’t believe we need to. We remain blind to how our money worldviews are passively absorbed rather than actively acquired, and end up with a poor relationship with money as a result.
* Our relationship with money is a means of matching the story we tell the world about who we are with the one we tell ourselves. You do not improve this by thinking you can avoid it, either by delegating the decisions that shape it to someone (or something) else, or by denouncing money as evil or irrelevant. You improve it by editing it.
### 6. We’re blinded by shitty substitutes, especially when they have big price tags
\[From [Idiot Money #7](https://news.moneyblind.net/7-what-fund-managers-can-teach-us-about-what-really-matters)]
* Things that cost a lot are crappy substitutes for things that mean a lot. But as long as we see external prices more clearly than internal benefits, the con will continue to consume resources for no reward.
* Nothing you consume is a substitute for anything you connect with. Where the human connection you are ultimately seeking exists, costly consumables are irrelevant to your enjoyment of an experience.
* There are people who spend fortunes every year on eating out, without it adding anything to their quality of life. We know this just as we know polo isn’t ‘better’ than pool – and yet most of us forget it the second someone dangles a ‘free’ £100-a-head meal in front of our maladjusted maws.
* We blindly rush to meet needs with stuff we’re promised will work, but never does… but because we’re deceiving ourselves, we fail to connect our blindness to our failure to find fulfilment, and so don’t do the work required to bugger it up a bit less next time.
### 7. If you want money to not have to think about money – if you actively pursue blindness in your financial decisions – you’ll probably use it terribly
\[From [Idiot Money #8](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money) and [#9](https://news.moneyblind.net/9-idiot-profile-an-oligarch-with-a-gun)]
* One of the main motivations for making a ton of money is to not have to think about money. This is moronic. Because failing to think about money is a guaranteed way to waste it. To pursue money so you don’t have to think about it is to believe that being able to spend blindly without going broke is a better aim than using your money to improve your life.
* To hear ‘because I can afford it’ is to hear somebody choose becoming dumber over becoming wiser. The ability to afford something is not a valid input into a decision-making process. ‘Because I can’t afford it’ *can* be a valid input. You can consciously conclude that something would add value to your life, but if it put a greater source of value in jeopardy, it’d still be dumb. But simply being able to buy something does not a wise decision make.
* Having cash to cover a cost shuts down our decision-making machinery. Lack of thought leads not to transforming our resources into a Good Life, but into wasting them on white sofas and publicising our insecurities.
* Going into ‘fuck-it’ mode and buying something because you can is simpler than contemplating the money, time, and energy spent, and the foregone everything else you could’ve spent it on, but ‘fuck-it’ mode is fucking stupid. Because it forgets the only thing that’s important: whether something will add to your life, rather than detract (or distract) from it.
* The trouble with being able to do anything is that you’re highly likely to do everything terribly.
# #51: Align what you care for with what you care about
6th September, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that cares about your caring.
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that avoiding the siren call of accumulation-at-all-costs is all in the preparation and why, despite feeling like it's awfully important and clever to do so, making plans, talking about needs v wants, and even aligning your use of capital with your values are all a bit bullshit.
**Good financial planning focuses on alignment rather than accumulation. Yet so strongly and so subtly do we want to believe that it’s the hoarding that leads to happiness that we passively parrot the idea more than we actively live its truth.**
Most decisions we make don’t feel like decisions.
Most money decisions we make don’t feel like they have much to do with money.
When we do the rare work of reflecting on our decisions – financial or otherwise – most of the time we’re wasting our time, and likely making future decisions worse, not better.
### The problem with plans
Picture the last time you were in an especially reflective mood. Perhaps you were conjuring up a cunning plan for a work project, or an exercise routine, or world domination.
I’m guessing your picture is a shining example of cool-headed clarity. Everything so obvious, so simple. Of course you’ll do more meditating and moving, and less eating of crap. And of course you’re never drinking ever again. For realsies this time.
In these more thoughtful times, we kid ourselves that it is we that’s changed, rather than our mood.
**We’re all wiser in our plan-making moments, though not wise enough to remember that the person for whom we’re making a plan is an idiot**. That’s why they need a plan.
The you that wakes up full of energy doesn’t need help. And the you that wakes up with a head full of fog needs more help than last night’s determined dreaming has ever provided. Cool-headed plans melt in the hotter heads they were allegedly designed for.
We don’t stick to our plans for the same reason we struggle to make more of our money. We just don’t feel like it. We don’t *care*.
We may remember an intention, but we don’t remember – or rather relive – the energy to act on it.
In the moments that matter, intentions without energy lead nowhere, save maybe to guilt.
There’s a reason we say we are ‘moved’ by what we care about.
**Your body is moved by what moves your mind**. The trouble comes when you’re set up to remember where you want to go, but not to remember what moves you… so you get blown around by any old bullshit instead.
This is, in short, why [living an examined life](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#an-unexamined-life-is-an-unfulfilled-life), remembering [the becoming mode](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode), and refreshing your intention on the [story of your self](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self) are the necessary starting point of living better with money.
### Easier said than done
Living an examined life is a tricky topic to write about. Because there is no perfect phrase, no motivational meme, that can work some psychedelic-esque magic on your brain, untangling your wiring so the way you see the world is instantly cleaner, clearer, and more under your control.
It’s something we want to think about *constantly*. It’s an entirely different way of seeing the world.
But to *think* constantly isn’t the same as to *calculate* constantly. This isn’t about performing lifetime cost-benefit calculations of every purchase. It’s about cultivating the sort of wiser wiring that means you don’t have to.
This is living life on easy mode – weighing up if a choice (and its consequences for our character) is helpful or unhelpful so rapidly that it’s basically automatic; and never even (con)fusing meanings and events, so we don’t need to bother with the hard work of defusing them.
When the patterns we want to challenge are so well embedded, and do well reinforced by external influences, getting going – remembering to respond to cues with polite challenge, not blind obedience – is hard. But it quickly gets easier.
### Lexical magic
**When it comes to in-the-moment remembering, subtly of language is so important, because it is through our language that we understand, create, and change and our worlds**.
Sometimes this could be simply using a different word to evoke a slightly different response. Consider how you’d answer: a) ‘What’s important to you?’ and b) ‘What matters to you?’ Or think about the classic therapist trick of turning ‘Why’ questions into ‘What’ questions (follow the link for a ton of reasons why ‘ [“why” is a surprisingly ineffective self-awareness question.](https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it)’)
Sometimes it could be rewriting what certain words mean to you. The most important example for making better financial decisions is doing something about the [dogshit differentiation we tend to apply to ‘needs’ and ‘wants’](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#4-needs-wants-addictions).
Our senses are alerted and our attention is captured by certain words and phrases more than others. Like hearing your name across a crowded room. Or the name of your personal political enemy number one. Or ‘tequila’.
These super-salient hooks are disproportionately important when it comes to shaping our worldviews, and by extension, the quality of our lives.
> [We know](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.1) that ‘developing greater control over your attention is perhaps the single most powerful way to reshape your brain and thus your mind’. We also know that ‘you pay attention by optimising some other process’. The process we need to optimise is that of the lexicographical inner-circle that already has the greatest control of your attention-grabbing machinery. We need to add to the ranks of words that make you stop in your tracks those that can most effectively enlighten your money mindset, so they can punctuate the flow of unthinking with moments of active, structured, purposeful, thought. This is how we get unstuck and break free of the circular troughs of self-deception.
**Hard-wired habits begin as fragile intentional attractors of attention**. With a bit of work we can add to the special inner circle of our lexicon – train ourselves to use other words and phrases as triggers that make us stop and think at the exact moments we’re most in danger from not doing so.
But what should we use as a trigger? What do we want to be reminded of?
**Asking yourself ‘Do I “need” this, or do I just “want” this?’ when on the brink of a potentially idiotic spending decision isn’t helpful**. Not only is the distinction dogshit, but we know [diets based on denial don’t work](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same): we don’t want to temporarily spend less by *fighting* defaults, we want to dance along with better defaults.
So what about a reminder to focus on alignment rather than accumulation?
### Alignment > accumulation
**If there’s one thing that broadly differentiates good financial planning from its infamously salesy, exploitative, commission-cowboy evil twin, it’s that good financial planning prioritises alignment over accumulation**.
But focusing on alignment is a bit trickier.
An accumulation focus not only doesn’t require conscious thought, it actively discourages it. An alignment focus not only relies on such conscious thought existing, but also requires the interest in it and intention to remember it being continually refreshed.
Alignment is also harder to measure than accumulation. Especially when the things you want to align – the Goodness of your life, and the overall application of your money, time, and energy – are basically immeasurable.
An accumulation focus on the other hand offers a comforting objective reality. There’s an objectively best investment, and the game is to try to find it. Raw numbers are the only things that matter, which is wonderful news, for KPIs don’t really work otherwise, and there’s no such thing as a key performance if you can’t indicate it exists.
Yet you may also have noticed that there are plenty of miserable accumulators, which at least calls into question the wisdom of dedicating one’s life to having what they have (and being obstinately blind to the risk of becoming what they have become).
Those that choose instead to recruit their resources towards becoming who they deep down, with undistorted and undeceived vision, want to become, don’t tend to be so dissatisfied with their lots.
However, sticking ‘alignment not accumulation’ on a wristband is likely to work little better than telling yourself you don’t need something shiny when you’re in magpie mode.
We need something a little more specific.
### What you care for and about is a better focus than your values
One common option is to talk about ‘aligning your use of capital with your values’.
However, an aim to ‘align your use of capital with your values’ is a bit like one to ‘align your eating and drinking choices with your health goals’. It is absolutely what you should do, but saying you’ll do it does not get it done, and may even work against it.
‘Align your use of capital with your values’ is the language of the planner. The you with a cool head. As above, cool heads rarely need plans. Hotter heads do, but they need ones made to withstand the heat. Plans centred not on reasons, but on reminders, restrictions, and emotional resonance.
‘Your use of capital’, and even ‘your values’ are not emotionally resonant. And here’s the most important point: ***there aren’t words alone that are***.
**This is why it’s so important to treat the resource-allocation problem of your life as a way of life, and not a way of allocating resources – i.e. focus on the philosophy, not the plan, or even the planning**.
With this understood, there is a better rallying cry for your remembering self: align what you care *for* with what you care *about*.
It is by no means a perfect solution. But it’s a small step in the right direction, because it’s a step closer to talking in language your hot-headed self understands.
### Care for what you care about
Consider caring *for* an ill friend. What emotions and actions arise?
Consider caring *about* an ill friend. What emotions and actions arise now?
When we ask ourselves what we *care* about, we tend to inspire a subtly but significantly different set of responses than when we consider what we want, or what’s important, or what matters to us.
It’s easier to find a bullshit justification for ‘wanting’ a thing, or a thing being ‘important’ to us, when that thing, when fully thought through, is unlikely to make a sustainable difference to our lives.
**The lens of caring isn’t vehemently anti-materialistic. It’s rather to recognise, to remember, that deep down, we simply aren’t very materialistic beings. It’s putting material desires in their place – as servants of a Good Life, not the definition of it**.
Like anything we could do with remembering when we’re least likely to remember, this change is difficult to make directly. Recall the shortcomings of [the spotlight metaphor](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#how-does-money-fit-into-meditation): the Good Life emerges as a result of paying attention to the right things, yet this happens not by ‘willing’ attention, but as a side-effect of mindfully engaging in other activities.
When we focus on cultivating the conditions that afford meaning-making, we align what we care for with what we care about as a side-effect.
The traditional tactics-based approaches – step-by-step guides to greater saving, and less insane spending and investing habits – are great, but we want to go from blind to not only seeing, but insight.
That’s an entirely different thing.
And **because our problematic actions have deep problematic roots, often the very tactics we use to stamp down the most obvious weeds of our unhelpful wiring can make it harder to tackle the underlying anxiety whence they spring… and whence they will spring again**.
Nothing inspires blind ignorance like money. Given its fundamental role in living well, this is a catastrophe.
Blind accumulation is what Sartre and his moody band of existentialists were on about when they talked living with ‘bad faith’ being how to live badly. It’s bad faith to say you care about something but then not care for it. This is what eats you up from the inside.
### Intent on intentional interest
If we remember to reflect only when we’re sat on a cushion or staring at a credit-card statement and promising we’ll do better next month (forgetting that next-month us is a hot-headed idiot) then we’ll get sucked into a cycle of recklessness and remorse.
Financial reflection isn’t an act, it’s a way of seeing. Which is why living in a more consciously constructed world is so important.
It’s not a task to be ticked off. It’s something we need to feel. To care about. To remember. To live.
As we saw when discussing effective meditation in [Idiot Money #46](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is):
> **If you want to make better decisions by default, the answer isn’t to pay greater attention to every decision. It’s not even to make your decision-making better, e.g. by carrying around a checklist that you crack out on special decision-making occasions. It’s to make your decision-making *****machinery***** better. To develop flexibility of attentional scaling, to zoom in and zoom out at the same time, to enable you to better remember what you actually care about and continually refresh your attention on it, and your intention to align your resources with it.**
# #52: Do what only you can do
13th September, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. The newsletter that’s one year old!
**This week**: becoming wiser with money by understanding that financial frustrations are universal, so it’s better to face them than flee from them.
*Dear readers: happy anniversary to us! A big thank you to both all those that have been here from the start, and that have joined along the way. Especially those that have told me it’s made them feel like less of an idiot with money, for without you this newsletter would have something of an existential crisis on its hands.*
*Because I have those sort of friends, plenty have asked me along the way what I’ve learnt from writing this. However, focusing on personal lessons doesn’t feel especially helpful.*
*So instead, herewith some lessons from a decade of face-to-face financial planning: stuff I’d dearly love everyone to somehow internalise before ending up with ‘everything they ever dreamed of’ doing a dodgy impression of anything they ever actually wanted.*
**Beneath the surface-level stuff like ‘wanting to sort out the finances’, or ‘because it’s what other people like me seem to be doing’, there are two almost universal reasons people come to a financial planner, and they’re both bullshit**.
They’re also lessons I’ve been reminded of in the year of writing this newsletter.
**1. People – rich or not – want to believe being rich makes things different**. Promising ‘secrets’ improves sign-ups but worsens souls. All clients are a little disappointed when they discover that there are no ‘secret’ *superior* investments that they get special access to, like buying your way into an exclusive club. We forget that ‘exclusivity’ isn’t about standing out, it’s about fitting in – playing the same game, desiring the same stuff as everybody else. We may openly brag about how ‘[well](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#17-x-has-done-well-for-themselves)’ we’re doing, or envy those doing ‘[better](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4#1-better)’ but it’s the unspoken way *all* our life choices feel justified by others that matters so much more.
**2. People are much happier to pay for technical investment advice than to be challenged on what those investments are *****for***. For some, there’s a certain pride in not knowing about tax technicalities, or even having made suboptimal investment choices. But dare to suggest that someone may have, on occasion, made poor earning or spending choices – even if they’ve still got *decades* in which to make better ones – and you’ll make an instant enemy. Challenges that leave you either more confident in your existing good life choices or to scrapping your poor ones should be met with delight, not defensiveness. If only.
The clients that get the most out of financial planning are the ones that get over these mistakes.
### Clients who get the most value from financial planning always look really pissed off at some point
**These mistakes are rooted in a belief that it’s external circumstances that determine the quality of a life, rather than how well one is set up to dance with those circumstances**. This belief leads people to dedicate their resources to changing the quality of their lives by changing their worlds, rather than their worldviews.
This never works, but because no one understands *why* it doesn’t work, we all keep trying the same damn-fool things over and over again. We’re all [stuck in the Somme](https://youtu.be/rblfKREj50o), vision so distorted by mud and the [ghosts](http://invalid//) of our poor, psychologically screwed-up ancestors, that, hyped up by hubris and hope we keep hurtling blindly over the top, mutilating our potential rather than making anything meaningful out of it.
Bugger.
Doing something about this is far from easy.
In both giving financial advice and writing about it, there’s an inverse relationship between what’s actually important and what most people crave consuming.
Tell someone that the only ‘secret’ the rich are hiding is their regrets, and they’ll slump off to someone who promises them otherwise.
Tell someone that you’re less impressed, in the role of their *financial* adviser no less, by the financial ‘success’ they’re bragging about, and more concerned that maybe it wasn’t worth the sacrifices that have left them with a life that’s both crammed full of everything, and yet completely empty, and they’re more likely to hit you than hug you.
The best clients, however, always – after a few weeks, months, or maybe years – have a revelatory moment.
The penny drops.
‘Oh! It was *never* about the money!’
Not only ‘not about the money now we’ve got X million’, but – assuming they were never actually impoverished – *never* about the money.
‘Not being about the money’ isn’t about having ‘f-you’ money, of course. That’s literally still all about the money. Being driven by denunciation is also the opposite of living well.
The size of the potential rewards is irrelevant. You can bribe people to do anything except live in a world where bribes don’t work.
Those that have the most financial resources do have more opportunity to flourish, but also more opportunity to waste. Because we can only ever do so much, and because diminishing returns on empowering what we can do kick in pretty quickly, this is a hugely asymmetrical equation. The focus therefore has to be [not on the making, but the making the most of](https://news.moneyblind.net/44-a-story-of-lions-and-loss).
### Living a flourishing, flowing life comes from doing what only you can do
Just as there’s an inverse relationship between what’s actually important and what most people crave consuming, a year of this newsletter has made it clear that there’s a negative correlation between how important I think a post is and how popular it is.
And the further I drift from spelling out a point – for example highlighting some silly thing a rich person once did and leaving the reader to see the mirror – the more it gets missed. Mirage trumps mirror every time.
This newsletter is not optimised for clicks. If it were, half the time I’d probably say the exact opposite of what I want to say. I wouldn’t [take the piss](https://news.moneyblind.net/#five-silly-stories) out of the peddlers of fortune-cookie crap, I’d join them. I would click-bait the titles, and listicle the content. I would, in short, bombard you with tactics for playing the same silly game, only better.
* ‘Five things financial professionals won’t tell you!’
* ‘How to halve your expenditure AND live a more luxurious life in the process!’
* ‘The surprisingly simple maths behind retiring in your 30s!’
At some point, of course, however important a message is, if it reaches no one, it’s no good. But silence is better than the unintended consequences of commercially conscious compromise.
Financial advisers would do better to shut the hell up than pretend that clever-sounding market commentary was anything other than a disingenuous veil concealing the lack of value of an inordinately expensive service.
**The greatest value of a financial planner is that they’ve got access to the hidden parts of the heads of the people that are ‘winning’ the silly game, and can report its silliness back to everyone else**. They see what works and what doesn’t, across a wide range of people with the resources to try just about anything.
Importantly, they can see (assuming their own vision isn’t also distorted, which, alas, for reasons we’ll explore another day, it almost inevitably is) that what *doesn’t* work is pretty much the exact same stuff that everyone who aspires to have what the planner’s clients have dedicates their lives to obtaining.
Financial planners are best-placed to help their clients question what game they’re playing. And in one important respect, being rich enough to be one of these clients does make you different. **Because** [**ability = responsibility**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent#the-only-thing-we-dont-want-to-own-is-the-only-thing-we-should)**. Freedom *****to***** do anything is one thing. Freedom *****from***** feeling the need to is another. But freedom *****for***** is the one that counts, even if it’s the freedom we flee from**.
Planners are best placed to hammer home the message that everything you do is all that you are, so it’s a life-or-death decision to take the time to choose your game wisely, and that if you sacrifice your soul to participate, you’ll never win a thing, no matter how well you play. Because they’ve seen the alternative play out hundreds of times, and it all counts for shit.
This can be hard to accept.
But hard to accept doesn’t mean hard to do.
**Those that spend hours a day moving, meditating, and contemplating will tell you that it doesn’t *****take***** time, it *****creates***** it**, because they’re now able to easily and happily ignore all the distracting, de-energising crap that blinds other people into believing they don’t have time for anything else.
Playing the right game for you is playing life on easy mode. What’s hard is going through the motions for 30 years in a job you do only to earn money to fund a lifestyle full of stuff you don’t really care about.
This isn’t about ‘tempting people in with what they want, and then giving them what they need on the sly’. The distinction between needs and wants is bullshit; the distinction that matters is between what we need/want and what [all the crap we self-deceptively believe we want](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5#the-compulsion-con), but is actually not making our lives any better.
To proclaim that no one cares about your solutions, they care about their problems is true, but limited. A crack addict only cares about crack. Do you ‘solve’ that by giving them more? By letting them be because ‘that’s just the way they are’? What do you do when the problems that have hijacked someone’s attention are pretend ones, and the more fundamental problem is one of self-deception… and therefore by definition invisible?
### Feedback is crucial, but it’s irrelevant if you’re not clear what you want to achieve
My book [rests on the assumption](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.4) that everyone, in their own way, wants to live well, and that therefore the task of a life is to take our resources – our money, time, and energy (with money being the easiest to measure and manage) – and use them for stuff that makes life better, and not for stuff that makes life worse.
With life choices being made all the time, you’d think we’d be better at this than we are. All that feedback!
Of course, as wise types from both West and East have been pointing out for a couple of thousand years, feedback is only helpful if you pay attention to it – [live an examined life](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#an-unexamined-life-is-an-unfulfilled-life) – and if you pay attention to how you pay attention – if you’re [seeing clearly](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons) both the world and the means by which you are looking at it, and interpreting it.
Unfortunately, all that pointing out hasn’t led to much [tuning in](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt#meditation-isnt-turning-off-its-tuning-in). We remain [more idiotic child than wise sage](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage).
And while money should be the best bridge over this abyss of idiocy, it’s far more likely to further muddy our vision and supercharge our self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour.
**If you’re not clear on what game you’re playing, the feedback you will get on your performance is pointless**.
Paying someone to make it more comfortable to continue playing a game you don’t want to play, let alone ‘win’ is as pointless as a like, a share, or a comment on a post you’ve missed the point of.
The best feedback I’ve received for both in-person advice and in-Internet ramblings is the same.
* ‘I’ve never thought about money like that before.’
* ‘Every page slapped me in the face.’
* ‘I thought I was pretty aware of the role money played in my life. So much for that.’
* ‘Since you’ve pointed out X, I now see it *everywhere*.’
* ‘You bastard. I feel personally called-out.’
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2):
> If you know what a thing is, how it works, how it sits in context, and how it works with who you are, there’s no excuses for not using it well. This book is about cultivating a philosophically grounded conviction within you, rather than the old-school sales model of trying to persuade you of something for long enough to guide an action or two until **a more persuasive idea comes along.**
**The best planners do this**. They help people know money not only as a sign of membership of some bullshit club, but as a symbol that shows how someone is living and how they can live better. This newsletter tries to do the same.
As Jung wrote: ‘The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is called for to give us the certainty and clarity we need.’
The world of investing has been optimised for artful denial of problems, not for solving them.
It’s a large part of why those that have ‘won’ the game that everybody believes they want to be playing don’t feel all that wonderful for the ‘winning’ and why – when devoid of challenge for decades – the citadel of their life choices crumbles under the slightest interrogatory siege.
If this newsletter helps someone avoid sleepwalking into the same frustrating fate, it’ll have done its job.
# #53: Money for many means happily ever after… but after what?
20th September, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that waiting isn’t living, including:
* being on high alert for anything of the form ‘when X is sorted, then I will be able to do Y and feel Z’;
* how you may be exceptional, but you’re probably not the exception; and
* the dangers of letting Disney’s dreamworlds dictate your decisions.
**As with all such simple solutions that poke at pernicious perennial problems, there is a dark side to the mantra that ‘life is a journey, not a destination’.**
Just last week I was talking with a smart, switched-on girl, a trainee psychotherapist, no less. Let’s call her Anna.
Anna is easily in the top few percent when it comes to examining her life (albeit she, like all of us, has work to do turning the difficult, reflective periods of *life-examining* into the easy-mode *living an examined life* by default).
Anna was describing the personal journey that had led to her coming career change, and how it was something of a prerequisite for helping others in turn. All hearty, healthy, life-affirming stuff.
Until…
‘I still have a lot of personal work to go, of course,’ Anna said.
‘To go?’
‘Until I’m ready.’
And just like that the focus flipped, without fanfare, from the in-the-moment journey to the destination to be arrived at: the secure foundation from which *then*, ‘the Good Life’, [whatever that meant](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.4), could come to the fore and flourish forever more, happily ever after.
Box ticked, life simplified, one less thing to worry about.
In narrow contexts, such as being legally allowed to practice psychotherapy, or losing weight, say, quantification and qualifications are tremendously helpful.
However, as has been remarked a few times in this newsletter, by all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.
**All too easily the way we look at specific goals seeps into shaping the way we look at living. *****Especially***** when it comes to money**.
The language we choose to use and the meanings we (and our wider societies) choose to attach to it [construct the worlds in which we live](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.3-there-is-always-an-underlying-emotional-reward#beyond-objective-and-subjective-introducing-transjectivity).
Part of the reason the book is called ‘Money Blind’ is because most of this construction, while it is in our control, is out of our consciousness. When it comes to how we choose to live with money – how we choose to make it and use it – this blindness, [assuming the overriding goal is to live well, rather than live expensively](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.2#2-there-is-only-one-goal), can be extremely costly.
It is arguably costliest just when we think we’ve got it nailed. When we *talk* of journeys, blind to the fact we’re *acting* on arriving.
\*
**The ‘Arrival Fallacy’ is my name for the idea that the Good Life is something we arrive at. It has many different expressions, all of the structure: ‘when X is sorted, then I will be able to do Y and feel Z’**.
It’s a belief that underpins so many of our idiotic financial decisions, such as believing there’s a ‘number’ 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.
**If you find yourself thinking this, then stop**.
You’re wrong.
Be it a bigger house, a job title, a family situation, or even an investment reaching or returning to an arbitrary value, in every instance other than ‘when I’ve escaped the prison of being so poor all my decisions are necessarily about money’ such beliefs, however intensely felt, and however well reinforced they are by both your ancestors’ demons and current society, are irrelevant to the Goodness of your life.
**All journeys start with objectives or ‘goals’, but too often the way we think about and plan our lives around these goals leads us somewhere other than where we want to go**. The Arrival Fallacy tricks us into treating a human journey like a robotic production line. It’s oh-so-tempting, but oh-so-futile.
‘Arriving’ can often make life easier. But this is to mistake standard of living with access to comfort. Engaging in challenging-but-not-impossible activities is the hallmark of ‘flow’. Things are rarely impossible without the fancy exercise equipment or the few extra dollars (or the [drugged-up deer](https://news.moneyblind.net/9-idiot-profile-an-oligarch-with-a-gun)). Miss the challenge, and you miss the point.
### We say the Good Life isn’t a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but live as if it is
To understand the Arrival Fallacy, let us take a trip to Agrabah. A street urchin named Aladdin is talking to Abu, a monkey.
‘Some day, Abu,’ says Aladdin, ‘things are going to change. We’ll be rich, live in a palace and never have any problems at all.’
It’s the fairy tale ending that drives as near as makes no difference *everybody*’s life choices.
Sometimes it’s riches – when I have this much money, then…
Sometimes it’s palaces – when I live in this postcode, or have this many bedrooms, or space to myself, then…
Sometimes it’s having no problems – when I’ve dealt with this work thing, or that family thing, or that other illness, then…
And sometimes it’s something subtler. When I’ve got this piece of exercise equipment… Starting Monday…
When Google announced an imminent clever-sounding improvement to the way its ‘tasks’ app integrated with its calendar, I remember seeing a message from someone who could not have been more sure that this was what they needed to finally fulfil their potential. The missing piece of the puzzle. They could not have sounded more passionate about this belief if they’d lost all their limbs and their senses and some hot-shot medical company had announced a means of growing them back.
I think it’s fair to assume that his frustrations remain. And also that he believes it’s Google’s fault, not his.
Part of the reason we root for Aladdin is because he doesn’t spend his time bemoaning his lot. And he’s not only in it for the money. He really does love the princess. They could be happy together outside of the palace.
But of course they are happ*ier* in it. Certain levels of happy living are open only to those with sufficient square footage. And servants.
We don’t begrudge Aladdin like we do the evil Vizier Jafar. Aladdin has ‘earned’ his reward by the personal growth he displays when his acquisitive dreams are ultimately overridden by true love, and when he unselfishly frees the genie.
We forgive Aladdin his thieving on account of the injustice of the world. And because he not only steals to stave off starvation, but does so as part of a jolly song-and-dance routine. And because he is a hero, and unrelatably flawless heroes are an oxymoron. If we didn’t on some level want to *be* Aladdin, we wouldn’t care about him, or for him.
His story also helps the blind, dehumanising, eyes we turn to street urchins sit more comfortably in our sockets. Here is ‘proof’ that karmic justice will find its way to fundamentally good people in unfortunate situations, so we need not worry too much about helping redistribute the fortune ourselves.
**More tellingly for our purposes, Aladdin’s dreams of riches are justified by Jafar**. Jafar’s already got money, high office, and sodding *magic*. His craving for wealth and power is insatiable. He’s not righting wrongs; he’s exploiting the shit out of them from an already unfair position. He’s not a lovably roguish street rat regrettably taking what he needs to survive; he’s a total bastard. Aladdin wants only to be rich enough to not have problems. Jafar wants to rule the whole damn world.
Jafar is the comforting strawman version of the Arrival Fallacy. The one we can all point to and say ‘well obviously I’m not so obsessed with craving wealth and power that I’d still crave it if it meant being an evil tosser. I don’t want to *rule the world*; I just want to *never have any problems at all*. Therefore *my* cravings are perfectly fine. A sign of healthy ambition, even.’ (See [this bit](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1#the-1-is-surprisingly-subjective) of the book on how everybody’s ‘threshold for “rich” is reliably about 20% or so higher than one’s current position.’)
### Everybody’s fault but mine
**The oddest thing about the Arrival Fallacy is that we all know it’s nonsense… in *****others***. Yet we also all believe we’re the exception. Sure, a big house, a few million, and a hotel suite with its own postcode wouldn’t make anyone *else* happy, but we’d spend it all so much more wisely… if only we had the chance to prove it.
**Money wouldn’t change *****me*****, we each tell ourselves, because *****I’m***** obviously basically perfect** (though naturally too modest to admit it; and where others’ imperfections are irritating flaws, *my* imperfections are further evidence of the humanity of my perfection). It’d change *something*, of course, because otherwise I wouldn’t want it. But it wouldn’t change *me*. Except for how it’d change my wanting. I wouldn’t want it if I had it.
This train of thought relies on ‘wanting’ being a function not of one’s mind, but of one’s circumstances. Perfect circumstances = nothing left to want. If this were true, there would be no warnings to sound about the consequences of letting cravings for changes in circumstances dictate one’s life choices, I would’ve had no reason to write this book, and The Buddha would be *so* embarrassed.
**For a decade, my job was to be inside the heads of those that by any objective measure had arrived where everyone else wants to get to. It turns out, however, that objective measures do not make for subjective reality**.
The no-more-problems-happy-ever-after world is a myth. It’s not even a helpful myth, where the journey to get there and the friends we made along the way were the real prize. Because **the major lesson anyone who ‘gets there’ learns (if indeed they ever do) was that a fixation on the certainty of the destination was a damn-fool thing to dedicate one’s life to**.
The easy response to this is to say something like ‘it’s okay, I’ve defined what “enough” looks like’.
Believing the Arrival Fallacy is only a problem if you go too far is a foolish, dangerous, mistake. It’s characterised by Nassim Taleb when he writes: ‘Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.’
As if it’s good to crave stuff for a bit, as long as you know when to stop.
**Yet you’ll never see when to stop if you don’t see that the thing that got you started was never the stuff, but your self-deceptive patterns of thinking**.
Taleb should learn from Genghis Khan: ‘It will be easy to forget your vision and purpose once you have fine clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women… \[in that case] you will be no better than a slave, and you will lose everything.’
The key insight of [Buddhism’s Second Noble Truth](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2) is that ‘suffering’ (by which is meant our self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour) can be understood – and that it is caused not by ‘having attachments’ but by the *way in which you become attached*.
The difference is crucial.
The point is not to know what your ‘number’ is, but to forget about the ‘number’ entirely, and cultivate the conditions that provoke you to remember what you care about.
**Becoming wiser – less blind – with money isn’t about spotting some strawman surface-level silliness as a means of justifying continuing to play the same silly game, but about seeing the silliness of the game itself**.
Despite their Disney denominated differences, Aladdin and Jafar are playing the same game. It would’ve been culturally unacceptable for the audience to see Aladdin, having concluded that he didn’t need the riches and the title and the palace after all to actually *give them up*. It’s one thing to admit that they’re not everything, it’s quite another to admit that they’re irrelevant.
# #54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment
27th September, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that financial enlightenment isn’t about getting better at seeing in the dark, it’s about bothering to look for the light switch, including:
* why financial enlightenment trumps financial freedom;
* why we remain unenlightened… why we do stuff to make and spend money that drags us down at the expense of more energising endeavours, with no evidence of learning from our mistakes; and
* what financial enlightenment looks like to your brain… and therefore how to work towards it.
*This is part 13 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**For such a common dream, the reality of financial freedom is poorly understood. Thinking instead of financial enlightenment can help correct this error.**
However often you reiterate that you’re not running a monk-recruitment school but borrowing its deception-defeating, decision-making framework (and however well it’s almost spookily supported by the brain science) there is resistance to learning lessons from Buddhist philosophy.
Part of this resistance, I think, comes from the fact that we’re not sure where it all leads: what the bollocks is ‘enlightenment’ anyway?
Even when we get that ‘enlightenment’ is something about waking up to a clearer vision of reality, and (sort of) *thinking* our way to a better life, this is deeply unpopular.
No one wants to be told they’re sleepwalking through life, and that waking up is something they’re in control of. We much prefer the idea of a heavenly *after*-life.
**And while you’re perfectly welcome to suggest to someone there’s a better way of *****investing***** money, don’t you dare suggest there’s a better way of *****spending***** it**.
There’s a weird kind of comfort in believing that, even if you feel you’re the victim of a gross cosmic injustice, at least there’s no other game in town. It’s why we love a scapegoat, [attach faces to our fears](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear), and buy snake-oil from [unscrupulous salesmen](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money).
It’s also key to understanding why every day we do stuff to make and spend money that drags us down at the expense of more energising endeavours… why, in Buddhist-philosophy speak, [we are constantly prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviours](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1).
It’s because so many of those behaviours are driven by and enabled by money that cultivating a better relationship with money – becoming more financially enlightened – is so damn important.
Enlightenment isn’t about eradicating the dark forces that keep us from our potential. Not even the Buddha did that, as Thich Nhat Hanh notes:
> Even after his enlightenment, the Buddha experienced suffering. From his teachings and stories about his life, we know that he suffered. But the key point is that he knew how to suffer. His awakening came from suffering: he knew how to make good use of his afflictions in order to experience awakening. And because of this, he suffered much less than most of us.
To believe otherwise is to live in the same world that believes quality of living is about arriving at a number in your bank account.
**You don’t need to *****eradicate***** ‘suffering’ if every time it creeps up you recognise it and use it as a stepping stone, rather than an obstacle**.
**Enlightenment isn’t a state; it’s a process**. This is bad news for those betting their lives on the bingo-board collection of mansion, job title, and private jet, but it’s good news for the less short-sighted among us, that want to build better brains, not bigger houses.
The brain is a prediction machine, and when it comes to predicting how to live with money, the machine is malfunctioning.
### Brain power-up
In *Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment*, David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo explain that:
> In the language of neuroscience, enlightenment is the condition of optimal mitochondrial and brain functioning that allows us to experience both wellbeing and inner peace *and* the urge to create and innovate.
Which sounds an awful lot like most people’s aims for ‘financial freedom’. Free from worry, and with time to write the memoirs.
We’ll return to the dumbassery of the traditional model of financial freedom next time. For now, we need only to acknowledge that **we’re too busy worrying about fake financial freedom to work towards the enlightening kind**.
> Regardless of the possible number of computations our brain is capable of, the truth of the matter is that **most people use most of their computational ability to dwell on everyday problems**. This waste of a good brain leaves hardly any computational power for innovation, creative problem solving, and enlightenment.
For ‘waste of a good brain’, see also ‘waste of precious resources’.
It’s not that we’re incapable of being creative and enlightened. We’ve just got no space to flourish when we’re faffing around dedicating our resources to self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviours and [failing to understand how to tackle them](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5).
‘Financial enlightenment’ is, in short, about becoming less of an idiot with money. It’s what \*this\* \[waves arms around the [newsletter archives](https://news.moneyblind.net/)] is all about (though calling this newsletter ‘financial enlightenment’ felt a bit too pompous, even for me).
**Enlightenment isn’t relief from pain. It’s freedom from being trapped by your own idiotic way of viewing the world**, a way that seeks to deal with internal pains by changing external circumstances, rather than the bonkers belief system that made those external circumstances the scapegoat in the first place.
‘**There is only one cause of unhappiness**,’ wrote Anthony de Mello,
> the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. Because of these false beliefs you see the world and yourself in a distorted way. Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way.
To free ourselves from this trap we need to [learn a new language](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.1#how-to-interfere-with-inherent-inferences). Luckily, this new language contains exactly the same words as the language we already use. All we need to do is see, think about, and use them differently. Slowly at first, but shortly with so much ease that we’ll wonder how we ever did it differently.
**Taking conscious control of your thoughts and your decisions around money isn’t any more impossible than learning a language is to the child living in that language**.
### Enlightenment and emotional maturity
Immanuel Kant defined Enlightenment as ‘the liberation of man from his self-imposed minority’, adding that this minority lies ‘not in lack of understanding, but in a lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another’.
To remain unenlightened about something is to remain, in an important psychological sense, [a child](https://news.moneyblind.net/22-the-psychoanalysis-of-money-or-how-to-screw-up-your-childrens-financial-worldview).
For Kant, the motto of the Enlightenment (i.e. the intellectual movement) was ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’.
Courage, as [this part](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear) of the book explains, is the antidote to anxiety. **The courage to challenge shitty self-deceptive beliefs is how we become comfortable with increasing levels of complexity – how we grow up**.
Nowhere is this more important for each of us than in how we think about money.
Because nowhere do we react to our anxieties in such an unhelpful way.
**Nothing so inspires us to grab for the simplistic ‘solution’ and so tricks us into failing to understand why those solutions never work, thereby tempting us to try them over and over again**… until you end up sitting in a financial-planning meeting as a middle-aged millionaire wondering why you’re not nearly so free of misery as you were so damn sure you would be.
**While we want to avoid complicating things, we don’t want to make everything simple. We want to make ourselves wiser, increasingly capable of mastering complex things**.
### Out of the darkness
‘Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the Buddha,’ wrote Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, ‘is his delivery of the message that we’ve become so used to walking in the dark that we’ve forgotten how to turn on the light.’
This isn’t an exclusively Eastern idea. It’s the same message of [Plato’s analogy of the cave](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage), and innumerable other myths of self-transcendence.
The basic concept is one of coming into greater contact with reality. We climb through a cycle of ascent – each enlightening step changes us, our comfort with the reality of the world, and the possibilities we can see in front of us… which enables us to take another step towards our potential, and so on.
We gradually become more ourselves as we become more at peace as we become more aware of the patterns of reality.
From [child to adult to sage](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#do-you-see-money-through-the-eyes-of-a-child-an-adult-or-a-sage). We become more human when let go of our grasping for simplicity and certainty in a complex, uncertain world. Like challenging ourselves each time we find ourselves believing that ‘more money’ is ‘the answer’ when we haven’t even tried to properly define the question.
{% content-ref url="/pages/X3xqJun2Nsv73ecQHl48" %}
[#58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom](/58-the-abc-of-money-part-14-the-secret-shackles-of-financial-freedom)
{% endcontent-ref %}
# #55: Identifying your hidden money addictions
4th October, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that your hidden addictions are leading your wallet astray, including:
* what’s wrong with the conclusions commonly jumped to from the ‘give drugs to rats’ experiment;
* the limitations of addiction ‘cures’; and
* how the problem of being a bit dumb with money isn’t about the world, or your nature, but how your decision-making machinery determines how you make the most of your wealth of opportunities.
*Friends, this one's important.*
**Society’s story of addiction is all wrong. Understanding how can help you treat your hidden money problems. Because your story of your addictions (or perceived lack of them) is likely all wrong too.**
You’ve probably heard about the ‘give rats drugs’ experiment. If not, it’s pretty simple.
You plop a rat in a cage with two water bottles, one of which is laced with heroin, or cocaine, or Fox News. Pretty quickly, the rat drinks itself to death from the drugged water.
Moral of the story: rats are weak and silly and drugs are bad and evil.
This experiment is responsible for a lot of how we think about how addiction works.
And this is a problem.
Because the conclusions we’ve drawn from it are spectacularly wrong.
Below, we’ll see how they’re wrong, how they apply to the more mundane but vastly more important ways we screw up with money, and what we – whatever our class of poison – should be doing instead.
When it comes to our financial decisions, we’re all living under a haze of addiction. The more you think this doesn’t apply to you, the more it probably does. **Not only are we far more afflicted by addictions than we believe, but we’re addicted to ignorance of our addictions, and therefore end up more likely to label them as ‘treats’ than to treat them**.
### Idiot addiction therapy: scorch the earth
In Idiot World, addiction is part of the all-consuming war between good and evil.
Addiction is about a chemical reaction between a compulsive desire and a person too morally weak to deal with it.
To treat the addiction, you must therefore lock the chemicals in a cupboard and the person in a prison.
### Clever addiction therapy: cure the addicts
In Clever World, you realise that, after a multi-decade, multi-country, experiment, the way of the warmongers hasn’t worked very well.
In Clever World, addiction is still a chemical reaction between a compulsive desire and a person too weak to deal with it, but the treatment plan is a bit more personable; running away from compulsive desires doesn’t work, so the answer must be to have a better compulsive desire to run towards.
Less war, more counselling.
Let’s return to our rat experiment.
The original experiment was rubbish. So a clever chap called Professor Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology in Vancouver, came along, made it better, and noticed something pretty cool, as Johann Hari explains in [this TED talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong/transcript?language=en):
> ‘Ah,’ \[said Professor Alexander] ‘we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different.’ So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called ‘Rat Park’, which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of coloured balls, they've got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex.
They’ve got the same two water bottles. You may be able to guess what happened next \[my emphasis].
> In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. **None of them ever use it compulsively**. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.
When you start a rat in the boring, isolated, drug-addict cage and move them to ‘Rat Park’, they even wean themselves off the chemically enhanced water.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do a similar experiment on humans? Perhaps put some people in an isolated environment with easy access to heroin, say, and then transport them to one with good-enough access to heroin, but with other stuff to do too?
Luckily (in a way), we have just such an experiment. It’s better known as the Vietnam War.
> In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends. It made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped.
Maybe, think the people in Clever World, the chemicals aren’t that objectively addictive after all. In which case, they conclude, the ‘problem’ must be the people.
Maybe, think some people in Clever World, we shouldn’t even talk about ‘addiction’, as [*this excerpt from a review of Addiction by Design*](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design), a book about gambling addicts, explains:
> Peter Cohen in the Netherlands said maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings.
This is a lovely thought – who wouldn’t support a ‘more hugs’ policy? – but it’s the sort of plan that’s going to be knocked out when the world punches it in the face the second it steps in the ring.
Maybe, just like moving to Rat Park, if you’ve got a clear-enough choice between stuff that makes your life better and stuff that makes your life worse, you’ll choose the Good stuff.
But we don’t live in Rat Park. Rat Park didn’t have billboards, or ‘influencer’ rats.
A ‘cure’ that ‘works’ in the lab but not the wild doesn’t work. **The ‘perfect’ plan you don’t stick to is worse than no plan at all**, because it sells you the illusion of progress, and entrenches your belief, when things don’t go according to plan, that it was you or the plan that was at fault, rather than how well the two dance together.
[Recall](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same) how **diets based on denial not only don’t work, but can’t work**, because they build on, rather than beat, the defective belief that all along you’re wired to actually want cake.
### All show is no flow
Outside of places like North Korea, we have better access to all the necessary elements of a Good Life than ever before, and our opportunities to bond with our soul’s matiest mates are as good as unlimited.
But what have we done with these opportunities? What sort of world have we collectively constructed and advertised as the ‘Good Life’?
Is it one built on playing with our ratty friends in the ball pit and hanging out in the complimentary cheese room?
No.
It’s a huge goddamn isolationist lair. Something fit less for Bonding and more for Blofelding.
In Hari’s talk, he related a study, which…
> …looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been.
The irony, of course, being that one of the main reasons people crave so much floorspace is to ‘host’ or show off to their friends, forgetting that we only ever show-off our insecurities, and therefore if you need to show off to someone, they’re probably not a friend in the traditional sense.
### The art of fighting without fighting
Clever World’s recognition that addictions are neither about especially compelling products is great.
But it still fails to see that it’s not about especially compulsive people either.
It’s about seeing the world through a narrow, distorted, self-deceptive, lens.
A lens that leads to a belief that there is no alternative.
**Easy access to unhealthy food isn’t a problem to a healthy body that clearly and instinctively ‘sees’ its likely reaction to consuming it**.
Work well enough on your vision, and your fighting skills become irrelevant.
As we saw in [Idiot Money #52](https://news.moneyblind.net/52-do-what-only-you-can-do):
> Those that spend hours a day moving, meditating, and contemplating will tell you that it doesn’t *take* time, it *creates* it, because they’re now able to easily and happily ignore all the distracting, de-energising crap that blinds other people into believing they don’t have time for anything else.
If you’re thinking this sounds a lot like the First Noble Truth, that ‘[all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)’, then you’re spot on!
And how do we treat this self-deceptive narrowing of vision?
It’s not with a series of isolated steps – tips, tricks, and hacks. It’s with a system. ‘[A web-like network, or an ecosystem that you cultivate in conjunction with changing circumstances.](https://news.moneyblind.net/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4)’
There’s no need to go to war with addiction, or advertising.
War says either you or your circumstances are flawed and you must fight against those flaws.
But you can’t win a battle that never ends.
We’re not short of chances to earn or spend money in ways that make life better.
We’re not short of superb bonding opportunities.
We just choose to use our resources elsewhere.
We choose poorly.
We need to improve not our circumstances, or our ‘selves’, but our choosing.
*We’ll look at Wiser World addiction therapy next week.*
# #56: Treating your hidden money addictions
11th October, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding the wiser way to treat your addictions (i.e. the ways you waste resources on stuff that doesn’t make your life better), including:
* improving your choosing abilities;
* breaking free of money-inspired tunnel vision; and
* choosing to construct a world that affords living on easy mode.
**Addiction – by which we mean a regular pattern of resource allocation that doesn’t make life better – afflicts us all. Typical attempts to tackle it are non-existent, or more likely to enable the behaviours they’re trying to stop. The wiser way – to improve the clarity of your vision rather than bemoan the compulsiveness of your desire – is less sexy, but more successful.**
[Last week](/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions), we looked at the flaws in the common view of (and consequently methods of treating) addiction – and what this means for all the stuff you do with and for money that don’t ultimately make your life any better.
In Idiot World, addiction is seen as a problem of objectively evil chemicals meeting morally weak minds, leading to a treatment plan based around bans and imprisonment.
In Clever World, it’s acknowledged that this approach hasn’t worked, but addiction is still seen as a problem of compulsive desire, rather than narrowing of vision, so Clever World’s treatment plans don’t work all that well either.
We concluded:
> We’re not short of chances to earn or spend money in ways that make life better.
> We’re not short of superb bonding opportunities.
> We just choose to use our resources elsewhere.
> We choose poorly.
> We need to improve not our circumstances, or our ‘selves’, but our choosing.
So what does a wiser way look like? **How do we improve our choosing in the face of the money-fuelled forces that make us so damn dumb?**
### Wiser addiction therapy: choose life
Wiser conclusions are never as catchy as idiotic, or even clever ones.
Preventative measures may sound wonderful to the cool-headed person we are when we’re making plans, but the hot-headed idiot that we become when it’s time to put them into practice is not such a fan. [‘Become wiser’ will never be as popular as variations on a theme of ‘always say yes (or no)!’](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money)
Firstly, unless death appears to be imminent, problems don’t appear nearly as pressing as they did during the planning stage. Despite anyone over the age of about 35 being able to confirm that the most common catastrophes are the ones that creep up while you’re busy pretending you’ll deal with them by radically changing who you are on Monday.
Secondly, we live in a world that – from brand-name paracetamol to fancy exercise equipment to cryotherapy chambers – believes that unless a solution is for sale (and the more expensive the better), it’s probably not that good anyway.
These hot-headed idiots we become don’t see that they not only live in, but *created* this world, and *continue to re-create it every day*, with just about every default decision that involves the opportunity to measure something with money… which of course is just about all of them.
**What we want is not to make a cognitively draining series of isolated smarter choices, but to choose life – to choose to live in a world where we more reliably choose to allocate our resources towards the stuff that we really want – the stuff that makes life better, whatever that may be**.
Above wanting to get richer, quicker, we want to be wiser.
As I wrote in the introduction to the book, when [comparing it to intelligence and rationality](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#intelligence-rationality-and-wisdom), wisdom…
> …is more a characteristic of a way of living than it is a definition of static state, choice, or even series of choices. It’s the cultivation of a dynamical system for countering the equally dynamical system of self-deception, and consequently for affording a flowing, flourishing, meaningful life.
> ‘Wisdom,’ wrote Socrates, ‘begins in wonder.’ The sort of wonder that opens you up to the possibility that aspects of your worldview, however well-engrained, and however well-enforced by internal and external guardians, could be bullshit. The sort of wonder that upon being open like this is motivated to challenge previously jumped-to conclusions, and, when they’re found wanting, to aspire to find a better way.
### Disrupt your default distractions
In Addiction by Design, Natasha Dow Schüll explains the actions of gambling addicts as ‘dark flow’ – the [downward spiral](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5#if-theres-a-spiral-down-there-must-be-a-spiral-up) that’s the opposite of the creative flow that characterises a flourishing life well lived. This is crucial to understanding a gambling addict (and therefore other subtler addictions).
Because **just as when you’re spiralling up, you don’t want to disrupt the flow, a gambler lost in a downward spiral doesn’t want to disrupt the flow either**. They’re gambling to escape. To escape living… to escape *everything*.
Disrupting the distraction means having to confront what living means. It’s scary, and not nearly as under their control as pulling the lever or rolling the dice one more time.
Even winning is a disruption. Because when you’ve kidded yourself you’re playing to win… and you win… then you’re more likely to question if you should keep playing… but of course you’re really playing to stay distracted… but admitting that is almost as painful as stopping.
This is also, incidentally, part of the reason why [retirement is such a shitty goal](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#retirement-is-a-terrible-goal) for so many people.
### Look at the language through which you see the world
Our brains spend their whole time trying to predict the best thing to do, based on their assessment of various inputs such as vision and emotions, and the past experiences that have created neuronal highways in our heads.
It’s a beautiful process. But, as we saw in [Idiot Money #32](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5), the very machinery that means we can operate at all also leads us astray.
Mostly by leading us to [shitty simplistic substitutes for irreducibly complex things](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-siren-call-of-simplicity-and-succumbing-to-substandard-substitutes).
Making predictions about what to do every freakin’ second is hard. The brain loves a shortcut. When constructing its model of the world, it pays to make as much of that world as possible predictable.
The more of the modelled world that’s controllable, the better.
As this [excellent review](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design) of Addiction by Design demonstrates:
> I used to think that gambling addicts ‘lost control’ when they gambled excessively. But the addicts in the book use machines as a way to gain control in their lives. In front of a machine, the world is simple: they place bets and lose a little bit of money on each turn. The gamblers are in control of this machine world. It is the world away from machines where the prospect of losing control in frightening ways looms. Away from the machines, life is long and full of terrors.
Something similar is at work when we use money to measure everything. Not too troublesome when comparing identical cups of coffee. Very troublesome just about everywhere else.
Tunnel vision makes life choices such as what you do to earn, and how you spend money simpler, but it doesn’t make them better.
The aim isn’t to have simplicity. That’s inhuman. It’s to become better at dealing with complexity. [To complexify is human](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money#to-complexify-is-human).
The aim isn’t to have a predictable world. It’s to become better at predicting.
As we’ve seen (especially in Idiot Money [#31](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2) and [#32](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)), **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 silly things**.
> The most common misreading of ‘attachment’ is to believe it’s about compulsive desires. It’s not. It’s about a narrowing of your vision.
The implication of this understanding goes way beyond giving up smoking, say. It’s too damn easy and too damn idiotic to read the word ‘addiction’ and decide that because you’re not shooting heroin into your eyeballs, it isn’t relevant.
> If you misunderstand the problem, your solution is bound to fail, and you won’t know why. So you’ll keep trying the same dumb thing over and over again, wasting your money, your time, your energy, and therefore your life, in the process… none the wiser why you never became what you could have become.
Which explains why, despite a consumption-based solution to an existential unease never having worked before, people will keep on trying it again, and again, and again…
A wiser treatment plan, therefore, isn’t two weeks in the Priory. This can help to hit the reset button of course. But if it doesn’t alter the narrowness of the addict’s worldview wiring, how do you think they’re going to operate in the world when they’re back in it?
The key to a preventative approach is based not on playing addiction whack-a-mole, but on a way of living that starts with more conscious use of the language we use around money.
When you pay attention, you’ll probably start to see a ton of places where you use the language of addiction to talk about things you could’ve sworn you weren’t addicted to.
* ‘Just one more’
* ‘I’m not perfect, but I’m not nearly as bad as proper addicts’
* ‘It brings me pleasure’
* ‘It’s a treat’
* ‘It’s the best (only) way I destress’
Every time you use the word ‘treat’ to describe something that lightens your wallet and poisons your insides, you’re working against living better. Every time you use the word ‘treat’ as a trigger to catch yourself, and quickly question your default decision-making, you’re doing the opposite – almost regardless of what you then actually do.
### From waste to wisdom
The premise of the book is to investigate why, when it comes to turning our resources into the Good Life, we don’t do it as well as we could. Why we systematically allocate resources to stuff that makes our life worse (what we’re addicted to) rather than stuff that makes it better (what we want, when we’re seeing clearly).
**Our problems are not ones of too few resources. They’re ones of too little wisdom in how we allocate them**.
We don’t ‘want’ stuff that makes our lives worse.
We want to make life better!
We want to live in a world where we automatically align our resources with what we want because we’re great at predicting what will work.
When we’re seeing clearly, we tend to do this. We see the shitty substitutes for the cons they are.
# #57: Idiot Money Maths #1: How much does it cost to keep you happy?
18th October, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding the actually important numbers in personal finance. Starting with how much it costs to keep you happy, including:
* how typical budgeting approaches are all backward;
* freeing yourself from a common freedom-hunting trap; and
* the change in my thinking that made going self-employed less scary.
*When it comes to using money in a meaningful way, the importance of the numbers, from using price tags as a measure of value, to fretting about growth forecasts, is grossly overblown.*
*We tend towards tunnel vision on the most misleading numbers (such as an investment-growth forecast, or a retirement ‘number’) while remaining ignorant of the insightful ones (such as the role of the unequivocal accounting record of our life choices in living an examined, wiser, life).*
*Some numbers, however, are actually helpful. This is the first in a new occasional series highlighting the most important numbers for you to know.*
**Knowing how much it costs to keep you flowing and flourishing – built up from an examination of what you care about, rather than blindly implied by your existing expenditure – is the starting point of real financial freedom and wiser, higher-conscious living.**
Financial freedom starts with knowing the approximate minimum cost of what it takes to make your life Good.
This isn’t the minimum cost to survive on nothing but rice and hope in a squalid shoebox shared with sixty stinking squatters. Life without hobbies and friends and helping others and learning and growing and reflective space and the occasional haircut may be existence, but it isn’t life.
This is the cost of living up to the point of obviously diminishing marginal returns on each extra sliver of spending. It therefore doesn’t include any of the crap that doesn’t really add much, if anything, to your ability to live well.
This is entirely subjective. Maybe for you life without a string of polo ponies or the hundredth handbag would be markedly worse. This would be unfortunate of course, but not insurmountably so, for example if you work for a hedge fund and are unburdened by ethical concerns. If that’s the case, add those ponies and purses to your list.
This has nothing to do with frugality and frivolity. As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-spend-it):
> **Frugality for the sake of it misses the point. While it may rid someone of the false belief that quality of life equals access to comfort, it is still defined by equating cost of living with standard of living. It just reverses it. It turns it into higher savings rate equals higher standard of living.** The chance of wasting money resources is diminished, but the chance of wasting time and energy resources isn’t. This is much safer than the extravagant alternative, but it’s still focused on a numbers scorecard, and is therefore still doomed to fail (in the sense of cultivating a Good Life). Dropping the attachment to the numbers scorecard opens us to the opportunity to use a more meaningful one. For example (to borrow from Bruce Lee) to ‘seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion’.
### Why is this important?
**1. Because** [most budgeting advice is bullshit](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#budgeting-is-bullshit)
Most budgeting calculators are good at counting, but crap at categorising.
And, more devilishly, typical budgeting approaches, while they may work at helping rein in the more reckless retail-therapy patients in the way a food diary curbs the worst epicurean excesses, they cast a veil of action over a void of actualisation: they con us into thinking we’ve dealt with a problem, when we’ve done nothing of the sort.
The counting is necessary, but insufficient. The ultimate point [isn’t to look at your numbers, but to see your narrative.](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path) How do your decisions express and shape who you are becoming?
**2. Because typical budgeting approaches have the whole thing backwards**
They analyse existing expenditure, and help us ‘optimise’ all the dumb shit we’re already doing, rather than building up from the bottom.
Budgeting should be the best tool we have to live more meaningfully, but blindly logging existing expenditure is the opposite of examining a life. It checks everything against a pointless ‘can I afford this?’ measure rather than asking: ‘what makes life cool?’ and then checking how much that costs.
It’s a common error in all expenditure; [we read the wine list the wrong way around](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#are-you-reading-the-wine-list-the-wrong-way-around): we start from what we can afford, and then see what we can buy for that amount, rather than starting from what we want, and then seeing if we can afford it.
Given how much of so many people’s expenditure is driven not by their wants, but by their immediate means, knowing how much it costs to live well is a vastly superior part of this calculation than simply knowing how much you tend to spend.
**3. Because getting it right really ramps up your financial freedom**
Firstly, you’ll probably be surprised at how little it costs to live well when you sidestep the pernicious belief that living well is [some strange exception to the rule that it’s smarter to get the same output for a smaller input](https://news.moneyblind.net/47-idiot-profiles-lord-and-lady-jewellery-addiction-teenage-ozymandias-and-me).
Secondly, knowing how much you *really* need to earn each year to live well frees you from the trap of believing that there’s an increasingly narrow list of options for what you can realistically do to earn that money in the first place, including how long you can comfortably take off from earning anything at all. Given how long we spend doing the earning, and how much it determines our mental and physical health outside of the hours sold to it, this is pretty damn important.
**4. Because it makes spending choices above the minimum more conscious, and therefore more likely to make your life better**
If your starting point for spending is ‘do I crave this, and [can I afford it](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)?’ rather than ‘do I want this – do I have good reason to expect this to make my life better, and will I remember to check that it has so I can refine the machinery for when it’s making similar decisions next time?’ then you’re leaving the quality of your life more up to luck than you probably want to.
If, however, you’ve taken the time to work out your baseline of effective expenditure then you’re likely to be automatically more conscious of everything you’re adding on top of that. Again, this isn’t about being so tight you open your wallet only with a crowbar: it’s simply caring enough about your life to try to make it better by seeing more clearly what’s likely to do so.
### Can you give me an example?
**I first worked this out for myself when I was thinking of going self-employed**.
I’d tracked my expenditure in some form ever since I moved out. First, this was driven by necessity – I needed to ensure I wasn’t spending more than I was earning, and as barely more than an intern in a think-tank, what I was earning didn’t stretch terribly far.
Because it was so helpful, the tracking stuck around, continuing to evolve to meet both changing financial circumstances, and me getting smarter at managing them (through both clearer thinking and madder Excel skillz).
More by luck than judgment – and after editing out of my life the unhelpful (and rather wanky) story of ‘[expensive tastes](https://news.moneyblind.net/47-idiot-profiles-lord-and-lady-jewellery-addiction-teenage-ozymandias-and-me#3-me)’ – it transpired that the habits and hobbies that most reliably triggered a transcendent sense of flow didn’t cost a fortune.
The better I got at finding efficient, effective, means of managing the inputs in my resources-to-Good-Life equation, the more options for good living presented themselves. Eventually, this provided enough freedom to overcome the terror of giving up the monthly paycheque; I came to see that in a pinch it wouldn’t really matter what I did during the middle part of the day to fund the big bookends of fun that I planned to put in place around it – **something that would’ve still looked impossible had I stayed trapped in calculating the cost of Good living the old-fashioned way**.
By the time I gave up the regular salary, I was already either saving or donating 50-60% of it, so becoming a funemployed bum didn’t lead to too many changes in my spending, outside of things specifically related to having a proper job. But it changed the way I *related* to *all* my spending.
# #58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom
25th October, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that financial freedom is not what you think it is, including:
* the myth of financial freedom;
* misunderstanding financial worries; and
* an introduction to the two fundamental flaws in how we talk about ‘freedom’ in a financial sense.
*This is part 14 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**The most common financial goal is also the most commonly misunderstood.**
### Goals, freedom, retirement… they all suck ;)
When anyone talks about financial planning, talk of ‘goals’ isn’t far away. And when anyone talks of financial goals, talk of ‘financial freedom’ isn’t far behind that.
It’s everyone’s big goal. The goal whose achievement would make everything else possible. The goal that allows you to not have to worry too much about what that everything else is, because it’s so damn obvious what you *need* to be focusing on first.
It’s so unquestionably worthy of focus that countless millions of people will – happily, apparently – sell their best time and energy in service to it.
But what does financial freedom even mean?
Have you ever met a financially free person?
Maybe someone who’s retired?
Ignore, for now, that [retirement is famously a damn-fool idea](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#retirement-is-a-terrible-goal), which makes it a damn-silly goal.
(Ignore, too, the fact that ‘retirement’ in any form is such a new idea that it was only an average lifetime ago that the average lifetime didn’t give the average person any time to retire. You can think about the implications of that on your own time.)
I’ve met plenty of retired folk that are still trapped by money somehow. The awareness that you’re not going to earn anything more (because despite it being worse in every single way, the world still sees retirement as a one-time, irreversible, decision) can be awfully uncomfortable… especially since we scrapped the ‘traditional’ promise-of-an-income pension without replacing it with any remotely universal understanding of basic stuff like how inflation, compounding, and time work.
**Retirement for a lot of people means having no idea what to do, and no long-term idea how to fund doing it**.
But maybe retirement isn’t the point anyway. Maybe it’s being *capable* of retiring. There must be a reason every financial planner’s website advertises ‘making working optional’.
This sounds sane enough, though when you consider how both not-working and choices of current work to maybe one day not work screw most people up, **it’s got** **slightly unfortunate overtones of those paranoid preppers hiding out in the mountains with assault rifles and tins of Spam, seemingly praying for the apocalypse to come along and justify their life choices**.
(It also ignores the fact that for anyone with a chunk of savings in the UK or the US, say, working is already optional. If they were willing to live elsewhere. Which highlights again how ‘retirement’ isn’t a meaningful goal, because it distracts people from their only actual goal: looking at what ‘living well’ really means to them.)
Does time have to come into our thinking? Are we talking free right now? Until age 100? Until your children are 100? Indefinitely?
### Worry free?
Perhaps all that material stuff is irrelevant. Maybe we become free because we don’t *think* about money, or *worry* about money?
If you think financial worries are about money, you understand neither finances nor worry.
Besides, I’ve met travelling bums that are perfectly capable of neither thinking nor worrying about money.
‘But they’re blind fools!’ you cry. ‘You want to be free from worry, *and* have objective proof to justify that freedom! There’s a big difference between a supremely fit person not worrying about future health problems and a fatty in denial doing so. Real freedom requires awareness! They should cut their hair and become accountants!’
Okay. So what would objective proof look like?
There’s a quaint corner of the internet filled with intense graph-heavy debates on what constitutes a ‘safe withdrawal rate’ where people will argue over this question for days.
‘You’re free when your expenses are 4% of your investment pot!’
‘No! It’s 3.6%!’
‘No! That’s too simple! Here’s a clever formula to optimally flex your freedom (assuming you don’t change as a person except when the formula tells you to, of course).’
These debates are extremely important for that proportion of the population who have delegated not only the management of their lives but also the measurement of them to a spreadsheet.
For the rest, they’re a little…. lifeless.
(FWIW, a lot of the underlying principles of the [FIRE movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement) are really wonderful, and I’ll write in praise of them another day, but the safe withdrawal rate debates rest on assumptions that render them bonkers.)
As we saw in [Idiot Money #19](https://news.moneyblind.net/19-whats-your-number), if you think freedom is about a number, you’re an idiot (just as I was). We’ll revisit this again one day; the idiocy is too prevalent and too damaging not to.
### If a freedom falls in the woods but there’s nobody there to hear it, does it still make a noise?
Whatever criteria you choose, what if you’re financially free and don’t know it? Are you still free?
Maybe you need to feel free *and* have objective proof *and* be aware of it.
Let’s assume you are. You are ‘financially free’. You’re confident that your investments will fund your lifestyle for as long as you’ve got a life to style. What now?
I’ve known people declare their financial independence at any age you can think of. If you’ll allow parents to do it on behalf of their children, this includes newborns.
Recall from [Idiot Money #53](http://invalid//):
> For a decade, my job was to be inside the heads of those that by any objective measure had arrived where everyone else wants to get to. It turns out, however, that objective measures do not make for subjective reality. The no-more-problems-happy-ever-after world is a myth. It’s not even a helpful myth, where the journey to get there and the friends we made along the way were the real prize. Because the major lesson anyone who ‘gets there’ learns (if indeed they ever do) was that a fixation on the certainty of the destination was a damn-fool thing to dedicate one’s life to.
Whatever criteria that are commonly chucked about, I’ve met loads that meet them all. And they’re still in chains.
I’ve met others that meet none of these criteria but are unchained, whose ability to use money to make their life reliably better is brilliant. That feels like a far wiser thing to aim at than an investment pot that’s 27.7777777777 times bigger than your expenditure.
A life measured by a number gets lived in service of that number. Which is really stretching the definition of ‘lived’.
Working in financial planning highlights, in a fairly harrowing way, how many life years are sacrificed to chasing a fake freedom, and ending up in chains because of it.
I want to stop this happening so damn often.
This starts with dropping the fixation with financial ‘freedom’ in the first place.
### F\*\*k freedom
Never underestimate the importance of language in shaping our worlds.
The word ‘freedom’ suffers from two major problems in the context of a driving force for your life decisions.
Firstly, ‘freedom’ is too damn emotionally resonant. In some contexts this could be useful (how different would the Brexit vote have been if it had turned into a fight between ‘take back control’ and ‘defend your freedoms’?). But in the context of shaping your life, the traditional notion of financial freedom isn’t a focus, it’s a powerfully distracting lack of it.
Secondly, ‘freedom’ is unhelpfully ambiguous. We’ll look at the problems of this next week, in the context of the difference between ‘freedom to’, ‘freedom from’, and ‘freedom for’.
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# #59: The ABC of money, part 15: freedom to, freedom from, freedom for
1st November, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that freedom without purpose is pointless, including:
* ‘Freedom to’ – pointless, fake freedom; the freedom to blindly attempt to do everything, and therefore do nothing but trade the chance to live for craving a carnival of meaningless consumption.
* ‘Freedom from’ – empowering, internal freedom; the freedom from being bullied by external forces.
* ‘Freedom for’ – purposeful, human freedom; the antidote to living in a self-deceptive, self-destructive, and ultimately unfulfilling fantasy world.
*This is part 15 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**Freedom can be pointless, empowering, or purposeful. It pays to know which one you’re pursuing.**
We ended [last week](https://news.moneyblind.net/58-the-abc-of-money-part-14-the-secret-shackles-of-financial-freedom) saying that ‘freedom’ – despite it being personal finance’s favourite goal – is unhelpfully ambiguous.
This week we’ll look at the problems posed by the unexamined ambiguity and unchallenged authority of ‘financial freedom’, through looking at the differences between ‘freedom to’, ‘freedom from’, and ‘freedom for’.
### Freedom to
‘Freedom to’ is fake financial freedom.
You know the drill: freedom to succumb to every passing fancy, and to say ‘fuck you’ to bosses and responsibilities.
Yet, as I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#budgeting-is-bullshit):
> So called ‘F-you money’ believes it is saying that the consequences of decisions don’t matter. This is clearly nonsense. What it’s actually saying is that the consciousness of those decisions doesn’t matter. Yet to live unconsciously is hardly ‘to live’ in a meaningful way. All purchases are investments; it’s not wise to double down if you’re betting on bullshit.
The trouble with ‘freedom to’ (even ignoring the oddness of building your life around saying f-you to things) is that those that have such freedom don’t have a great track record of looking like they’re actually enjoying living.
My job for a decade was to get to know people with ‘freedom to’. **If I learnt anything from that time, it’s that ‘freedom to’ mostly means the freedom to waste it**.
It’s almost as if [deliberately accumulating money so you can put less effort into thinking about how you use it doesn’t lead to using it terribly well](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money).
(Though the response to the pandemic in certain places does suggest maybe I don’t fully appreciate the value to many of the freedom to be a fucking idiot.)
As those who’ve got that far in the book know, [we’re wired for waste](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#the-conspicuous-consumption-con), but blind to the truth of this, so we go on playing the wasting game… regardless of how much we’ve actually got to waste.
More ‘freedom’ in this sense confuses freedom with variety. **Often, all more variety does is give you more options to express the idiocy of your decision-making machinery**.
‘Freedom to’ looks outward because it believes quality of life is determined by external circumstances, and therefore keeps trying to live better by changing those external circumstances, even when it’s only ever the internal changes that actually make life better. As Stephen Batchelor explains:
> To subordinate what is human to that which is less than human – wealth, opportunity, knowledge – is thoroughly self-defeating; we end up destroying the very life we set out to save.
‘Aha!’ You cry. ‘I’m wiser than this.’
‘I don’t confuse freedom with variety. I know life is limited. I know about the paradox of choice. I know the fifth Ferrari isn’t a sign of success, but a monumental failure of both imagination and living.’
‘I’m not picking from a pre-set menu,’ you continue. ‘I’m consciously – and freely – choosing things… and then seeing if I can find them. What I want is not the insecurity-showcasing “freedom to”, but “freedom from”! I want internal freedom.’
Go you.
Though also slow down a sec.
### Freedom from
The patron saint of ‘freedom from’ is angel investor and Twitter royalty, Naval Ravikant:
> My old definition was freedom to, freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now I would say that the freedom that I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s freedom from.
And:
> So, the purpose of wealth is freedom. It’s nothing more than that. It’s not to buy fur coats, or drive Ferraris, or sail yachts, or jet around the world in your Gulfstream. That stuff gets really boring, and really stupid really fast. It’s really just so that you are your own sovereign individual. You’re not gonna get that unless you really want it. And the entire world wants it. And the entire world is working hard at it. And to some extent it is competitive. It’s a positive sum game, but there are competitive elements to it. Because there’s a finite amount of resources right now in society. And to get the resources to do what you want, you have to stand out.
‘Freedom from’ is nothing new of course. Think of the Buddhist attitude to attachments. Or the Greco-Roman ideals espoused by, for example, Epictetus:
> Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it. Assure yourself of this by expending as much effort on these new ambitions as you did on those illusive goals: work day and night to attain a liberated frame of mind.
Or 17th Century French mischief-maker La Bruyère:
> The man who, one fine day, can resolutely renounce a great name, a great position or a great fortune escapes thereby, at one blow, from many cares, many sleepless nights and, sometimes, from many crimes.
In common understanding, all ideas of ‘freedom from’ (having removed the clearly insane ones about being free from human connection) are tied to an ideal of freedom from worry.
However, as we saw last week, **if you think financial worries are about money, you understand neither finances nor worry.**
The implications of this are rarely, if ever, understood, let alone publicised.
Money doesn’t buy freedom from worry. You don’t have money worries because you don’t have enough money. You have them because you [have a deep, existential, anxiety woven into your worldview](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear).
‘Yeah, whatever, mate.’
**That millionaires have money worries too is possibly the most valuable lesson personal financial planning has to teach the world. Though few learn it properly.** Many are momentarily moved by examples of millionaires being a bit silly, but few use the examples to permanently shift *how they see* the same silliness in less exaggerated exemplifications.
People are happy to ‘learn’ that millionaires aren’t living perfect lives, but they’re not happy to learn that if *they* became a millionaire, *they* likely wouldn’t be living a perfect life either.
**We are happy to see other people playing the same game we’re playing badly, but not happy to see that it’s a bad game to play**.
To move towards financial enlightenment is to move away from money anxieties. Yet you do not move away from anxiety by turning away from it, but by turning towards it.
The first step in overcoming any addiction is to recognise you are actually addicted. The first step in overcoming money blindness is to recognise that [you’re not blind, but wearing a blindfold](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4#what-is-money-blind). *And it’s within your power to take it off*.
**There is one sense in which ‘freedom from’ is wiser**. Freedom from fantasy. As the incessantly insightful Iris Murdoch explained:
> The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called ‘will’ or ‘willing’ belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.
What Murdoch is talking about here, of course, is the same thing we encountered when looking at [the Eightfold Path](https://news.moneyblind.net/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence) – the cultivation of a complex dynamical system for countering the equally complex dynamical system of self-deception, and consequently for affording a flowing, flourishing, meaningful life.
Freedom from fantasy – from self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour – is rather different to freedom from worry. It’s something more. It’s purposeful. It’s freedom in a [perspectival and participatory](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#do-you-know-how-to-know-if-you-know) human context. It’s ‘freedom for’.
### Freedom for
Reflecting on the key lessons he’d extracted from his epic study of 6,000 years of human behaviour historian Will Durant wrote: ‘Real freedom is possessed only by those who are not anxious to be rich.’ Adding later that ‘Freedom unlimited is chaos complete.’
For freedom to be fulfilling, it needs a focus, a ‘for’.
I wrote in [Idiot Money #52](https://news.moneyblind.net/52-do-what-only-you-can-do) that:
> Those that spend hours a day moving, meditating, and contemplating will tell you that it doesn’t *take* time, it *creates* it, because they’re now able to easily and happily ignore all the distracting, de-energising crap that blinds other people into believing they don’t have time for anything else.
A few of you asked me to elaborate. This is the elaboration.
Freedom is an ability. Therefore it’s also a responsibility. And like any ability-responsibility (like money, time, energy, intelligence, connections, and the like) if you waste it – if it has no purpose, nothing it’s *for* – then rather than flowing, you’re going to flounder.
We all cling to fantasies, especially financial fantasies. Freeing ourselves from them is frightening. But when you do so, you gain far more than you lose, both mentally and materially. You wire yourself not for waste, but for your wants.
You open up the opportunity – the freedom – *for* flourishing. Which, assuming your goal is living better, rather than being able to say ‘f-you’ to your boss, is excellent news.
But you can’t live better if you can’t see more clearly how to do so.
What does this look like in practice? That’s what [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/) is all about! As our friend and one of the chief guides through [this series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly), Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche explains:
> According to most classical Buddhist texts, achieving this sort of freedom involves three stages: listening, contemplation, and meditation.
> ‘Listening’ essentially means allowing oneself to be introduced to new facts or ideas.
> ‘Contemplation’ \[…] essentially involves thinking deeply about lessons learned through reading and oral teachings, and questioning whether or not what you’ve heard or read is a valid means of understanding and responding to life events.
Which not-at-all-incidentally map perfectly to the [two fundamental financial errors](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3).
> ‘Meditation’ the third stage of practice, asks us to begin by simply observing our physical, intellectual, and emotional experiences without judgment. \[...] Even looking at a thought like, ‘Oh, I did such and such twenty years ago. How stupid of me to regret it, I was just a kid then!’ is meditation. It’s an exercise in simply observing thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they rise and fall in our experience. And it is an exercise.
Which, in turn, maps to living more meditatively with money, which we looked at [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4), [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt), [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is), and [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/48-living-mindfully-with-money-the-abc-of-money-part-12).
As we noted in [Part 11](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is) of this series, we want insight: we want to free our sight from both external and internal distortions and distractions, so that by seeing more clearly we edit the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and rewire our default mental patterns from pursuing waste to pursuing our deepest, most human wants… so, in short, we live better with money and use it to consciously make our lives better, rather than leaving the whole thing up to an ineffective and usually disastrous game of chance, however freely we believe we’re rolling the dice.
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# #60: If you go there blindfolded, you probably won’t like where you end up
8th November, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that wilful inattention and ignorance are good shortcuts for a lot of things, but how you live with money isn’t one of them.
*Because spaced repetition is cool (and because apparently I'm not above doing a clip show) for this, the 60th edition of Idiot Money, a recap of some stuff from the early days.*
> “There is a great pressure to come up with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need. But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.” – Ernest Becker, *The Denial of Death*
### **1. Beware simple steps**
\[From [Idiot Money #12](https://news.moneyblind.net/12-financial-independence-an-actual-idiots-guide)]
* **Simple rules make better conclusions than starting points**. You believe you want to wallow in impractical ignorance. Really you want to become [practically wiser](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3).
* **What matters is not the simplicity of the steps you take, but whether they take you where you want to go**. A simple step taken blindly is worse than the same step taken with your eyes open.
* **‘Stupidity well packaged can sound like wisdom’**. When it comes to financial advice, what you believe you want – [assuming the aim is to turn your resources into whatever your version of a Good Life looks like](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.4) – is not what you really want. Nothing is more worthy of effort than learning to challenge your [accumulation-based assumptions](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-accumulation-and-alignment).
* **Fears grow in the dark and dissolve in the light**. Paying someone to do all your financial stuff for you works about as well as those that pay for a personal trainer, not to make them more likely to do the work, but as an excuse not to.
* **No one believes they’re wasteful, at least not when they’re doing the wasting**. So simply saying ‘stop’ stops nothing. Telling people to ‘cut waste’ – whether it’s emptying a cupboard of crisps or a wardrobe of unworn clothes – doesn’t work. What’s worse, it’ll make you think it has, at least well enough for now. You’ll scratch ‘sort finances’ off your itch list, believe you’ve changed as a person, and *stop* yourself from paying the very attention the itch was suggesting you should.
* **Spending consciously will lead to spending less. The opposite is not true**. It’s the consciousness, not the crap, that’s important.
### **2. Beware feeding your fears with inaction**
\[From [Idiot Money #13](https://news.moneyblind.net/13-lets-talk-about-money-baby)]
* **We don’t talk about money because we’re so attached to it as a measure of value, and therefore fear what we say about money says about us. The antidote to that attachment is talking about it from a place free of such fear.**
* **We suffer both *****in***** silence, and *****because***** of it**. So many of our worries about money stem from the fact we assume everyone else knows what’s going on, but because we never talk about it, we never know this isn’t true.
* **This silence creates all sorts of problems**, from believing that more money makes the worries go away, to never quite getting around to working out how investing works, and so either never starting to do it, or paying someone far too much to do it for us while never understanding how badly we’re being ripped off.
* **Talk about money as a facilitator of trades** – an investment of one thing in the hope of gaining something better that justifies it. And about how we make better trades, better decisions. What works and what doesn’t?
* **Use money as a spur to challenge (and where appropriate change) worldviews the only way they can be changed**: one word, one phrase, or one concept at a time. For example, catch yourself using ‘treat’ to mean ‘costs money and worsens health’, or ‘better’ to mean either ‘pays more’ or ‘costs more’, rather than ‘makes life better’, and ask if you mean what you said; if not, tell your brain to do it better next time.
### **3. Getting going is hard in the moment, but standing still makes life harder than it has to be. Find a way to get moving.**
\[From [Idiot Money #14](https://news.moneyblind.net/14-new-years-non-idiotic-financial-resolutions) and [#16](https://news.moneyblind.net/16-just-tell-me-what-to-do)]
* **No one wants to be told important things are easy**. Because what sort of an idiot hasn’t done important easy things already? Where to go for dinner? Happy to debate it for a week. What to do with a lifetime of earning and spending? Let’s pretend that saying it needs ‘proper time to think about it’ excuses never actually prioritising that time.
* **Believing the financial system to be designed against you is not a completely brilliant excuse for doing nothing but swear at it**. Here’s some stuff you can do (details in the [post](https://news.moneyblind.net/16-just-tell-me-what-to-do)):
1. Insure what you can’t afford to replace
2. Stop putting off the legal stuff
3. Save up a cash emergency fund
4. Merge your pensions into one (probably)
5. Use your entitlements to free money and free tax avoidance
6. Have an investment strategy
7. Invest habitually
8. Review
9. Consider getting professional help
10. **…and of course above all of them, learn to live an examined life.**
### **4. Beware wilful inattention**
\[From [Idiot Money #17](https://news.moneyblind.net/17-how-to-choose-better-investments)]
* **Don’t worry about choosing the right investments.** Choose the right way to look at investments and the right ones may just choose themselves.
* **The costs of financial inattention can take many forms**. For example:
1. **Getting stuck on the short-term emotionally salient**. As Charlie Munger said: ‘People make bad choices all the time, usually because of a fundamental inability to operate over longer time frames.’
2. **Believing you’re making conscious choices when you’re not**. As Steven Kaas said: ‘You are not the king of your brain; you are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, “A most judicious choice, sire.” ’ In many ways, this is the point of [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/): to open eyes to things being choices that people don’t believe are choices.
3. **Confusing symptoms and states**. [Investing isn’t objectively scary or complicated](https://book.moneyblind.net/#must-money-seem-scary-and-complicated). Its scary-and-complicated-ness is taken by many to be a state, when really it’s a symptom of something deeper.
* **In finance, philosophy trumps psychology**. Sometimes symptoms can – and should – be [tackled with psychological nudges](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#your-financial-philosophy-and-your-relationship-with-money). But because money is so intertwined with our worldviews, we need something that seeks to shape our neurology, not play tricks on it: we need philosophy.
* **Advice that doesn’t start with neuroplasticity isn’t advice, it’s enablement**. Neuroplastic changes are the least emotionally salient thing in the world, and short-term fluctuations in money are the most. The two key points of a focus on [neuroplasticity](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1) are:
1. **How you do anything is how you do everything**. Every daily decision is a vote for a worldview that either makes life better or worse.
2. **It gets easier**. Every choice makes one neural pathway easier to go down, and another more difficult. You don’t need to choose the good path for long before it starts to choose itself. But you do need to do it for a bit.
### **5. Beware your inability to count**
\[From [Idiot Money #18](https://news.moneyblind.net/18-you-cannot-count.-this-leads-you-to-make-idiotic-financial-decisions.)]
* **You’re crap at counting. Recognising this is key to making wiser decisions.** In terms of how numbers translate to meaning, counting tends to go something like: one, two, three, some, lots, loads.
* **It would be great if you could appropriately distinguish between a million and a billion, but you can’t**. No one cares 1,000 times more about a billion than a million. They’re both ‘loads’. One is intellectually a bit bigger, but in terms of guiding our actions, one unimaginably large number is pretty much the same as the next one.
* **To make wiser decisions, we often need to be sensitive to this sort of scale, but our decisions are driven by feelings that aren’t up to the job**. In these situations, we need to find a way to delegate the decisions to the calculators. This often feels weird and inhuman, but not doing so could lead to inhuman actions. ‘Prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters’ (Nate Soares).
* **Those living well aren’t those that are better calculators of the opportunity cost of every decision**. They’re the ones who’ve learned to better control their decision-making machinery. Who’ve learnt to live examined lives with a view to focusing on what makes their lives better and ignoring everything else.
* **If we learnt to trust that we were incapable of feeling any different if we hoarded wealth on any part of the ‘loads’ scale from ‘can easily afford the odd holiday’ to ‘billionaire’, we’d probably waste less of our lives trying to gain more wealth simply for the sake of it and do something a bit more meaningful instead**.
### **6. Beware believing there’s a ‘number’ (especially if you build your life around it)**
\[From [Idiot Money #19](https://news.moneyblind.net/19-whats-your-number)]
* **A lot of people are certain about what their ‘number’ is**. I was. Some even get competitive about it, apparently believing saying something like ‘Oh no, my number’s much higher – I’m thinking £50m’ makes them sound like anything other than a miserable idiot.
* **They’re all wrong**. Working with those that have accumulated vast wealth (assuming you’re paying attention to how well it’s worked out for them) robs you of the notion that there is a ‘number’, and, by extension, that it should therefore be the focus of your daily endeavours.
* **All ‘numbers’, however calculated, are anti-insightful**. This includes a total asset value, an income (usually a naively pre-tax one), and even a total asset value ‘calculated’ by multiplying a desired income by 25 because you heard something about a ‘safe withdrawal rate’ of 4%.
* **These calculations come so easily because they’re not calculations.** [**They’re stories**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1)**.** ‘Needing’ 20k or 200k a year isn’t because you’ve worked out that’s what you need to flourish (aka how needy you are). It’s a slightly less socially obnoxious way of parading how you value life in terms of money – and in every case, high or low, showing that you do, indeed, value life in terms of money.
# #61: Idiot Money Maths #2: What is your default unit of spending?
15th November, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding the usefulness of measuring potential purchases in terms of a known subjective value, not an abstract objective price.
*When it comes to using money in a meaningful way, the importance of the numbers, from using price tags as a measure of value, to fretting about growth forecasts, is grossly overblown.*
*We tend towards tunnel vision on the most misleading numbers (such as an investment-growth forecast, or a retirement ‘number’) while remaining ignorant of the insightful ones (such as the role of the unequivocal accounting record of our life choices in living an examined, wiser, life).*
*Some numbers, however, are actually helpful. This is the second in a* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/57-idiot-money-maths-1-how-much-does-it-cost-to-keep-you-happy) *highlighting the most important numbers for you to know.*
**Our spending decisions both express and shape the integral whole of our lives. However, we commonly make them as if they were isolated incidents, using phrases like ‘just this once’ to describe decisions made with alarming frequency. Having a go-to use for a given amount of money bridges this gap and reminds us of who we are choosing to become in the moment we’re choosing to become it.**
Having a default use of a given amount of money lodged in the front of your mind – a use that reliably makes your life better, but that you often forget to do as often as you would like – helps you make better spending decisions at the moment you’re making them.
It’s a way to quickly weigh up what a potential purchase means to you.
For example, maybe you consistently bemoan your inability to stick to an exercise programme, and despite previous success with using a personal trainer, concluded that you couldn’t afford one regularly (at £100 an hour, say).
You regularly buy impulsive things that add far less value to your life, maybe because you’re drunk, or on holiday, or both. Having the PT cost at the front of your mind allows you to reframe these things from ‘only £20’ to ‘a fifth of a PT session’.
The point isn’t about buying the impulse thing or not. It’s about helping you to remember the trade-off you’re making when you’re making it.
This isn’t a dictatorial denial of anything (though obviously junk-buying is rarely wise). It’s simply a question. If any question feels like an unwelcome dictatorial demand and inspires a defensive reaction… the problem isn’t with the question.
**Idiots see spending as a series of transactions. Clever people see in-the-moment trades. Wiser people see the trades as simultaneous expressions of and shapers of a way of life… opportunities to wire themselves to make ever-more-effective trades by default.**
### Why is it important?
**1. Because it’s a simple way of accomplishing the vital-but-vague life-enhancing task of remembering the becoming mode**
As I wrote in the introduction to [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode):
> Money misleads us into believing it will bring us what we want, when in reality it is only a well-disguised substitute. ‘As a man is, so he sees,’ wrote William Blake. If we are to stop being misled by money, we need to start living in a different mode.
And followed-up on [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.3#an-unexamined-life-is-an-unfulfilled-life):
> A shift into the becoming mode is necessary for the systematic overcoming of self-deception. Tackling decision-making errors one by one is as impossible as eating healthily while still identifying as someone that ‘wants’ cake. However many battles you win, you’ll never win the war.
However, ‘remembering the becoming mode’ is hard. And it’s not something you can ‘nail’ one day and forget about forever more. It’s a lifelong task. Albeit one that gets easier each time.
When constructing the world in which we choose to live, we want to construct one that reminds us to spend more time in the becoming mode. This is where the ubiquity and universality of money can be so damn helpful.
**Having a single go-to use of your resources is the simplest reminder to pay attention to your life choices, challenge them, and consequently make them better.**
The point (obviously, I hope) is not to pick one use of money and sacrifice everything to that aim. No optimal allocation of resources can ever be looked at in time periods of less than at least a month. This is a trigger to encourage thinking, not another means of avoiding it.
**2. Because it’s a means of acknowledging self-deception**
It’s near impossible to catch self-deception in the act. That’s sort of the point of self-deception.
To spot it, we need symbols: means of trialling a different way of seeing the world that we do not yet naturally possess, but which we’ve good reason to believe would make life better if we did, because it would contribute to a wider vision, and a more accurate interpretation of who we are, what the world’s all about, and how the two dance together.
Money’s proper place is not as a measure of value, but as a facilitator of a trade: a conversion of one life choice into another.
[If you make trades without knowing what you value, you’ll be in the position of a Tourette’s sufferer at an auction](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.5-putting-a-price-on-real-value#welcome-to-valueville-population-nearly-no-one).
**A great financial planner acts as an ‘alignment coach’ rather than an enabler of accumulation – someone that reminds us to check that our expenditure is expressing the story we actually want to tell**. Having a default reminder is a DIY means of playing the same role.
This is far more effective than asking yourself ‘do I really need this?’ – which doesn’t express a trade-off, save between stuff and your bank balance, drives [an unhelpful wedge between needs and wants](https://news.moneyblind.net/14-new-years-non-idiotic-financial-resolutions#money-maxim-of-the-week-festive-cheer-edition), and encourages living in a world ravaged by a never-ending and very bloody battle based on denial and guilt.
**3. Because it’s a reminder to prioritise your priorities**
Too much of life is ‘lived’ in the future… if indeed we can really call that living, rather than waiting or wasting.
This isn’t a call for reckless hedonism. It’s for a more meditative approach – remembering to return your attention to how you’re living as you would your focus to your breath in a ‘formal’ meditation session.
**4. Because it’s a check of both immediate potential purchases and a check-in on your underlying priorities**
The idea of ‘budgeting’, when done properly, begins as a means for examining life choices, but it’s ultimately about using our interactions with money as a tool for seeing more clearly. It’s a means of examining an unequivocal accounting record of our chosen trade-offs which helps heighten our awareness of what is most salient to us: what, through the lens of our current worldview, stands out to us.
### Can you give me an example?
I have two.
Firstly, playing squash is one of the most reliable ways of bringing more flow into my life.
Not only playing, but playing well – dancing around the court with maximum intensity and minimum perceived exertion. Playing without thinking about playing.
Squash coaching costs about £35-40 per session. Every session I’ve ever done has improved my ability to flow on the court. It’s made my life better in a marginal, but material way.
I rarely get coaching. Whatever its priority in my head, my wallet regularly expresses other ideas.
Secondly, and rather more importantly, I live better – and I strongly suspect most others do too – when I remember that all expenditure is inherently and inescapably ethical. Because all expenditure is a trade-off that expresses how we want the world to be.
The going rate for saving a life is, on best current estimates, about [$3,000 (£2,200)](https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities).
I make better big spending decisions when I remember this.
It’s one thing to read about a comparison between the J. Paul Getty Museum paying $65 million for a painting, thereby allowing the museum’s visitors to enjoy looking at it, and the 1.3m people or so living with cataracts in low-income countries that the same amount could have enabled to look at *anything at all*, and think ‘much as I like art, that does feel a bit mental’.
It’s another thing to trace a line between *that* expression of ‘a bit mental’ and your own subtler value choices. But it definitely pays to remember that they come from the exact same place.
The importance of remembering this – to me at least – isn’t because of the benefits of redistributing wealth. To some extent everyone bar the most chronically insecure knows that already.
It isn’t even about remembering that basically all the distribution of wealth across the world is down to luck: of where and when you were born, your innate felicity in the areas – or your ability to learn the skills – the world is willing to pay for, and so on.
Far from everyone knows that already, but because those most in need of reminding are the most likely to tell you to fuck off when you remind them, there’s less benefit in doing so.
It’s important because it challenges the norm of self-interest that shapes so many of our poor financial decisions, and causes so much undue financial stress… and which does so on the slyest of slys.
As Peter Singer wrote in The Life You Can Save ([a free copy of which is available here](https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/the-book/), and which you should 100% definitely absolutely at least begin reading a few pages of):
> Everyone in a developed society is constantly being bombarded with messages about how to save money, or earn more money, or look better, or gain status – all of which reinforce the assumption that these are things that everyone is pursuing and that really matter.
> The norm of self-interest is an ideological belief, resistant to refutation by the behaviour we encounter in everyday life. Yet we are in thrall to the idea that it is ‘normal’ to be self-interested. Since most of us are keen to fit in with everyone else, we tell stories about our acts of compassion that put a self-interested face on them.
> Sociologist Robert Wuthnow found that even people who acted altruistically tended to offer self-interested explanations – sometimes quite implausible ones – for what they had done. They volunteered to work for good causes, they said, because it ‘gave me something to do’ or ‘got me out of the house.’ They were reluctant to say: ‘I wanted to help.’
I don’t believe anyone, making a conscious choice in the moment, would choose to prioritise spraying a few grand’s worth of Champagne around a City nightclub, or having someone open every door for them when on holiday over truly transforming someone’s life, maybe even saving it… but they do.
We all do, usually in far less obvious ways than being a wanker in a Champagne-soaked suit.
I think it’s good to remember to check, at the point of doing these things, whether we really want to be doing them.
Note that I said check, not stop. I’m still astonished by the defensive reactions such a suggestion to check often inspires. If your choice can’t stand a challenge, it’s probably a crap choice, coming from a unwisely wired part of your brain. You should welcome the reminder to choose a better way.
That’s all defaults such as these are. Quick reminders. Of the world you want to live in, and the person you want to become.
Surrounded by the vision-narrowing forces of [addiction](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions) and [unscrupulous salesmen](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money), and the lazy-bordering-on-suicidal sacrifices of our potential to the gods of mimetic desire, our in-the-moment financial decisions are often stained with tragic incompetence. And all for want of a well-prepared reminder.
# #62: Balance isn’t stillness
22nd November, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that not chasing ‘more’ doesn’t mean standing still, including:
* why it’s a mistake to think of balance as a passive counterpoint to active ambition;
* why ‘finding your enough’ flows from the same flawed premise as chasing ‘more’; and
* an actual transcript of me on a dating app.
*This week’s newsletter was inspired by Brian Portnoy’s Twitter thread* [*here*](https://twitter.com/brianportnoy/status/1456702424916320257)*. You may like to follow* [*him*](https://twitter.com/brianportnoy) *on Twitter. You may also like to follow* [*me*](https://twitter.com/Belgarvm)*.*
**Balance is active, not passive. Yet the common money worldview says otherwise: it confuses balance with stillness and sloth, and thus sets it up as an inadequate alternative to blindly chasing ‘more’. This is important because it is your financial worldview that determines your financial choices and your financial choices have a monumental influence over the quality of your life.**
Allocating money in ways that make your life better is wise. Allocating it in ways that don’t, isn’t.
Yet we commonly do rather more of the latter than the former. Because [we both fail to formulate our problems properly and fail to reason our way to sane solutions](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3), we fail to see the roots of our more wasteful allocation decisions. And the more money we are in charge of allocating, the wider this gulf becomes.
Far from filling the gap between where you are and where you want to be, money multiplies it, because the gap comes largely from how you see the role of money in your world.
If you fail to see that all your attempts to solve something spring from the same flawed premise, you’ll not only keep making the same mistakes – while not seeing that they’re the same – but rather than learning from them, each mistake will make it more likely you’ll make the same mistake again.
**It doesn’t matter that the previous thousand attempts didn’t work… if you keep believing the ‘answer’ is ‘buy something’, then it doesn’t matter what you’re buying**. The sixth Ferrari is different to the fifth! The latest bit of fancy exercise equipment is different to the ones gathering dust in the corner!
If you don’t see that you’re still searching for a solution not because the previous answer wasn’t as conclusive as you’d hoped, but because you’re looking in the wrong place, you’re doomed to never find anything, while always believing you’re on the brink of doing so.
And – even more importantly – even if you do see the silliness in option A, if option B also feels a bit wrong, and you’re not really looking for C, D, or Z, then you’re likely to keep entrenching your belief in option A all the same.
One strand of this deceptive web is our curious attachment to ‘more’. And how even those that easily reason that ‘more’ is a flawed default, don’t so easily reason themselves to a wiser alternative. I’m sure you’ve all met someone who is both doing something only for the money while at the same time acknowledging that they should really think about it a bit harder… later.
Much has been written about ‘more’, often in contrast to ‘enough’. [I’ve done so myself](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.1-give-give-give-me-more-more-more).
We’ll return to that in a second. But first, once upon a time, this was me on a dating app. Because, yes, I am odd enough to have both written these things, and kept a screenshot of doing so.
> Me: ‘I do wonder if the plate-spinning model of trying to “balance” career, creativity, and companionship by looking at them largely in isolation isn’t a little flawed. Doesn’t feel very… human 😊. A life can be productively broken down for helping with certain constrained examination, but we mustn’t forget to put it back together again when making decisions!’
> Lucky girl: ‘\[…] to be super good in what you do, you need to invest a lot of time and energy so by default other things in life will slip.’
> Me: ‘What if that thing you wanted to get super good at were (to quote Bertie Wooster) “to just exist beautifully”? Then you’d be investing your time and energy on the balance, rather than the individual components and then thinking about how well they’re balanced afterwards 😊.’
You see this sort of story (the belief that when it comes to living a Good Life, charging ahead in one area can offset falling behind in another, not how I behave on dating apps) [everywhere](https://news.moneyblind.net/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4).
From the careerist cycling between burn-out and resort reset to every ‘successful businessperson’ that walks into a financial planner’s meeting room beating their chest about their bonus and their latest set of wheels, before beating a retreat at mention of their mental or physical health. And of course the common belief that more money offsets less everything else.
**When you see something everywhere, chances are it’s embedded in a shared philosophy. And when that thing you see everywhere expresses itself in all sorts of silly ways that philosophy is probably flawed**.
Which is where ‘more’ in contrast to ‘enough’ comes in, and how while it’s commonly done, it’s uncommonly done wisely.
### More blindness or more sight?
People pointing out the flaws of a blind pursuit of ‘more’ sometimes feel as numerous as those doing the blind pursuing. Not least because people have been doing it since at least the Ancient Greeks. As Will Durant informs us:
> The change from landed to movable wealth produced a feverish struggle for money, and the Greek language had to invent a word, *pleonexia*, to denote this appetite for ‘more and more’, and another word, *chrematistike*, for the ‘busy pursuit of riches’.
‘Busy’ in any arena is rarely a sign of wisdom. For busy forgets the crucial step of checking if what we’re being busy about is actually worth it.
Assuming you can do it without embracing immorality in a manner suggestive of a Tory MP, or perpetuating a planet-ravaging worldview, there’s nothing inherently wrong with chasing riches. But as we saw with [the three levels of freedom](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for), you probably don’t want to be so busy chasing riches that you forget why you’re doing so in the first place.
Despite humanity being defined [not by succumbing to the siren call of simplicity, but by getting comfortable with complexity](https://news.moneyblind.net/3-your-relationship-with-money-is-complex.-but-it-neednt-be-complicated.), **the craving for simplistic certainty is one heck of a drug. And money – by reducing everything to an apparently universal, objective, measurement (**[however flawed this is](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3)**) – is one heck of a delivery mechanism**.
The common lens through which we view the role of money in our lives deceives us into latching onto [shoddy substitutes](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3) that promise an easy certainty but deliver only costly disappointment.
This is the problem with ‘more’ as it’s commonly seen: it enables a worldview that says money can be converted into actually meaningful stuff later, so if in doubt, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of tunnel vision now (and let’s forget that there’s always some sort of reason to doubt, right up until the point doubt flips into regret).
This reductionist view can con us into thinking we’ve seen the problem, and are therefore immune from its effects. As we saw with [the difference between good and bad rules](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3#good-rules-v-bad-rules), **defaults are often good but they’re always dangerous**.
In short, **‘more’ is a driver not of wiser default decisions, but of poor problem formulation**. And we know what happens when we ask silly questions.
You can spot this happening when you hear things along the lines of the following:
* you’ve got two options: ambitiously chasing more or settling for enough; or
* stop chasing more when you’ve found your ‘enough’, then you’ll live happily ever after; or
* something akin to the trouble we saw with Nassim Taleb’s take on the extent to which it’s okay to be [possessed by possessions](http://invalid//): ‘Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.’ As if it’s good to crave stuff for a bit, as long as you know when to stop.’
All such beliefs are packed with the potential to mislead.
This trap is baked into your relationship with money. Which is why it’s so vital to [*look at your relationship with money before you blindly look through it*](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is).
**If you find yourself flicking between ‘more’ and ‘enough’, you’re constantly looking *****through*****, not *****at*****. The flicking you want to be doing is not between ‘more’ and ‘enough’ but between through and at.**
The contrast between ‘more’ and ‘enough’ should not be seen as a spectrum, along which we need to find some sort of balancing point, or two modes between which we should flick depending on our circumstances. To do this would be to make the same mistake I ranted about in [Idiot Money #40](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money): believing that ‘advice’ to ‘Always say yes!’ or ‘Always say no!’ or ‘Say yes to everything when you’re young and exploring, then say no to everything when you’re exploiting your exploration!’ is anything other than a terrible waste of everybody’s time.
**There are no circumstances in which using ‘more’ as the default for both earning and spending decisions helps you become wiser**. No, it doesn’t work ‘for a bit’. It just doesn’t work.
This isn’t about ‘finding enough’. It’s about asking: Why do we dedicate so much of our lives to unfulfilling ends? And why do we keep doing so in the same ways?
The answer must be because we’re deceiving ourselves somehow.
However, much of what is written on the topic of more v enough *entrenches* this self-deception: it both comes from and further encourages a worldview where:
* money’s importance is measured in numbers not its role in your narrative, which encourages us to compartmentalise, seeing isolated decisions or periods of time when we would be better seeing a whole human life;
* what matters most (our desire to cultivate the conditions in which we can participate in a process of becoming a certain somebody) can be met by having stuff; and
* money is good partly because it saves us from having to think about how wisely we’re using it, either temporarily or permanently.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.1-give-give-give-me-more-more-more#if-others-set-your-goals-whose-life-are-you-living) (the whole section is relevant):
> Hitching the power of self-deception to the power of default has implications beyond a bit of thoughtless spending. When we live our lives as if we’re in one of those meetings that, deeming it too difficult to reach a conclusion there and then, concludes to have another meeting instead, we do more than just delay decisions.
### No human is an island
When we look at a self-deceptive money worldview, what do we see?
We see transactions when we want to see [trades](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.2-if-less-is-more-then-more-is-also-less).
We see isolated ‘one offs’ that compare the predicted benefits of a thing (be it earning, spending, saving, investing, or whatever) with usually always the immediate cash in our bank balance, sometimes the longer-term cash-flow consequences, and almost never the effects the decision has on expressing and shaping who we are in the process of becoming.
As I wrote [last week](https://news.moneyblind.net/61-idiot-money-maths-2-what-is-your-default-unit-of-spending):
> all expenditure is inherently and inescapably ethical. Because all expenditure is a trade-off that expresses how we want the world to be.
**More of something is always less of something else. So why do we so easily dress one side up as ‘better’?** Anyone else think that ‘less is more’ is a really weird rallying cry for those advocating minimalism? Because it’s basically saying ‘less stuff is better’, but using ‘more’ in place of ‘better’, thereby tacitly agreeing with the very mindset they’re allegedly against? Denunciation is still attachment.
The contrast between ‘more’ and ‘enough’ should be seen as a means of becoming more aware of the self-deceptive forces that lead us to make such screwy financial decisions.
In a bid to better understand this, let’s consider a common conception of the contrast between ‘more’ and ‘enough’ that looks like it’s saying something sensible but may end up sustaining self-deception on the sly.
### Balance is active not passive
**Characteristic of the deception-enabling approaches is to see ‘more’ as ambition (good to get going, but don’t take it too far) and ‘enough’ as settling (good to enjoy now and then, but beware stagnation).**
(We’ll look at the shortcomings of ambition relative to aspiration another day, mostly because [Agnes Callard’s book](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Aspiration-Agency-Becoming-Agnes-Callard/dp/0190085142) on it is so good it demands loads of space).
In this context, ‘balance’ is a lovely place to holiday, but a poor place to live, as anyone cycling between burn-out and beach-reset, or that’s waiting for the bank balance to hit ‘the number’ or the external stars to align in the pattern that unlocks ‘happily ever after’ will tell you.
In this view, balance is passive. Pleasant, but passionless.
**However, as anyone who’s ever stood on a slackline knows only too embarrassingly, balance is active, not passive. Balance isn’t about not moving; it’s about incredibly refined, skilful movement.**
As Jana Kingsford wrote: ‘Balance is not something you find, it's something you create.’
Importantly, balancing in life, like balancing on a slackline, happens as a side-effect. All good outcomes do. You don’t balance by trying to balance. You balance by making the right movements that each in-the-moment set of circumstances require. Wave your arms, clench your toes, tune in to your core. Just do the next right thing.
Do this often enough, and you start to do it automatically. Whereas when learning it may be helpful to break down those movements into each arm, or foot, or toe, or core, it works only when you put it all back together and see the body as a whole. Moving from seeing isolated numbers to a whole human is at the heart of living better with money.
‘Enough’ isn’t a passive relaxation in some coma-like contentment. That’s still looking through the same self-deceptive lens that craves an inhuman simplistic certainty. It’s a continual refreshing of your attention and intention.
Believing enough is something to be ‘found’ doesn’t contrast with the ‘[Arrival Fallacy](http://invalid//)’. It commits it.
Hang around financial advisory circles and you’ll hear a lot about the importance of ‘knowing your enough’ or your ‘number’. As if you know that, then you will be happy. Can we see how this is playing the exact same game as those chasing ‘more’?
(See [Idiot Money #19](https://news.moneyblind.net/19-whats-your-number) for the foolishness of ‘knowing your number’.)
### Enough isn't settling
As I wrote about [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.2-if-less-is-more-then-more-is-also-less#healthy-balance), the Greeks had a word, *sophrosyne* – which conceptualised an idea of excellence of character and soundness of mind. When combined in one well-balanced individual, this combo naturally gave rise to other virtues – such as decorum and self-control – as side-effects.
Though often translated as ‘temperance’ or ‘moderation’, these suggest ‘settling’, which sophrosyne shouldn’t. Sophrosyne – like ‘enough’ in the context of its contrast with ‘more’ – has nothing to do with settling. It is a form of self-control, but in the sense of rejoicing in control by yourself, not by others, as opposed to desiring and then denying something.
It is an active understanding and embracing of the balance that makes for a Good Life. It is a means of tempting yourself into the Good Life, by engaging with the actions that cultivate it. It is a bridge between where you are and where you want to be. It links the apprehensive feelings associated with the short-term discomfort attached to any sort of desirable growth with the excitement of doing that growing. It is the thrill a fearless child feels on going to a music lesson to spend an hour being crap at playing an instrument.
The aim of a human life can never be to ‘settle’. As if a stagnant pond were more beautiful than a waterfall. Nor can it be to blindly accumulate. Nor can it be to flick between the two. It can’t be about the decisions as destinations. It must be about the continual process of refining your decision-making machinery as an end in itself, with a better sort of balance as an inevitable side-effect.
Contrasting more and enough is important… as a process of remembering the mode in which you’re living your life, and the clarity with which you see the trades that express and shape it.
And finally, something that can never be repeated too often (taken, as it happens, from the same dating-app chat above):
> ‘I think possibly the best thing about a job being inside the heads of rich folk (as I had for a decade) is that it’s a continual reminder to check in on whether what life choices you’re making every day actually work.’
# #63: A problem shared
29th November, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that what you have is a terribly misleading substitute for what you are becoming, including:
* the difference between the role of money in Mediterranean mountain and city life;
* the weirdness of talking about living a life of ‘intimacy, dignity, beauty’ while still ‘having nothing’; and
* another broken-record rant about how encouraging conscious consumption is not the same as telling everybody to be a cheapskate.
**Having everything isn’t incompatible with feeling empty. That should shake us into questioning our default assumptions about how to live more vigorously than it does.**
A few weeks ago, I was pretending (poorly) to be a mountain goat.
I was in Italy, frolicking through forests, climbing up (and falling off) boulders, and scaling slabs of rock with a level of grace more akin to a new-born deer than a gravity-defying goat.
On a hike, in between sucking in the delicious mountain air, and peeling rather less-delicious spider webs from my face, I got talking to the guide, Lisa.
Lisa had grown up in the mountains before moving to the city, so I was interested in her take on what distinguished mountain people and city people in Italy.
She articulated something I’d noticed a thousand times in investigating the wisdom (and idiocy) of using money to live better, but had never heard expressed so starkly.
The city folk, she told me without a pause, were waaaaaay more individual.
Human life is in many ways one long string of problem solving. (Or ‘puzzle’ solving if ‘problem’ leads you to think only of ‘bad’ things.)
Because the mountain people don't have the means to solve problems by themselves, Lisa told me, they solve them as a community. They don’t have fewer problems. Often they don’t even have different ones. But they see completely different solutions. Everybody helps each other out, and is glad to do so. *Not* being asked for what city folk could see as an unwelcome imposition isn’t to dodge a bullet, it’s to suffer the worst wound of all – feeling like you don’t matter.
Other differences are there too, of course. Mountain houses look less like pocket-sized palaces, but more like homes, for example. And mountain people don’t have the space specifically designed for hosting dreamy dinner parties; but they do more often eat together, with the emphasis on connection, not competition.
They better remember that [nothing you consume is a substitute for anything you connect with](https://news.moneyblind.net/7-what-fund-managers-can-teach-us-about-what-really-matters)**, and where the human connection you are ultimately seeking exists, costly consumables are irrelevant to your enjoyment of an experience.**
–
One of the books I took to read when recovering from my slightly too excitable approach to running up hills and my far-from-efficient climbing technique was Krista Tippett’s [*Becoming Wise*](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Becoming-Wise-Inquiry-Mystery-Living-ebook/dp/B01BKS9PHO).
In it, she recounts a story from her days as a foreign correspondent in then-divided Berlin, that made her rethink the role money played in a life well lived.
> This realization \[being drawn more and more to the ‘poor’ Eastern side of Berlin] unsettled my sense of personal progress and education: it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to ‘have nothing’ in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.
Imagine a child brought up in the most American of Americas. Every day of their childhood, the walls of their collective worldview are strengthened by stories that make it clear: if in doubt, follow the money. These stories may be unspoken, but they’re that much more psychologically penetrating as a result.
These stories tell our all-American child that there is a direct link between ‘standard of living’ and ‘cost of living’. This is great. So great. The greatest. When the news is awash with stories of gunning downs and shooting ups that make you question if your home really is ‘the greatest country in the world’ as everybody keeps telling you to a slightly creepy degree, along comes a GDP per capita stat to put your mind at ease. To say screw you, doubts, I’ve got faith in my direction.
Not sure what matters? Don’t be silly! Money matters! Not because of itself, of course – I’m not a psycho! – but of all the things it can buy! Value stuff like time, and energy, and intimacy, and belonging, and happiness? Money can buy them all!
–
I want to draw a parallel here between the starkness of Cold War Berlin and more mundane concerns of each of our daily lives.
Re-read that quote above: ‘it was possible to “have nothing” in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.’
Does it strike you that it’s possible to read a line like that and not be stopped by its strangeness? You may have just done so.
If you live in a world where you can in effect say ‘intimacy and dignity and beauty are nothing’? then it’s probably time to question that’s the right world to live in. The good news is that while many may live in this world, it is a world of its inhabitants’ construction.
Each of us *construct* our worlds, day in and day out, whether we swear a creepy allegiance to a flag each morning or not.
We don’t do it consciously, of course. No one walks around saying you can have intimacy and dignity and beauty and ‘have nothing’. We’re all the more screwed because we don’t.
–
I wrote recently elsewhere about how financial-planning people go about goals all backwards.
We all know that what makes for a flowing, flourishing, life is connection and belonging stuff, yet rather than seek *that* out, we mistakenly go to the complete opposite end, and pursue isolation. We con ourselves into thinking that ‘having a massive mansion to host a big dinner party’ is what makes for connections, as opposed to, errr, the actual connections... which isolating yourself in a palace tends to work against.
It’s often not our underlying ‘goals’ that are faulty, but the [shoddy substitutes](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-siren-call-of-simplicity-and-succumbing-to-substandard-substitutes) we deceive ourselves into believing will achieve the same ends.
–
Because, alas, it always seems to need clarifying: the hiking guide’s and Tippett’s messages are not about glamourising poverty. They are not a paean to parsimony, nor a fight for frugality against the forces of frivolity.
They’re not an argument that the lives of mountain folk are objectively better than those of city dwellers, or that one sort of person is better or smarter than another. Give a poor mountain community a ton of cash, and they’d no doubt be led just as easily astray by the shiny but shoddy substitutes as anyone else. Remember the lessons of [Rat Park](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions). **The world is full of crack addicts living perfectly respectable lives purely because they haven’t yet been sold on the pipe as the solution to all their ills**.
These stories are rather a prompt to remember the only freedom that ultimately matters… [*the freedom for*](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for).
**To remember to be moved externally by what moves us internally**.
To remember that when it comes to what matters, we want to live in the [becoming mode](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode), rather than stay stuck believing that what we have determines who we are.
To remember to [align what we care for with what we care about](https://news.moneyblind.net/51-align-what-you-care-for-with-what-you-care-about), and that however much we may be wired to believe otherwise, [a life well wasted is not the same as a life well lived](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste).
# #64: How to live well, even in a palace (the ABC of money, part 16)
6th December, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that you can live well, even in a palace, including:
* why you should never question someone’s historical life choices, especially if they’ve made a ton of money because of them;
* how you can turn eight words from Marcus Aurelius into hours of useful reflection; and
* a terribly interesting note for pedantic scholars of Roman philosophical literature.
*This is part 16 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**Living well is not a function of your external circumstances, even really glittery ones.**
For many, nothing is more emblematic of living a ‘good life’ than a palace.
As we saw in [Idiot Money #53](http://invalid//), even our roguishly handsome friend Aladdin, while he went on a journey from a dream of ‘We’ll be rich, live in a palace and never have any problems at all’ to one of realising that the love he shared with the princess was more meaningful than any palace, still ended up in a place that said certain levels of happy living are open only to those with sufficient square footage, and servants. Agrabah’s favourite A-list couple *could* be happy outside of the palace, but of course they are happ*ier* in it.
If you’ve ever politely asked someone with an enormous house if it feels at all wasteful, in even the teeniest, tiniest, most innocent of ways, you’ll probably have met with a barrage from their defensive arsenal. ‘I’ve worked hard all my life… blah blah blah.’
Such defensiveness may be a stupid (albeit unintentionally enlightening response), but it’s also a stupid question.
Because as I explain in one of my favourite bits of the book – borrowing from James Carse – [the whole point is the waste](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste). Palaces pulse with opportunity cost; people with palaces have by definition sacrificed a lot to own them. The palace justifies those sacrifices. It *has* to be worth it. And so asking if it *were actually worth it* is very rude indeed. When you do so, you question a lot more than the worth of a few spare rooms full of crap.
There is, however, another, more instructive, way to see palaces in relation to a good life.
### Imperial insight
‘One can live well, even in a palace’ wrote Marcus Aurelius.
Packed into those eight words are ties that bind together everything we’ve covered in this [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly):
1. [The three poisons](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons) – Becoming aware of the self-deceptive habits of relating to experience that are so deeply rooted that they cloud or poison the mind.
2. [The four noble truths](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview) – Becoming aware that all of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour, because the same machinery that makes us wise also leads us astray, and how rather than succumbing to self-destruction, we can embrace the countervailing opportunities.
3. [The eightfold path](https://news.moneyblind.net/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence) – A systematic approach to developing better meaning-making machinery.
4. [Neuroplasticity](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity) – The fact this is more than just woo-woo: any attempt at upgrading the lenses through which you see the world must account for the stories you’re mapping in your brain, and how you edit those stories.
5. [Living mindfully with money](https://news.moneyblind.net/48-living-mindfully-with-money-the-abc-of-money-part-12) – Refreshing your awareness of how you operate according to a philosophy in an inherently uncertain, impermanent world, not according to an algorithm driven by a simplistic set of numbers.
6. [Enlightenment](https://news.moneyblind.net/54-the-abc-of-money-part-13-financial-enlightenment) and [freedom](https://news.moneyblind.net/58-the-abc-of-money-part-14-the-secret-shackles-of-financial-freedom) – Aiming not for some nebulous ‘state’ of financial freedom, but for a process of enlightenment.
There are a few ways to read Aurelius’ statement. Below, and over the next few weeks, we’ll look at three:
1. What it’s sort of about – what does it even mean to be rich, and how would being so really make your life better?
2. What it’s more sort of about – the difference between denunciation and renunciation, or why playing a different game is a better bet than bemoaning the same one while still ceding control over your life choices to its rules.
3. What it’s really about – seeing more clearly, and freeing yourself from fantastic illusions.
And, given that, what living mindfully with money really meeeeeaaaaaans.
### What’s the use of being rich?
On one level, Aurelius’ words are about the story you tell yourself about what it means to be rich, and how being richer would make your life better.
It’s a useful quote, because it makes you do more than just scroll past while nodding sagely to yourself. It stops you in your tracks.
Wait, what? *Even* in a palace. *Even*? What’s he on about?
It encourages us to ponder the question Bertrand Russell posed in *The Conquest of Happiness*: ‘What is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?’
And hopefully that encouragement isn’t to assume something moronic like ‘all rich people are miserable’, but rather to question if the story that’s so deeply woven into our collective consciousness, that living in a palace is better than not living in a palace, is so objectively true that it makes sense, in myriad subtle ways, to dedicate your life to blindly following its implications.
* Is being able to ‘solve’ problems (or puzzles) by yourself really better than solving them as part of a community?
* Given you can only ever be in one room at a time, how would having 20 really be better than having only 2?
* If I can throw money at any worry, will there come a point when the worries go away?
And so on.
The point isn’t that there are ‘correct’ answers to these questions. The point is that if you never ask them, then you’re ceding the outcomes of your life choices to luck, not judgment.
Not only is living a good life not off-limits to those that don’t own a palace, but maybe, if the goal is actually to live as beautifully as possible, the palace could just as easily be harmful as helpful.
If you’re really lucky, the quote will take you even further, and encourage you to realise that, as long as you believe people that live in different countries (and maybe even different times) are people too, palace or no palace, [you are already rich](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1). Now what are the implications of *that*?
*Next week, we’ll dig a layer deeper, and look at how those that denounce something (for example those that would head to a palace with pitchforks) are psychologically identical to those that have dedicated their lives to owning the object of denunciation (those that are sat in the palace), and how there are less-silly games to play altogether.*
*-*
\* Notes for pedants and other interested parties:
‘One can live well, even in a palace’ is one possible translation of part 16 of Book 5 of the Meditations. There are a ton of ways to translate this, and even more ways of interpreting those translations.
One way to read it is that the Good Life is about avoiding the temptations of debauchery and whatnot and it’s possible to avoid them even in the place – a palace – where they’re most readily available. Think of how it’s possible to go to Las Vegas and not spend a month’s salary on a lifetime of regret. This is a completely valid take. Though for our purposes we’re focusing less on the isolated incident of behaving yourself for a weekend, and more on the construction of a worldview which leads you to behave in ways that actually make you feel amazing all year round.
Another interpretation would point out that the context of the quote, and the fact that the whole of the *Meditations* are ‘notes to self’, means it could be read as ‘stop making excuses that being Emperor makes it harder to live well: every time you do so, you don’t combat the idea, you entrench it, and work against the very thing you want.’ As one translation poetically puts it: ‘the soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts’.
He could also have been talking about how lonely it is to live in a palace, because it makes it so much harder in many ways to flourish in the fellowship that (in the second half of the same passage) he states is the highest good of humanity.
It’s probably a bit of everything. Not that it matters. The use of it for us isn’t in playing the game of ‘What did Marcus Aurelius really mean?’ but asking: ‘Regardless of what the author meant, how could this be instructive for me?’
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[#65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)](/65-denunciation-is-still-attachment-the-abc-of-money-part-17)
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# #65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)
13th December, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that denunciation is still attachment, including:
* how in the most important respect, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are the same;
* the origin story of the Buddha, and one way it’s still relevant; and
* moving from a fixation on fixing problems with objects of belief, to fixing the system of belief that deified the objects in the first place.
*This is part 17 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**To be against something is still to be defined by that something. To denounce money is not to have a healthy relationship with it; it’s a different sort of abusive one.**
One of the saddest birthday messages I’ve ever seen was from someone, who, to celebrate his 40th, announced to Facebook that the thing he enjoyed most about turning 40 was that he “hated wealth and privilege as much as ever.”
Not corruption. Not exploitation. Not valuing paintings over people. Wealth and privilege. Perhaps it was a cry for help from an undeniably (by virtue of living in the UK in the 21st Century) very wealthy and privileged person.
Motivation aside, it’s hardly a new thought. Absolutely nothing about money and humans ever is.
Take Spinoza, for example, in his *Ethics*:
> For the poor man, when he is also greedy, will not stop talking about the misuse of money and the vices of the rich. In doing this he only distresses himself, and shows others that he cannot bear calmly either his own poverty, or the wealth of others.
Or Aldous Huxley, in *The* *Perennial Philosophy*:
> One may be poor but desperately concerned with what money can buy, full of cravings, envy and bitter self-pity.
Or historians Will and Ariel Durant, reflecting on 6,000 years of human behaviour:
> By and large, the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
Our birthday boy wasn’t poor. He believes he is, of course. Or rather he believes he’s not ‘rich’. Because just about [nobody does](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1#the-1-is-surprisingly-subjective).
> As Morgan Housel reported: ‘Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is worth a billion dollars. But he told *The Financial Times* earlier this year that he considers himself well-to-do, not rich. “I can’t even say ‘rich’,” he said. “I don’t feel that way.” ’ \[Blankfein’s] short-sightedness is scarier than other people’s, but as far as his, and other people’s brains are concerned, it’s identical.
**Moaning about not being rich is just so much easier than coming to terms with the consequences of admitting that if you can’t be happy being among the richest fraction of a per cent of people who’ve ever lived, money really isn’t your problem**.
Of course a single hater-wots-gonna-hate isn’t worth writing about.
Nor is the idea that some ladies and gentlemen doth protest rather too much – that mental suppression is subconscious superglue.
However, the consequences of relating to money in this way – and the unconscious manner in which we do it – are.
As Plato wrote in the *Laws*: ‘Love of wealth wholly absorbs men \[…] on this the soul of *every* citizen hangs suspended.’
*Every* citizen.
### From prince to pauper to… something else
But first, a quick retelling of the origin story of The Buddha.
For those that don’t know the tale, before he was The Buddha (the ‘awakened one’), The Buddha was a young Prince, living in palatial comfort.
Daddy the King was fearful of what might become of the young Prince if he were to not have every desire instantly met, and if he were to experience anything other than material comfort. So he kept the youth from seeing the ‘real world’. King Dad, like a multi-divorced multi-millionaire, was apparently not a fan of growth that can’t be measured in numbers.
Despite the external comfort and stagnation masquerading as stillness and security, something inside the not-yet-awakened-one was uncomfortably stirring. This gnawing feeling grew and grew until one day the Buddha-to-be legged it – leaving the palace to see what he could find outside the marble walls.
What he found was suffering.
Poor people. Ill people. Dead people.
This was a bit of a downer. So much so that the Prince became a pauper.
Marble baths and fancy feasts clearly weren’t the answer, so obviously a total lack of marble, bathing, or feasting were!
Travelling around living off handouts, sleeping in slightly suspect places, and washing less regularly than one may consider completely conscientious… Buddha became the first backpacker.
However, after a while as an aesthetic, all the Prince really lost was a lot of weight, and most of his dignity.
‘Dammit!’ he thought. ‘This is no fun. And it’s not working any better than the palatial gig.’
So he sat under a tree for ages until he became enlightened. The end.
(We’ll fill in the gaps of the story next time; they’re not relevant yet.)
### One can live well, even in a palace, take two
Last week, we looked at Marcus Aurelius’ statement that ‘One can live well, even in a palace’. Specifically, we looked at using it to question (not claim!) the idea, so deeply woven into our collective consciousness, that living in a palace is better than not living in a palace.
We looked at the importance not of judging the value or otherwise of living in a palace, which is ultimately irrelevant, but of simply stopping and asking: is this an idea that’s so objectively true that it makes sense to dedicate your life to blindly following its implications?
The importance of this comes largely from the fact that no bugger does it.
**When it comes to life choices, even the slightest questioning of them – despite it being the only thing likely to make them consistently better in future – is never welcome**. Especially if you’re rich but pretending not to be, *precisely in order to not have to question what you’re choosing to do with your life*, [because you need do that only when you’ve arrived at ‘rich’](http://invalid//).
‘Screw you! I want to buy a big yacht! Don’t tell me I don’t “really” want to buy a big yacht! I’ve worked towards this for a decade, I’m damn-well going to have it! [Stop calling me an idiot](https://news.moneyblind.net/5-idiot-profile-private-jet-guy)!’
This blind spot lies at the heart of many people’s money problems. Both pining for palaces and sour-grapesing them, mean choosing to live in a world where money is the measure of all things. It means choosing to believe that if only you had your fair share, your problems would go away.
The Buddha’s story of leaving the palace gives us another angle to read Aurelius’ statement about the possibility of being happy even if you’re forced to live in one.
First we asked, borrowing from Bertie Russell: ‘What is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?’
Prompted to see that this misery grips all groups that define themselves by their wealth – the rich, the poor, the Prince, the aesthetes, the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ – we are now asking: ‘**What is the use of everybody playing the same game of money-as-make-believe-meaning if winners and losers alike are miserable?**’
What if the problem wasn’t the object of the belief, but the system of belief that deified the object?
Is there a better way?
*Next week, a long-winded way of saying ‘yes’.*
*(For those who’ve jumped to the conclusion that this isn’t relevant to them because they have no plans to bugger off to India and starve themselves, nor crave living in an actual palace, and that they’re not insecure enough to be extravagant, and all they want is about 20% more than they’ve currently got, please know that In my decade of working with multi-millionaires, there was no more common claim than ‘We’re not extravagant.’ Wanting a yacht may be the mark of a fool, but that doesn’t make not wanting one the apotheosis of wisdom. Whatever ‘level’ one may deem ‘reasonable’ or ‘sensible’ or whatever, where there is a ‘level’ (unrelated to escape from actual poverty) one’s world is still being viewed in the exact same way. Even the person in the ‘middle’ denouncing both poverty and palaces is, by doing so, ensuring that their perception of their own position is still defined by them.)*
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[#67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream](/67-the-abc-of-money-part-18-addicted-to-a-dream)
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# #66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)
20th December, 2021
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that peeking through the curtains isn’t the best place to look for financial guidance, including:
* if you don’t know what you want, you’ll never get it, even by accident;
* the trouble with ‘security and freedom’ as substitutes for thought-through purpose for your financial resources; and
* why the palliative financial planning you crave is not the profitable financial planning you really want.
**If you don’t know what you want, you’ll never get it, even by accident**
It’s taken about three months, and goodness knows how many last-minute rearrangements, but finally the wife has consented to our rule that we do not start properly planning – let alone implementing anything – until both halves of a couple are in the room.
Sometimes the female half is firmly in the financial driving seat. Usually they’re not. Always they appreciate at least being listened to. Well, until now.
Mrs B is not only reluctant, she’s positively petrified. If she were a tortoise, you wouldn’t be able to tempt her out of her shell for all the leafy greens or sensual neck rubs in all the world. She’s a perfect example of why, from a short-term business point of view, it’s better to ditch the rule, and why, from a doing-a-half-decent-job point of view, the rule is unbreakable.
Felicity with the family finances does not come from treating them like a gentleman’s club. Appeasement is anachronistic. Addressing insecurities around something so inescapable has inherent value. Especially as **the importance of one’s relationship with money doesn’t fade, but grows in step with one’s bank balance**.
‘Mr B has, I understand, set out the reasons for you being here.’
‘Yes. To do something with our savings. “Make our money work harder for us”, isn’t that what you said, darling?’ This is far too early to let Mr B say anything. I press on.
‘Good. At a high level, how do you feel about the general aims, the broad idea? Any reservations? Bits that are clear, bits that aren’t? Nagging doubts?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mrs B says, a little flustered. ‘I’m not built to understand such things. Mr B?’
‘No conferring!’ It’s an attempt at levity. It probably comes across as the height of inhumanity. Mrs B seems to be shaking a little. I attempt reassurance.
**‘I promise you that you possess all the building blocks you need to understand all that’s worth understanding.’**
‘What do Blackheath people do?’
I’m briefly taken aback by the beautifully unashamed example of something people usually dance ungracefully around. Delegating the decision making about how best to turn one’s resources into a good life is one thing. Delegating the understanding of the mechanisms to one’s neighbours – and not even a real neighbour, but some sort of Platonic form of the sort of people that live in a particular sort of suburb of London – is quite another.
Though it’s a story as familiar as it is frustrating. Frustrating because I know the delegation (or avoidance) problem will run much deeper still.
‘You’re a Blackheath person. You tell me. What do *you* do?’
‘Sorry…’ she says with the clipped middle-class polite perturbation that confirms she’s anything but sorry, ‘that’s why I’m here isn’t it?’
‘Not really. No. Blackheath is, I’m sure, a lovely place to live, but it’s not the best halo to use as a guiding star for investment decisions.’
‘I know it’s difficult,’ I continue, ‘but it’s really important. Like the cars along your road… there may be certain common qualities to a lot of them, but they’re not all the same. Because they’re trying to achieve different things. Here a couple that enjoy driving down country lanes hearing the exhaust bounce off the walls, there a junior football team in need of ferrying about, everywhere an emergency dash to stock up on avocados…’
You’d be hard pressed to interpret the look Mrs B fires back as anything other than irritated. I’m really not cut out for this, I think. But it’d be even ruder to resign in the middle of a meeting.
‘Let’s start from the beginning. **You want to use your money to achieve things. It’s best to achieve important things, to the extent money can. So what’s important about money to you? How does having it make life objectively better than not?** Most simply assume it does, but never break down how.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. A roof over one’s head. Food on one’s table. Holidays here and there. A comfortable retirement…’
The words may be calmly, methodically, automatically, delivered, but the space behind her eyes is screaming. Screaming something about status, or at least the appearance of it. Her knuckles are screaming too; gripping the slick surface of the boardroom table like the neck of an unruly child in a stress-laden sortie through a supermarket.
My silence is an encouragement to dig a little deeper beyond the surface of ‘stuff’. It works. Sort of.
‘I guess what’s really important is security and then aiming for financial freedom on top of that.’
Freedom and security. Security and freedom. You could turn this answer to the ‘what’s important about money?’ question into a mind-reading trick. Like guessing someone will say 7 when asked to pick a number between 1 and 10.
It’s what everyone says. No one ever says status, somewhat ironically because they’re embarrassed to do so, despite so readily using their income and expenditure to try to convey it. No one ever says health either. Yet **when asked directly, all say they’d trade an eye-watering sum for an eradication of the health issues caused by the postural or stressful impositions they endured to earn those eye-watering sums in the first place**.
And of course no one ever says meaning, despite the incessant existential bafflement caused by a failure of their spending decisions to bring it about, even though such decisions never really aim for anything else.
I want to ask ‘What if Blackheath people are unhappy?’
There’s no great evidence that Blackheath’s middle-class, middle-England, self-conscious peeking out of the curtains is a great inducement of either the Scandinavian stoic acceptance or Latin American *joie de vivre* that tend to characterise happy places.
I nearly do.
But I bottle it.
They’re not clients yet and history suggests they never will be if I go down that road. Plus, Mrs B’s nails are long; I’m not sure the table will survive unscathed.
‘**The trouble with security and freedom,’ I cautiously opine, ‘is that they’re important feelings, but we think of them as pots of gold at the end of a checklist of things that can be purchased. When really of course they’re mindsets**. And they’re cultivated by ways of thinking that often become clearer only when we dump the checklist illusion. As you can imagine, this job gets me close to countless people with what must be ‘financial freedom’ on any mathematical measure. Yet they often don’t feel free. And plenty, also, who find false security in narrowing the range of things they allow to bring themselves joy, rather than increasing them – be it modes of transport, or wine, or postcodes…’
I hope she doesn’t take the dig *too* personally.
‘Or,’ I continue, almost certainly injudiciously, ‘whose insecurity trumps their financial security so much that the more money and possessions they have actually decrease their feelings of security, because they’re always on alert to losing their castle, aware subconsciously at least that its foundations lay entirely outside of themselves.’
Mrs B mutters some words that translated from her tribal language, amount to ‘I’d rather appear to be rich than be rich’, ‘I’d rather my goals were set by other people’, and ‘If I spend only on what I really want, people won’t know I’m loaded!’
To which I don’t say: ‘**Chasing a freedom that one already possesses in the name of living someone else’s life is a dangerous game**. If Viktor Frankl could preserve his ultimate freedom to choose his reactions to circumstances while living in a concentration camp and if Epictetus could find security in his wisdom despite being a slave, I’m pretty sure we can achieve either without being in the world’s wealthiest 0.01% and living behind enormous gates. “If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it.” ’
Instead, I say something about my job being to help people question the common patterns of thinking that lead to so many squandering resources on stuff that doesn’t work. Mrs B says something about train times back to Blackheath.
# #67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream
27th December, 2021
**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* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**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.
Despite the whole thing being very specifically secular, more lost-faithers followed; each one there for the promises of promised lands, rather than the [neuroplasticity training](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is).
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?
As I wrote right at [the start of the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3):
> 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.
**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 [the question wasn’t worth asking](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#profound-or-trivial). Possibly both.
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
In [Idiot Money #65](https://news.moneyblind.net/65-denunciation-is-still-attachment-the-abc-of-money-part-17), 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.
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**.
As we’ve seen (especially in Idiot Money [#31](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2) and [#32](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)), 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.
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.’
* ‘Some sort of middling amount of material goods – “[knowing my number](https://news.moneyblind.net/19-whats-your-number)” is clearly the answer.’
* ‘Always say yes!’ ‘Always say no!’ ‘[Always say yes in these circumstances, and no in these other ones](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money)!’
**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.
[Because](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.1) **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.
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.
However, this requires paying attention. And as we saw in [Idiot Money #8](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money), 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 [Idiot Money #41](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), **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.**
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.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.3-there-is-always-an-underlying-emotional-reward#investing-in-a-meaningful-life):
> 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.
{% content-ref url="/pages/k8mrrXKR2BBSuWBjS9gl" %}
[#72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good](/72-the-abc-of-money-part-19-denunciation-bad-renunciation-good)
{% endcontent-ref %}
# #68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?
3rd January, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that investing like a non-idiot has almost nothing to do with actual investment knowledge, including:
* succumbing to the siren calls of simplistic substitutes for actually worthwhile advice;
* why financial decisions outside the very limited realm of making changes to an investment portfolio are so much more important than those in it; and
* something about kettlebells.
**Why, given the aim of these articles is to get people investing like non-idiots, I rarely write about investment management.**
I occasionally get asked if the balance in these newsletters between the philosophy and the strictly investment stuff isn’t a bit off. Where are all the [charts](https://news.moneyblind.net/17-how-to-choose-better-investments)?!
Other than [this series of posts](https://news.moneyblind.net/#all-investments-are-gambles-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing), and the [listicle last New Year](https://news.moneyblind.net/15-new-year-old-message), I’ve hardly touched on appeasing the hunger for tips, tricks, tactics, and magic beans from the ‘Just tell me what to invest in!’ crowd.
This balance simply reflects the relative importance of a wiser worldview and magic beans in getting a grip on and making the most of your financial circumstances.
How to invest like a non-idiot isn’t a big secret. Anyone that tells you it is is almost certainly trying to sell you on something – probably a product, or their status as a financial genius.
Because the investment advice anyone ever really needs comprises about 30 things not to do and about three things to do, it’s perfectly primed for clickbait articles. ‘These six investment mistakes are killing your gains! Number five will surprise you!’
There are millions of articles telling you not to try to time the markets, that active investment management doesn’t work, and to spend less than you earn.
(And while there are bafflingly fewer on not spending money on stuff that doesn’t make your life better, there are enough of them too).
There are just as many millions of people reading them, and then ignoring them, while sounding either like an addict (‘Just this once’) or someone primed to fall for a scam (‘That advice is for the idiots, but I’m smart enough to make it work.’)
It’s almost as if these articles are completely pointless. As if nobody actually sets out to spend more than they earn, or even if they did, would stop doing so because a Tweet told them to.
### Consistent and easy non-idiot outcomes come from non-idiot brains
Investing like a non-idiot is much the same as doing anything like a non-idiot. It’s much less about investing and much, much more about not being an idiot.
This, in broad terms, is about becoming [better at formulating problems, and at solving them](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.3).
In most things, but [***especially***](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4) when it comes to money, this is about seeing your world and how you interact with it more clearly.
This about becoming less self-deceived.
When you build a better relationship with money by building a brain that’s less prone to [succumbing to self-deceptive, self-destructive beliefs around money](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3), all that terrifying investment stuff that inspires the call to just be told what to do all just… vanishes.
The hard part isn’t finding the ‘right’ person to tell you the ‘right’ thing to do. It’s recognising that the very wiring that made you believe that the million and first person to tell you the same thing is going to make the difference is the very thing you want to challenge, and change.
### What about expensive delegation?
That’s all well and good for advice plucked from the online swamp, I hear you cry. But what about proper investment advice. The sort you pay for. The sort you (probably unwittingly) **pay more for than everything else you buy each and every year, and that for most people inflates in line with market returns and additional contributions** – easily double-digits a year.
This used to be my job (though pleasingly, never at a place that pulled that insidious inflation trick).
This certainly has its uses. It’s very often worth it, even at such extraordinary prices.
Yet even those that have not only been told what to do, and paid tens of thousands a year for it, and not only to a well-meaning adviser, but also a well-trained one (by luck more than judgment probably, given most do so somewhat out of panic, or at least ignorance)… then yes, they will be in a healthier financial position…
**But if you think they’ve stopped worrying about money, and stopped making dumb financial decisions, then my entire time in financial advice tells you you’d be mistaken**.
‘Peace of mind’ that you have a non-insane investment selection or the numerical ability to ‘retire’ isn’t the same as peace of mind that you’re comfortable and confident living with money in a non-insane way, or that you have a purpose that would make retirement anything other [than a really dumb idea](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#retirement-is-a-terrible-goal).
Avoidance of the worst investment errors isn’t the same as making the most of your money – leveraging what’s likely a fortune of historic proportions to not only avoid the gutter but reach some starry potential of an all-round healthy life packed full of flow (as if there’s a kind of ‘life’ that isn’t ‘all-around’…)
**Financial decisions outside the very limited realm of making changes to an investment portfolio are so much more important than those in it**.
Yes, it doesn’t take a huge investment pot for wiser investment decisions to have a disproportionate effect on the size of those numbers relative to all the other ones in your life.
But unless you’re so chronically insecure that the size of the numbers has an equally outsized effect on the quality of your life, investment decisions make up only the teeniest tiniest fraction of the financial decisions that both shape and express your overall wellbeing.
And because money is intertwined with almost all of your daily activities, unless you somehow do nothing to make it, don’t spend it, and don’t think about it, those daily money-infused activities count for something far beyond what can be counted on a calculator.
### Financial health is like physical health
Something similar happens with physical health, and while matters of physical health can get pretty triggering, they’ve got nothing on money, so [it’s often a more effective path to seeing the same thing](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same).
‘Tell me what to do to be physically healthy’ is even easier than ‘Tell me what to invest in’. No one needs *those* articles… though there are of course even more millions of them.
The world’s physical health isn’t suffering because of a lack of telling people that sitting for more than 6-8 hours a day is bad and kettlebells are good, or that there’s no such thing as a sweet tooth, or the thousand other things that are too obvious to bother spelling out.
Everyone already both knows what to do and what they’re doing. No one seriously thinks through their physical situation and concludes it’s a surprise they’re not feeling as wonderful in their body as they want to. They’ll keep *unthinkingly* believing it though. Just like they’ll keep believing in the power of ‘starting Monday’ to change it.
### Control, experiment
The key to better financial or physical health is taking control, not ceding it. Specifically, taking control of the decision-making machinery that makes you do idiotic things because you didn’t want to think them through, that, had you thought them through, you wouldn’t’ve done.
Fighting the ‘right’ version of being told what to do isn’t nearly as important as seeing more clearly what to do, with undistorted, non-deceptive vision.
Do that, and the living is easy.
# #69: Red Pill Financial Planning: Escaping the Money Matrix
10th January, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that financial certainty isn’t what you think it is, including:
* how everybody wants certainty right up until the point they actual have it;
* living heroically through learning financial kung fu; and
* possibly reading a little bit too much into the Matrix films.
**We crave nothing more than certainty. Yet actual certainty is a terrifying abyss, devoid of drama, and hope. What we want instead is a heroic capacity to be comfortable amid uncertainty, for which crystal-ball inevitability is an inhuman and unworthy proxy.**
There’s a scene in the new Matrix film (don’t worry, no spoilers!) where our hero Keanu is on a treadmill in a dark basement gym, being about as unheroic as it’s possible to be.
Treadmill-trapped Thomas Anderson is awfully far from the free-flying Neo who’s spent three films fulfilling his potential and saving the world as a side-effect, all while being a badass advert for the exceptional talents of both his tailor and his hairdresser.
The aging Mister Anderson is stuck going through the motions on an unheroic and unhedonic (and unsubtly metaphorical) treadmill: one mindless, one-track machine atop another.
Needless to say, Keanu escapes the treadmill, as well as the equally anodyne disco lights, banging tunes, and drinks in triangular glasses that make up the rest of this picture of modern Matrix-mapped ‘success’.
He follows the white rabbit.
And of course he pops the red pill: the choice everyone wants to make, but few enough do that a multi-million-dollar film franchise has built up around inspiring us to do so.
### Do you really want to know where your path leads?
No one wants the blue pill.
Yet if it weren’t clearly so damn universally tempting, *despite being clearly so damn universally unwanted* – The Matrix wouldn’t’ve been made, let alone become so popular.
The point of the blue pill is spelled out by Trinity in the first film before the blue pill has even made an appearance: ‘You have been down there, Neo. You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that's not where you want to be.’
And later, in the mouth of Morpheus: ‘You take the blue pill, the story ends.’
Everyone knows where a treadmill goes because a treadmill goes nowhere.
The blue pill is algorithmic, mechanistic, certainty.
There’s a reason ‘it is inevitable’ is Agent Smith’s villainous catchphrase.
And yet, as unremarkably as it slithers off the tongue of a villain, so does some abstract notion of ‘inevitability’ underlie so many of our money-based actions.
That we crave certainty is hardly news.
It’s the foundation of most psychoanalysis and just about every financial-planning business, even most of the ones that advertise that they’re doing nothing of the sort.
When it comes to financial planning, given it’s what 99% of the market comes to a financial planner for in the first place, *not* selling certainty – either outright or in some sort of subtle stochastic packaging – is a punchy and likely unprofitable move (and screw the fact that [craving certainty is at the heart of most people’s failure to make more of their money](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3)!)
And yet… there’s something awfully strange about it.
**What’s fascinating about our craving for certainty is that certainty, when spelled out, horrifies us.**
Imagine you knew precisely how your life was going to go and then spent however many decades, day after day, sort of detachedly watching it play out. Can there be a more reliable recipe for making a life feel mundane, miserable, and meaningless?
Would you still watch sports if you knew the score? Would you still play Wordle if you knew the answer?
The moments we really want are those when we’re in flow – those characterised by a challenge that lies at the edge of our capability. And yet so many dedicate their lives to money in a way that removes all semblance of any meaningful challenge. (This isn’t about glamourising aestheticism, of course, as we covered [a couple of weeks ago](https://news.moneyblind.net/67-the-abc-of-money-part-18-addicted-to-a-dream)).
To crave certainty, as the Matrix spells out, is to run from reality: to live more like a machine than a human.
With minds frazzled by momentary overwhelm, we kid ourselves into believing that our desire for a breath-catching pause is actually a desire for a life-stopping stagnation… forgetting that if we had actually arrived at a state where we (and the world, and our interactions with it) weren’t going to change ever again, it’d not only be suicidally boring, but we’d be the first human in history to do so.
(Recall the futile idiocy of the ‘Arrival Fallacy’ from [Idiot Money #53](invalid://) and why retirement is famously such a terrible idea for the majority of people from [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#retirement-is-a-terrible-goal).)
### Down the rabbit hole
We’re drawn to chase rabbits down holes precisely because we don’t know what’s down them.
The stories that grab us, from myths to fairytales, to blockbuster films about living in a simulation, the ones that wrench us from ‘reality’ do so best when they speak to something that is somehow magically ‘more real’.
There’s a reason the hero’s journey story archetype is so magnetic. **We’re drawn to heroes because they venture into the woods, not because they take a look at the darkness and decide they’ll come back later when someone’s razed the trees and built a resort**.
The point of the hero archetype is that unlike the villain, the hero recognises ability, if it’s to mean anything, is tethered to responsibility. The villain is a ‘[freedom to](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for)’ character. They use their ability to say f-you to the world. The hero is a ‘[freedom for](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for#freedom-for)’ character. They use their ability to help the world in the way that only they can (usually after having actively rejected the predictable path of the sort of beach bum or hedonist that modern retirement dreams are made of).
We crave money for the promise of synthetic certainty… a certainty that goes up in smoke the second something human happens, like a health scare, or the chance to do work that you actually think isn’t completely pointless.
Far more valuable than the numbers in a bank account are your ability to learn financial kung fu.
### Learn kung fu
**What do you do if you have everything and still feel lost?**
The typical multi-millionaire client of a financial adviser is no more lost than anyone else. But they are more aware of it. Because it’s harder to keep believing that more money’s the answer when you’ve got more than basically anyone that’s ever lived.
Living in closer alignment with reality, it turns out, is quite important.
And the mechanistic certainty of the blue pill is far from real.
We care about things feeling ‘real’.
Imagine you feel you are in a committed long-term relationship, though your other half (unbeknownst to you) is being… less committed. Is it better to find out, or not? If you’re like most people, you’ll reject the soma of unshakable, certain, contentment, and plunge into the pain and suffering of red-pill reality.
Your story shouldn’t end in bemoaning the loss of certainty and the injustice of the world, however. The best stories inspire you to learn kung fu – learn [how to dance with the uncertainty](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money) – to equip yourself to deal with whatever may arise, rather than crossing your fingers that what will arise will be a smooth line, perfectly contoured to you doing an impression of a sloth.
In financial terms, this means **get a grip on your** [philosophy of money](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2).
‘But what is philosophy?’ asked Epictetus, ‘Doesn't it simply mean preparing ourselves for what may come?’
> A sound financial philosophy better equips us to live with money. All investing is preparation, and because we’re investing – preparing – for living, the preparation of our money is inescapably intertwined with the preparation of our minds. **The point of philosophy is not to inform, but to form**.
Living well with money is a case of using it to equip you to handle increasingly complex challenges, not to fuel your retreat from them.
# #70: The nasty narrowness of number-governed living
17th January, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that money inspires us to narrow our vision in a heap of ways, and they’re all massively unhelpful… there is nothing more important to acknowledge, accept, and alter.
*Because spaced repetition is cool (and because apparently I'm not above doing a clip show) for this, the 70th edition of Idiot Money, a recap of some stuff from the earlier days.*
#### 1. Living well with money is more about humans than money, so there’s more to learn from human-centric disciplines than investment textbooks
In [Idiot Money #20](https://news.moneyblind.net/20-7-magnificent-money-lessons-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-money), we looked at seven different disciplines and their major lesson to living better with money:
1. **Economics**: Becoming wiser with money is in part a process of seeing opportunity costs as clearly as monetary ones. And – because thoroughly analysing opportunity costs with every decision is impossible – of establishing them as the decision-making default.
2. **Philosophy**: The unexamined life is not worth living: examining your life is necessary to living it well, and examining your money choices is at the heart of this process.
3. **Psychology**: However well psychological nudges work, they all start too late. They save us from symptoms, but do little to cure the causes. Even the best-intentioned behaviour changes are doomed to stumble if the underlying worldview – which is being continually reinforced faster than any behavioural prescriptions can keep up with – remains looking at the world in a distorted, self-deceptive way.
4. **Neuroscience**: How you do anything is how you do everything. Neuroplasticity is the magic link between seemingly insignificant actions and the hugely significant shaping of your life story.
5. **Psychoanalysis**: Becoming an editor of your life story. Where psychoanalysis is most beneficial is if understanding unhelpful beliefs (e.g. as wording implanted by your mother or father, or as a symbol of an underlying fear or insecurity) makes it easier to catch them.
6. **Sociology**: The difference between society and culture. In a society, belonging comes from rules; in a culture, it comes from traditions. Rules are something you have. Traditions are something you express, and help to create, or evolve. Where societies are bound together by shared external goods, cultures are bound by shared internal values.
7. **History**: However we express our struggles with using money to live better lives, they’re all simply variations on an unchanging theme. To study history is to remember this and to get a sense of perspective. History is the world’s greatest ever science experiment, disguised as a series of art exhibitions.
#### 2. The merits of money are negative
\[From [Idiot Money #21](https://news.moneyblind.net/21-the-merits-of-money-are-negative)]
* Money enables Good Things at best unreliably or fleetingly. But a certain level of money is insurance against Bad Things.
* Cheapest usually signifies worst. But most expensive usually signifies waste.
* One benefit of money is that we *don’t* have to do things *because* of it. For example, having enough savings so you don’t have to take the first (possibly unsuitable) job you can following redundancy is great. But it’s not the same as actually finding work that energises you, rather than work you endure for a few decades in the hope of not having to do it one day.
* Much as it’s a bit crap at directly leading someone to live a fulfilling, flourishing, flowing life, money is a great tool for the sort of clearer seeing that brings this about. It is the examined life that is worth living, and there’s no easier way to examine your life choices than by reflecting on your credit-card statement.
#### 3. Your most important money inheritance isn’t financial, but psychological
\[From [Idiot Money #22](https://news.moneyblind.net/22-the-psychoanalysis-of-money-or-how-to-screw-up-your-childrens-financial-worldview)]
* Are you telling your story through money, or is an inherited and imposed money story telling itself through you?
* 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.
* Come from a place where money meant meaning, and you’ll head off that way in search of it too. 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.
#### 4. We fail to make more of our money futures, because we’re ashamed to look at our money pasts
\[From [Idiot Money #23](http://invalid//)]
* A large part of our resistance to change is clinging to comforting, but disabling, beliefs that ‘that’s just how I am’. If we weren’t so desperate for certainty – for which money is the ultimate pin-up star – it would be a lot harder to sell it to us.
* Asking someone to contemplate what their spending says about their life inspires more terror than asking them to contemplate their or their partner’s possible death. And yet, assuming you actually traded money for things that made your life better, wouldn’t reliving those moments bring you joy?
#### 5. My favourite way to get started thinking about investing
\[From [Idiot Money #24](https://news.moneyblind.net/24-my-favourite-investing-framework-part-1) and [#28](https://news.moneyblind.net/28-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-2-the-approach)]
* All investments are gambles. Internalising the implications of this is the starting point for wiser investment choices.
* All the investment stuff that’s relevant to you isn’t complicated.
* Your brain is a prediction machine. It allocates your resources in the hope of yielding Goodness. This is why learning to see more clearly is at the heart of all practical financial planning – because while financial forecasts are usually a waste of time, money affects the predictions being made by your brain more than anything else.
* Given this, it’s probably better to stop being scared of bets and start working out how to make better ones. Especially in the context of the two big questions of investing: how to start, and what to invest in.
* The first and most important thing to learn about gambling was this: it’s not about picking winners. It’s about spotting mispriced percentages. It’s about odds, not outcomes. Successful gamblers know long-term profit comes from judging where the implied chances of each outcome happening are wrong, not from predicting the right outcome.
#### 6. Because money choices are life choices, making better ones starts with seeing more clearly; luckily, we have a proven, centuries-old framework for doing this
\[From [Idiot Money #25](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)]
* To see money more clearly requires a systematic approach to insightful vision, not mental shortcuts. You want a practice, not tactics; a [clearer vision, not a cleverer app](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.4).
* How do you see more clearly if your vision is so caked in mental mud that you can’t even see that you don’t see clearly? It’s not like people set out to be delusional, greedy, or hating. But it happens all the same. We need to tackle what makes these arise, not howl into the void in our lives created when they do.
* Overcoming craving, or greed, isn’t about denial. Believing it is is why diets don’t work. The typical approach to overcoming aversion is to either denounce the object of hatred harder, or to suppress it. Yet denunciation is just fanaticism for angry people, and suppression is subconscious superglue.
#### 7. Tackling the way money supercharges our self-deception should be top of every person’s to-do list
\[From [Idiot Money #29](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)]
* All of life is threatened by self-deception. That’s how life works. You get to choose to succumb or see differently. That’s how living well works.
* Nothing inspires or entrenches this self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour like your relationship with money.
* Our self-deceptions lead us to use money as relief from pain, as opposed to freedom from entrapment, and to succumb to the self-destruction it enables, rather than to embrace the opportunities it creates.
* The forces that shape your relationship with money are a constant threat to your sense of agency over your life… and therefore a constant threat of misery. Yet these same resources should be a source of opportunity for joyful, flourishing, fun.
#### 8. The needs-wants distinction is needless and wanting; speak instead of wants and addictions
\[From [Idiot Money #29](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1)]
* A far more useful categorisation – in the context of living an examined life, in a bid to live a better one – is not ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, but ‘wants’ and ‘addictions’. Wants being ways of allocating your resources that makes your life (as a whole, it being a life, and you being a human) better, and addictions being ways that make it worse, whether that’s wasting other opportunities, or literally poisoning yourself.
* We fail to beat most of our addictions because we don’t treat them like addictions. Even when they’re trashing our health and raiding our wallets in the process.
* We fail to challenge our 'wants', despite the facts that, as humans, they’re guaranteed to change over time, and if we really wanted them, we’d invite challenges, not defensively avoid them. A major reason we fail to do so is because we forget that they are never the isolated events we kid ourselves into believing they are. That’s not how brains work. How you do anything is how you do everything. Every action makes one pathway in your brain easier to travel down next time, and another one harder.
* Money is the strongest spotlight we have to shine on such things… but without direction, it’s also the source of our blindness.
#### 9. And finally…
\[From [Idiot Money #26](https://news.moneyblind.net/26-consider-the-pineapple-the-perfect-symbol-of-idiot-money)]
* Simply a wonderfully instructive (and silly) story of the history of the pineapple as a status symbol. And another about how to buy indoor plants like an idiot). And another about how eating lobster used to be thought of like being forced to eat rats.
# #71: Getting into Financial Flow
24th January, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding what effective financial management is ultimately all about, including:
* what it is that in the end everybody’s trying to do with their money… and remembering this when it matters most;
* the three major mistakes that screw this up; and
* forgetting the most basic question to ask of anything… let alone your life choices: does it work?
**The point of having resources – of which money is the most obvious and the easiest to control – is to turn them into living well: living in a way that makes you feel alive, rather than just not dead yet.**
If you’re anything like me, what leaves you feeling most alive is dancing on the threshold between your ability and an opportunity to do something cool, in a way that turns current ability into bigger future ability. Being in what we’ve come to know as *flow*. That all-play, no-thought, meditative-yet-hyper-aware state where you can maybe just about claim to be fulfilling your potential as a unique, ass-kicking human in some way. And bonus points if this expression of self also makes the world that bit more wonderful as a side-effect.
The man whose name has become synonymous with flow, or at least would have, if anyone could pronounce it, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (*Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high* if, like me, you still forget despite having said it a thousand times).
As he wrote in *Flow*: ‘Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.’
He continued:
> **Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times** \[…] The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. \[…] For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
He reminds us that:
> Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur.
And that:
> Gaining control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.
You don’t need a modern-day researcher to tell you that flow is cool.
We’ve known it for centuries and ignored it for just as long.
Csikszentmihalyi just gave us extra graphs to ignore just as we did thousands of years of accumulated philosophical wisdom and the messages our bodies desperately scream into the voids between our ears when we’re living how we know we should… and shouldn’t.
**We like to fulfil even a pica of our potential a lot more than we like to just trundle through the motions of the day without being struck by disaster. So when it comes to how we use our money, why do we choose the latter?**
Why do we choose to sacrifice the chance to fulfil potential on the altar of avoiding impoverishment?
Why do we choose to shirk the responsibilities of being both richer than just about everyone that’s ever lived, and having more opportunity to easily do worthwhile things with those riches?
Why do we desperately hoard resources in the name of ‘security’, despite the inescapable facts that if your ‘security’ comes from hoarding, one, it’s impossible to [arrive at](http://invalid//), because hoarding is driven by a blind, insatiate, insecure, craving for ‘more’, and two, it can never be secure anyway, because stuff can disappear in a way that character cannot?
If we made wiser decisions with money, both our lives and the world would be better off. **We don’t *****want***** to do dumb shit with money. So why do we?**
We don’t do it because we don’t know enough about money, or investing, or even ourselves, in [the way we typically think about ‘knowing’ about something](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2). Which of course makes the endless seeking out of the next [article full of tips and tricks](https://news.moneyblind.net/68-what-hot-new-financial-knowledge-are-you-likely-to-find-in-2022) perhaps a little pointless.
We do it because we’re self-deceived.
**The problem with self-deception, of course, is that – by definition – no one thinks it applies to them. So they keep looking in the wrong place for solutions to it**.
As we saw in [Idiot Money #56](https://news.moneyblind.net/56-treating-your-hidden-money-addictions):
> If you misunderstand the problem, your solution is bound to fail, and you won’t know why. So you’ll keep trying the same dumb thing over and over again, wasting your money, your time, your energy, and therefore your life, in the process… none the wiser why you never became what you could have become.
> Which explains why, despite a consumption-based solution to an existential unease never having worked before, people will keep on trying it again, and again, and again…
We ‘know’ money, and investing, and ourselves, and the world, and how they all fit together – and could all fit together in a more beautiful flowing way – with only half a brain. (A topic we’ll shortly be spending a lot of time exploring, with the help of possibly the finest non-fiction book I’ve ever read, Iain McGilchrist’s magisterial *The Master and His Emissary*.)
**Becoming wiser with money is primarily about being less idiotic with it. We may not be idiots, but when it comes to money, we do almost incessantly idiotic things**.
Self-deception is the worst. Admitting that you’ve been deceived by someone else is tough enough (hi Brexit!). Admitting that you’ve been deceived by yourself is nigh-on impossible.
First you’re trying to spot the deception with the same eyes that are deceiving you. Second, there’s at least a hint of an admittance that you are not completely and utterly perfect in every way. Bugger that.
The way we cede control to these self-deceptions is subtle; that’s how self-deception works. Mental mirrors can be uncomfortable to look at. Rear-view ones that force us to reflect upon what we’ve done with our lives are all the more so.
However, **making better decisions with money, spending more time in flow, living a freakishly flourishing, potential-fulfilling life, requires that we dissolve this self-deception**. It doesn’t matter how sane the stuff we layer on top is (e.g. investing in the ‘right’ fund, or ‘denying’ ourselves worthless junk). Layering sane stuff on top is pointless if the mind on which we’re layering the sanity is still deceived. It’s better to learn that your body genuinely prefers broccoli to biscuits than to wage a never-ending war against the hyperpalatable voodoo of the confectionary industry.
There are three main self-deceptions around money that hold us back:
* [**Believing money is something you have, rather than part of who you are**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode). Substituting ‘having’ something for ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ something never works. Yet because we’re stuck in the mode of believing it does, even when we see it doesn’t work, our default answer is to try again.
* [**Believing other people’s money defaults can be valuably adopted as your own**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#thinking-v-unthinking). Conscious choices are better choices. This isn’t about constant cognitive vigilance; it’s about slowing down and cultivating a state of effortless effort where conscious choices become comfortable, not something we flee from. ‘Although the flow experience appears to be effortless \[…] any lapse in concentration will erase it.’
* [**Believing the importance of money lies in numbers, rather than narrative**](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path). It’s (almost) never about the numbers. When making a money decision, if you’re focused on the numbers, e.g. as a judgment of value, or stating you can ‘afford’ something, chances are high you’re doing it wrong.
Defeating these takes work, because rewiring mental patterns always does, especially those that are being constantly reinforced by societal influences and the words we use to talk about money.
**‘The Good Life,’ wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘is the one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.’ The way we live with money, we are inspired not by love (either of ourselves, or by extension others and the world) but by phantom chases after our dream’s shadows, and we’re less guided by knowledge and more led by whoever best exploits our blindness.**
# #72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
31st January, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding the difference between denouncing money as bad and evil and simply renouncing the silly games we play with it, including:
* checking in on whether, if you’re not enjoying playing a game and the only prize is to keep playing, you should keep playing;
* how we all already live in palaces;
* and some perhaps overly liberal quoting of the endlessly marvellous modern monk, Matthieu Ricard.
*This is part 19 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**The crucial difference between denunciation and renunciation and why playing a different game is a better bet than bemoaning the same one while still ceding control over your life choices to its rules.**
All financial advice essentially boils down to one question: how do I best turn my financial resources into a ‘Good Life’ (whatever that may mean to each of us).
This equation has three parts:
1\. The left-hand side: your resources (crudely, your money, time, and energy; for why it’s best to both focus on these three, and, within these three, money, see [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.2)).
2\. The right-hand side: your Good Life (whatever that may look like to you, but essentially something that is flourishing, flowing, and fulfilling, and not something that while it may be stuff-full, is not soulful). Of course, to believe ‘the Good Life’ is an ‘outcome’ to be ‘arrived’ at is to commit the [Arrival Fallacy](http://invalid//); this isn’t important here: the point is the overriding purpose at which you’re aiming the allocation of your resources.
3\. The bit in the middle: your ongoing process for turning one into the other.
**The great puzzle of financial planning is why having more on the left-hand side doesn’t reliably lead to a better outcome on the right-hand side.**
And to remember in the moments that matter most that real fun comes in the middle bit. How do you engage in the participatory process of living with money in a way that’s focused not on the ‘having’ at either end, but the ‘becoming’ in the ongoing, perennially present middle?
Part of the problem is because the way we commonly ‘know’ money encourages us to believe that *having* more *automatically* translates to a better outcome, that more money is, in practice, *the definition* of a Good Life. Only truly first-rate idiots say this out loud, of course, but as we’ve seen so often, the most costly dangers are the ones we don’t see.
Over the last couple of posts in this series, with the help of Marcus Aurelius’ notion that it’s possible to live well, *even in* a palace, and how this relates to the origin story of the Buddha, we’ve looked at how denouncing the notion that the Goodness of a life is measured in monetary terms is to play the same silly game as those that swear it is.
**Those believing that the Good Life is the expensive life and those believing money is bad and evil, and that therefore aestheticism is noble and virtuous have a shared worldview**: judge everything in numbers terms. They ask themselves: ‘How well am I living?’ and look to their paycheque, their bank balance, or their savings rate for the answer. As if they were a machine.
We introduced the idea that to actually live with money more effectively, the answer was not to denounce anything, but to renounce (a la Socrates) living in an unexamined way, and to renounce (a la the Buddha) living while looking through self-deceptive lenses.
To renounce playing a game just because everybody else is... **because what’s the point of playing a game you’re not really enjoying if the only prize is to keep playing?**
To remember, per [Idiot Money #67](https://news.moneyblind.net/67-the-abc-of-money-part-18-addicted-to-a-dream), that it’s not the particular in-vogue *object* of attachment that’s important, but the way in which you become attached.
To remember that you jump to conclusions, however silly, when you see no saner alternative. That narrowing of vision is what addiction is about ([recall](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5#the-compulsion-con) that it’s not, as commonly thought about, and therefore poorly treated, about compulsive desire).
Renunciation of the silly game is the saner alternative. So what does it mean and what are its implications?
### Renunciation good
As Stephen Batchelor wrote in *Alone With Others*, we can get a lot more out of the Buddha’s origin story, and, indeed, of Marcus Aurelius’s quip about being able to live well *even* in a palace, when we use them to question whether living life in ‘having’ mode is always so smart.
> The essential element involved in ‘renunciation’ is our forsaking the values of having and awakening to the consciousness of being. \[…] Genuine renunciation is not a partial or conditional transformation of certain attitudes or beliefs; it involves a radical change of the entire personality.
> The final departure from the palace, which is also referred to as the ‘renunciation’, is thus a symbol for the radical shift from the dimension of having to that of being.
A radical change such as this is precisely what we’re aiming for by all this [looking AT our relationship with money, rather than merely looking THROUGH it](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is).
A Batchelor continues:
> It would be stretching the imagination too far to suppose that \[the Buddha's] father's attempts at concealment had caused him to literally have never seen or heard of old-age, sickness, and death. The point is that, in having his attention constantly diverted to possibilities within the sphere of having, he had never realized the deeper existential meaning of these phenomena. From this moment onwards he could no longer be contented with a pursuit of numerous particular achievements, for he was now confronted with the question of the meaning of life as a whole.
‘Having mode’ and ‘being (or becoming) mode’ aren’t good and bad, but problems arise when we get mixed up and have *modal confusion* – when we try to meet becoming needs with having things. Most of marketing is manipulating modal confusion: buy a Ferrari and be loved! Buy a house, be mature!
We all crave living in palaces, [especially in the modern, individualistic, West](https://news.moneyblind.net/63-a-problem-shared) – and we all do! To live in the palace is to live in having mode.
**But it’s not bloody working!**
If it were, the people I met as clients during my financial planning life would’ve been noticeably living better lives. Reader, they were not. Not worse. Just not better. Despite the fact they damn well should’ve been.
We want to leave this palace.
And we do that not by denouncing anything, but renouncing living in an unexamined way.
Marcus Aurelius, when he wrote ‘One can live well, even in a palace’ understood this. Especially when we remember that he was writing not to an audience (let alone one living two thousand years after his death) but to himself… the ‘palace’ isn’t the point; it was irrelevant to the game he was reminding himself he most wanted to be playing.
To remember that you’re living a human life, not going through mechanistic money-driven motions isn’t about finding a ‘middle way’ between two strategies for playing the same game. **The point is to see that if a game is foolish, there’s no damn point playing it in the first place**.
### Denunciation bad, renunciation good
Denunciation bad, renunciation good. Got it. I’ll put it on a poster and preach about it on Twitter.
But before I do, what, precisely, am I preaching about?
Let’s ask everyone’s favourite compassion-oozing French philosopher-monk Matthieu Ricard:
> Renunciation, at least as Buddhists use the term, is a much-misunderstood concept. It is not about giving up what is good and beautiful. How foolish that would be! Rather it is about disentangling oneself from the unsatisfactory and moving with determination toward what matters most. It is about freedom and meaning – freedom from mental confusion and self-centred afflictions, meaning through insight and loving-kindness.
Or, in the language of doing less dumb shit with money: disentangling yourself from wasting money on unsatisfactory stuff, and reallocating it towards what actually matters to you. **Stop wasting money to ‘justify’ the sacrifices you made to earn it, and indeed stop earning it in a way that feels sacrificial in the first place. Use money to make your life better instead**.
Let’s continue with Ricard, because this is both excellent, and important:
> For many people, the idea of renunciation and nonattachment implies a descent into a dank dungeon of asceticism and discipline. The depressing privation of life’s pleasures. A series of injunctions and bans that restrict one’s freedom to enjoy life.
Which is why it’s helpful to use the different labels of denunciation and renunciation.
> A Tibetan proverb says: ‘Speaking to someone about renunciation is like hitting a pig on the nose with a stick. He doesn’t like it at all.’
Anyone who’s ever suggested to someone in a financial-planning meeting that maybe their expenditure wasn’t completely and utterly optimal in every single way can confirm this is true.
> But true renunciation is more like a bird soaring into the sky when its cage is opened. Suddenly the endless concerns that had oppressed the mind are gone, allowing the free expression of inner potential. We are like weary marchers, carrying heavy bags filled with a combination of provisions and stones. Wouldn’t the smart thing be to set our bag down for a moment to sort it out and lighten our load?
How do we do this, Matthieu?
> To \[rid ourselves of dependency on the root causes of suffering], we first have to identify and recognize these causes and then become mindful of them in our daily life.
Like, say, [training ourselves to catch the words and phrases that are unconsciously constructing a world that’s less pleasant and less encouraging of flowing and flourishing than it could be](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5)?
> Renunciation, then, does not come down to saying no to all that is pleasant, to giving up strawberry ice cream or a nice hot shower after a long walk in the hills. It comes down to asking ourselves, with respect to certain aspects of our lives: ‘Is this going to make me happier?’ Genuine happiness – as opposed to contrived euphoria – endures through life’s ups and downs. To renounce is to have the daring and intelligence to scrutinize what we usually consider to be pleasures in order to determine if they really enhance our wellbeing.
And, because, as we saw in [Idiot Money #41](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), this is all about brain-training, while it’s tough at first, like sawing a piece of wood, it only gets easier… though beware blindly jumping into ‘renunciation’ as just the next ‘answer’ cab off the rank.
> Once you have sampled it, it becomes easier and easier. But there is no question of forcing oneself into renunciation, which would be doomed to failure. First you must clearly see its advantages and aspire to free yourself from that which you want to renounce. Once you’ve done that, renunciation is experienced as an act of liberation.
This last passage is reminiscent of someone at the opposite end of the compassionate spectrum to Ricard, Nassim Taleb: ‘You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.’ And of Bertie Russell, when he wrote: ‘There is, of course, no point in deliberately flouting public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a strength and a source of happiness.’
Next time, we’ll round this off by going one step deeper still, including how to use thinking about this to make more of your money by asking: if ‘The Buddha’ means ‘the awakened one’, what did he awake from?
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[#77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)](/77-seeing-your-financial-world-more-clearly-the-abc-of-money-part-20)
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# #73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choices
7th February, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that solutions to human puzzles are rarely for sale, including:
* The importance, having broken a decision down for analysis, of putting it back together again in context.
* The accumulated effect of seemingly innocent indulgences.
* And a couple of stories of rich idiots and their well-intentioned but ill-advised choice of toys.
**Solutions are rarely for sale. Shortcuts rarely take you where you want to go. Money conjures artificially narrow contexts, which make for narrow-minded decisions. To treat money mechanistically is to treat yourself as a machine.**
### The Parable of The Idiot Cyclist
I’m in a hipster coffee shop, in hipster East London, talking to a hipster friend-of-a-friend. We shall call him The Idiot Cyclist.
If you’ve spent much time around hipster coffee shops in hipster East London, you’ve probably met The Idiot Cyclist, or one of his identikit hipster bicycling brethren.
The Idiot Cyclist is proudly describing his ride. I’m particularly taken by the ‘Fizik carbon-fibre saddle’ that’s saved The Idiot Cyclist an apparently impressive 250 grams over the clearly inferior (albeit slightly more comfortable, and an awful lot less expensive) piece of crap that used to protect his package from his pole.
I’ve no idea what that 250 grams translates to in saved time-trial milliseconds, but given The Idiot Cyclist doesn’t actually compete in time trials, I’m not sure it matters.
In fact, I’m sure it *does* matter, just not in the way Idiot Cyclist believes it does.
It was my fault, really. I may have mentioned the importance, in terms of living well with money, of spending on stuff that really matters – [aligning what you care for with what you care about](https://news.moneyblind.net/51-align-what-you-care-for-with-what-you-care-about#what-you-care-for-and-about-is-a-better-focus-than-your-values) – and ignoring everything else.
Which triggered The Idiot Cyclist to jump a little injudiciously to the conclusion that he did precisely that – yes, the bike, the saddle, and other assorted accessorising ‘didn’t come cheap’, but he was a cyclist, he cared about cycling, and therefore it was more than justified.
Except…
Emanating from the Idiot Cyclists expatiations was more than a whiff of the Idiot Parents we met back in [Idiot Money #4](https://news.moneyblind.net/4-spending-gbp450k-on-being-bad-parents), who managed to align a full £450,000 a year of their earnings with the most important thing in their lives – their children – before realising one of the consequences of this was to be worse parents.
The Idiot Cyclist took up cycling more to get fit than to go fast. Lighter bikes go faster. Heavier bikes help you get fitter. In the context of its value as exercise equipment, buying an expensive saddle to save a few grams is like hiring a personal trainer to lift things for you.
There are other issues too, of course. This is London. Expensive bikes advertise more than the likely immorality of your job, or the fact you thought squeezing into lycra ill-equipped to deal with an executive paunch while wobbling through Bank on a five or six grand’s worth of Pinarello Dogma was a way to *enhance* your status.
They also attract thieves. And consequently simmering mental anguish.
Moreover, while The Idiot Cyclist was obviously not troubled by making money, he was troubled by making something of it. He hated his job. Yet he felt trapped in it. Partially because the mindset that pisses money away on unnecessary saddles pisses it away on other things too, until one day you end up fooled into believing that a Good Life that costs 10 grand a month is somehow smarter than one that costs a tenth of that.
Not to mention there were other things to buy that could have contributed more to his life, even if he wouldn’t think of some of them for a few decades.
There’s little point in getting somewhere faster if you don’t like where you end up.
I pootle around London on a bike with only one gear. As I approach the crest of the hill by the squash club, I’m peddling through a mixture of treacle and quicksand. In that moment, the parts of my brain in control of my quads and my cowardice think maybe more gears would’ve been a good idea. **But that bit of my brain, in that moment, is an idiot; it shouldn’t be left in charge of life choices.**
### The Parable of The Tennis Idiot
I’m hanging out in the club shop at my local tennis and squash club. I’m maybe eleven or twelve years old. In walks a sadly not-atypical member. We shall call him The Tennis Idiot.
The Tennis Idiot: ‘I need a new tennis racquet. What’s the most expensive one you’ve got?’
The shop owner (also one of the club pros): ‘Well, the most expensive one is this crazy double-strung thing – see, it’s got two separate sets of strings – but, honestly, it’s a terrible racquet. I’d highly recommend—’
The Tennis Idiot: ‘Looks great. I’ll take three.’
### The catwalk of conspicuous consumption
Carbon-fibre bicycle saddles and weird tennis racquets? So what?
I don’t expect anybody reading this is as much of an idiot as The Tennis Idiot.
Though I do expect everybody reading this has made at least one idiotic decision driven by the exact same neuronal patterns expressing themselves in less-extreme circumstances. I know I have.
The Parable of the Perfectly Ordinary Not-All-That-Idiotic Person That’s Occasionally Misled by Money in Subtle But Accumulatively Pernicious and Costly Ways isn’t nearly as catchy, nor entertaining.
By narrowing everything down to a series of isolated transactions, money promises simplicity, and ease. But this works only in a mechanical, not a human world. And as we saw in [Idiot Money #52](https://news.moneyblind.net/52-do-what-only-you-can-do):
> **These mistakes are rooted in a belief that it’s external circumstances that determine the quality of a life, rather than how well one is set up to dance with those circumstances**. This belief leads people to dedicate their resources to changing the quality of their lives by changing their worlds, rather than their worldviews.
Isolated incidents of spaffing a bit of cash on sporting equipment that act *against* what matters most to you are trivial concerns.
**But when it comes to life choices, nothing is ever an isolated incident. How you do anything is how you do everything. And these trivial concerns lead to some troublesome conclusions. The shortcut to simple promises leads only to a catwalk of conspicuous consumption.**
# #74: Kondo your credit-card statements
14th February, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the weirdly overlooked purpose of money is to make your life better, including:
* That some of the best skills in life can be cultivated for free.
* How typical approaches to budgeting are useless.
* And Kondo-ing your credit-card statements.
**To make more skilful life choices, cultivate more life skills. Too often, the focus for cultivating financial life skills is to do what you’re already doing more efficiently. However, the best skills, financial or otherwise, start with challenging the stories that govern your choices. Don’t worry… challenge doesn’t necessarily mean change!**
‘One day,’ wrote the queen of sorting people’s shit out, Marie Kondo, ‘I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted.’
In a scene that could qualify as the quaintest ever psychedelic revelation, when Maria came to, she heard a mysterious voice, ‘like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely.’
This self-avowed obsessive tidier realized she’d been making a big mistake.
‘I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. **Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying.**’
Marie was onto something.
**There’s a great difference between the processes of scratching stuff out and building stuff from scratch.** It’s why Kondo’s approach to tidying is magical compared to those obsessed with ever-cleverer storage solutions. And it’s why typical approaches to budgeting are bullshit.
Time spent tidying, however clever, is wasted when the stuff being tidied up would have been better ignored or discarded.
### Meditation is a life skill
I’m always on the lookout for foundational life skills. The sort of stuff that makes it easier to glide past life’s little (or large) frustrations, rather than slaving away getting better at dealing with them.
Like meditating.
Not only does being able to meditate mean you’ll never be bored, but there’s also more than a grain of truth in Blaise Pascal’s quip that ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’. Developing this ability is therefore at least moderately handy.
Not to mention good for your eyes, your posture, and your bodily tension.
And – most importantly – (and [as we’ve seen before](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), in explaining why meditation isn’t relaxation) **your ability to pay attention to how you pay attention is fundamental to making better financial decisions**.
Odd, then, that humanity’s made such an effort, not to make it easier to sit still, but to enable excuses not to.
### Fasting is a life skill
Another foundational life skill is fasting.
Aside from the myriad health benefits, fasting is freeing.
Fasting frees you from your gut hijacking control of your body and your brain.
And from being so desperate for a feed that you’re unable to focus on anything else.
From becoming hangry.
And from being forced to eat crap because you’re sure you need ‘something’ but find yourself in a nutritionless desert.
**Most importantly, fasting frees you from the story that a hunger pang is an indication that you’re hungry. This simply isn’t true. And its implications for your financial choices are huge.**
If you’ve ever fasted for more than three days or so, you’ll be aware that hunger pangs arise around the times you typically eat, and fade quickly after. Between about three and five days they disappear altogether. They’re mental expectations, not physical danger signs.
The more easily you can thank the hunger pang for its reminder and reassure it that all is well, the more easily you can take control of your priorities.
This is an incredibly useful thing to understand. With implications that extend far beyond your stomach.
For example, that pang you feel upon encountering a problem that a solution must be for sale somewhere. Maybe it is. But maybe it’s a costly reflex that serves not to make your life any better, but to distract you from the stuff that actually would, born of reflection rather than reflex.
**If you’ve never missed a week’s worth of food, you’re missing something far greater.** And yet the vast majority of people haven’t voluntarily gone so much as 24 hours between meals. Plenty object to the very idea by flapping about with all the grace of a portly pigeon on a windy day.
### Expenditure fasting is a life skill
**Like food fasting, expenditure fasting is also a life skill.**
Go for a week deliberately trying not to spend money on anything.
Maybe combine it with a food fast. That’ll sure make it easier, and more beneficial.
Just as the chief benefit of food fasting isn’t losing weight, the chief benefit of expenditure fasting isn’t about spending less money.
It’s about challenging the fundamental stories that rule your life, possibly in reeaaaaaallly unhelpful ways.
Fasting forces you to pay attention.
It forces you to identify what really adds to your life, rather than what merely doesn’t obviously detract from it. The difference between the two is huge.
### Typical approaches to budgeting are bullshit
As we’ve noted many times before, one of the most important things you can internalise about personal finance is that **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.**
Totting up money in versus money out isn’t paying attention.
That would mean that anyone earning a fortune would be spending their money wisely, whatever they did with it. Which is obviously insane. But this is the world we live in – that we choose to construct. Most expressions of the belief that all consumption is good consumption are a touch more subtle, but they’re no less stupid, psychologically speaking.
Nor is categorising expenditure based on where it was bought paying attention.
That would mean that meals out with friends whose company leaves you walking on air had the same effect on your life as those with [insurance salesmen](https://news.moneyblind.net/7-what-fund-managers-can-teach-us-about-what-really-matters). Or that the first glass of wine that lubricates a first date is the same as the tenth glass that ruins it. Or clothes bought because you were replacing something beautiful and/or functional were the same as those bought as a hopeful but ineffective form of therapy. And so on.
Nor is setting an amount you’re ‘allowed’ to spend on certain things by starting from your current expenditure paying attention.
That would mean not challenging your current choices but entrenching them – the opposite of what you want to do!
\*
Meditation and fasting are both brilliant tools because they both challenge the incredibly common, but unfathomably unhelpful story that the best solution must be for sale.
And they’re tools that, while you will benefit from learning to use them better, everyone already possesses, and can pull out instantly, at any time.
# #75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)
21st February, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding the financial returns, far from being an unequivocal objective scorecard, are primed to mislead you… but one simple sum can help.
(And yes, this being Idiot Money #75, I obviously should’ve posted this three weeks ago)
**The most useful number in personal finance is 72.**
The ‘Rule of 72’ is an easy way of comparing investment returns over the only period that matters to investors looking for a greater life rather than a greater fool. One measured in decades, not time between Bitcoin peaks and troughs.
It’s also a good way of getting people who never shut up about house prices to shut up about house prices.
The Rule of 72 tells you how long it takes an investment to double, based on its growth rate (or the growth rate, based on how long it takes to double).
72 divided by annual growth rate = time taken to double.
72 divided by time taken to double = annual growth rate.
How long would an investment growing at 5% take to double? 72/5 = 14.4 years. Getting 20% growth? Now it takes only 3.6 years.
What return would you need for something to quadruple in value in 30 years? That’s doubling twice, so 72/15 = 4.8% per annum to quadruple in 30. Thus did a 30 year-old’s £250,000 house or retirement pot become a 60-year old’s £1,000,000 with a pretty mediocre return.
So far so mundane. But **being able to quickly do such calculations has handy implications**.
First, it’s a useful way to quickly link *any* question of arbitrary investment returns to something more meaningful. It’s easier to picture what difference something would have if it doubled in value (and maybe doubled again, and again) than if it ‘grew at 7%’.
And second, assuming you’re not a member of the Liberal Democrats’ famous [Bullshit Graphs Squad](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/misleading-liberal-democrats-bar-graphs), if you’re going to compare things, you’re going to want them in a vaguely comparable format. Annualised growth is a fair-enough means of doing this.
### Apples and apples
**Say you heard someone brag about how they bought a property ten years ago that had since doubled in value. Sounds impressive, you may think. But how impressed should you be?** Should you be impressed enough to let it affect your own investing strategy?
One of the (many) problems with property as an investment is that unlike other investments, which usually make the news only with reference to their daily movements, property is usually talked about over timeframes of at least a year.
This should be a good thing. All investments as they relate to people more interested in funding lifestyles than trading jpegs should ideally be talked about in multi-year terms. But because *they’re* *not*, it makes the fact that *property is* a source of many misleading ideas about investing.
A property that’s doubled in value in 10 years has grown at 7.2% a year. 72 divided by 10 years = 7.2% annual growth.
Still not bad, though rather less viscerally engaging – and thus less prone to distorting vision – than ‘doubled!’ Especially when compared to typical long-term stockmarket returns. And especially if you capitalise your time and energy costs and knock them off the return, as of course [you absolutely should](https://news.moneyblind.net/36-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-5-cost-benefit-investing).
This isn’t to dunk on property. It may be *relatively* silly a lot of the time, but it’s still *absolutely* most people’s best investment precisely because they don’t bugger about with it. And while Daily Mail distribution is disappointingly endemic, most people are sane enough to think about things other than house prices at least some of the time.
### Extra credit
It’s helpful, too, to be broadly aware of the average annualised ten-year return of the major global stockmarkets (which is about 11-12%, and which you can capture for essentially zero time and energy costs, [assuming you’ve grounded such capturing on a decent philosophy](https://news.moneyblind.net/#all-investments-are-gambles-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing)).
And it’s definitely best to think about it *as* the average annualised ten-year return, not the average annual return, even though they’re in effect the same thing. Because stockmarket returns are rarely within an average range over a 12-month period (though you’re probably not investing for only 12 months anyway, so this is only a problem if you choose to set stupid expectations).
# #76: Forget about improving your decisions. Focus on improving your decision-making skills
28th February, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that your financial decisions are a system, not a series of snapshots, including:
* Why you want to focus not on better individual decisions but on improving your decision-making skills, so you make better decisions by default, rather than by way of a constant battle based on denial.
* Recognising the pervasive and pernicious problem of believing yourself to be a robot when it comes to money.
* And the age-old puzzle of why we ‘reward’ ourselves for doing a thing we want to be doing by doing a thing we don’t.
**The common, idiotic way of living with money is characterised by a belief that how you live with money is a mechanical series of isolated decisions. This leads to a focus on ‘improving financial decisions’. Yet this focus can entrench the behaviours we want to change. It is not your isolated decisions, but your decision-making skills that you want to improve.**
Do you know why supermarkets stock the fruit and veg at the front of the store, despite the fact that, as the stuff that bruises most easily, it would make more sense to have it at the end, where it would naturally sit on top of everything else you’d bought along the way?
You probably do.
It’s because smugly lining your basket with some fresh green stuff makes it more likely you’ll fill it full of crap later, as some sort of perverse ‘reward’ for your earlier healthy choices.
Most people are aware of the panoply of profit-maximising psychological tricks that supermarkets play. But they’re not wise to them. Wisdom requires action. And spotting a trick doesn’t reliably stop a trick.
And even when it does, battling past one trick doesn’t transfer to being blissfully unmoved by the ambush of others waiting around the corner.
Contemplating the implications of why the tricks work even when we know they’re tricks is far more fascinating than the basic psychology of why they work in the first place.
**You don’t need a supermarket psychologist to trick you, of course. You’re perfectly capable of tricking yourself**.
Which makes it even more fascinating.
### Healthy choices, or healthy mind?
Consider someone who wants to live more healthily (or maybe just lose some excess fat) so decides to do some exercise.
They pop on their trainers and go for a run.
At the end of the run they ‘reward’ themselves with a cookie or a croissant. Which, if they’re a typical person going for a typical run, probably contains more calories than they just burnt.
The point, however, isn’t the equation of calories consumed versus burnt. There’s way more going on beyond the numbers, such as habit formation, the theoretical consumption of counterfactual cookies and croissants, and the interplay of intentions and identity in the process of behaviour change.
The point is that **as long as the counteracting behaviour – the cookie or the croissant – is seen as a ‘reward’ then you haven’t changed the one thing that matters: your mind, and because of that, you’ll be fighting the impossible task of trying to win a battle that never ends**.
### The mysterious monotony of miscellaneous expenditure
Every client I’ve ever met, when asked to analyse what they’ve spent their money on, has described each and every year as ‘exceptional’.
This ironic overwhelm of ‘one-off’s isn’t only an issue for millionaires dealing with addictions to architectural overhauls.
It affects everyone.
**When it comes to a human life, there’s no such thing as a one-off**. Every decision is linked to every other. Every decision both expresses and shapes who that human is in a process of becoming. How you do anything is how you do everything.
**Yet how many financial decisions (or food decisions, or whatever decisions) do we earnestly believe are ‘just this once’ transgressions from who we ‘really are’, rather than the most reliable indicators of it?**
### Helping hands aren’t always handy or helpful
Because people perceive that the ‘problem’ for which they are seeking a simple solution is one of making better decisions, rather than cultivating better decision-making machinery, that is what the ‘solutions’ that fill our shopping baskets focus on.
The hot new supplement. The smarter app. The simpler step-by-step guide.
There’s a strong temptation for the truly stuck to believe that these, even if imperfect, can be a helpful kickstart, before [sorting it ‘properly’ later](https://news.moneyblind.net/2-dont-know-where-to-begin-sorting-out-your-finances-its-not-where-you-think-it-is). However, **it’s a bit of leap of faith to believe that a path picked because it *****enables delay***** is the same path that’s going to magically defeat delay later**.
If you seek a cleverer app or a simpler step-by-step *because* you believe finance is scary and complicated, then you are *entrenching* that belief, not dealing with it.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.1#how-do-you-get-unstuck-from-financial-confusion), in the context of face-to-face advice (which of course is just the slightly-richer person’s version of the exact same issue):
> People seek financial advice for the same reason they seek any advice: because they feel stuck. Someone can want to change, can imagine what being changed would look and feel like, can attempt all sorts of ways to change, but never actually change. The way clients saw it, however, was that they were paying not to get unstuck, but to ‘allow’ them to be unaware of being stuck. This has the advantage of being easy, but the disadvantage of not working. It looks like it works, because it works better than nothing, but it doesn’t work on the meaningful sort of level that leaves someone feeling like they can comfortably fire the adviser.
> It doesn’t work because to feel stuck is to experience an existential inertia, and external treatments can only salve, not solve existential issues. Etymologically, to suffer from inertia is to be ‘unskilled’, ‘inactive’. Unable to go anywhere under one’s own steam. To basically be dead. Even if you’re drifting *somewhere*, you’re essentially going *nowhere*. **The inert body is both not changing and resistant to changing because it is resistant to self-propelled changes of motion**.
However, if you start from trying to improve not your decisions, but your decision-making skills – which in the context of your financial decisions, is [the way your relationship with money is mapped in your brain](https://news.moneyblind.net/6-what-the-bloody-hell-is-a-relationship-with-money-anyway) – you’re walking along a far more productive path; one that leads not to a dead end, but to an end of feeling dead.
### Your mental machinery isn’t mechanical
You are not a robot.
You do not transform into a robot when you come into contact with money.
If anything, money amplifies your emotional engagement with every decision it touches.
In robot world, healthy choices add up to a healthy mind. Do everything right, and out pops the result of a good life. In human world, it’s more complex. And *that’s the point*. [To human is to complexify](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3).
From bananas in your shopping basket, to ‘rewarding’ yourself for doing a thing you want to be doing by doing a thing you don’t, to tactic number one in the [unscrupulous salesperson’s vision-narrowing playbook](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money), **there’s no easier way to be manipulated into making mistakes than to live as if your decisions were a series of isolated snapshots rather than a systematic expression of your inescapably integrated patterns of thinking**.
Each little decision may feel innocuous, but their daily volume means in context – i.e. as contributors to the quality of your life, and your ability to use your money to make that life better – they quickly become deadly.
**A focus on a destination may start you going somewhere, but maintaining it gets you nowhere**, and invites a constant struggle in the process. Dreams of a somewhere may ignite a spark, but it’s nurturing the fire within us, not the light on the horizon (or across the bay), that warms our lives.
And while it’s possible, through environment control, and other assorted psychological nudges, to make better decisions often enough that your decision-making machinery changes as a side-effect, this is both unreliable and – where it lacks the overriding intention to face fears rather than flee from them – [doomed to fail](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2).
Like the post-cardio croissant, **if your ‘nudge’ is a ‘reward’ that’s working against the very mindset you’re trying to alter, then it’s clearly never going to work**.
We need both a [zoomed-out view to check we’re on the right path, and to zoom-in on each individual step that keeps us there](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#knowing-what-to-do-with-your-new-knowledge-of-knowing). **The flourishingness or fucked-up-ness of our fate flows like a waterfall from a cascade of droplet-sized decisions. Little lifestyle choices add up to big brainstyle choices.**
# #77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)
7th March, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that everything you do for, with, and through, money is at risk of being irrelevant, including:
* The good type of dis-illusionment, in the process of becoming financially enlightened.
* Enlightenment as freedom from entrapment, rather than relief from pain.
* And, finally, the conclusion to five articles’ worth of words on Marcus Aurelius’s use of the word ‘even’.
*This is part 20 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*.*
**Making better decisions by default requires more than clever environment control at the moment of each decision. It requires engaging with the process of becoming more enlightened. This doesn’t change just because those decisions are ‘financial’.**
What is reality? What is enlightenment? What the hell do either have to do with becoming wiser in the context of your seemingly mundane monetary decisions?
As the title of Anil Seth’s wonderful TED talk, [*Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality*](https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality), suggests, what you ‘know’ as ‘reality’ is both at least partially ‘yours’ (as opposed to something unreservedly objective) and a hallucination (i.e. probably not all that ‘real’ as you commonly understand the term).
This is not the place to dive into the nature of conscious reality. It is the place to help you become wiser with money. So why mention your take on reality at all?
**Because your take on reality is fundamental to turning your finances into a flourishing, flowing, fulfilling, life**. It’s what this whole [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly) on financial enlightenment has been circling around.
(If you want to play with the consciousness stuff, both Seth and Antonio Damasio have new books out, which they talk about together [here](https://nautil.us/whats-so-hard-about-understanding-consciousness-13877/).)
### The parable of the palace, revisited
In [part 16](https://news.moneyblind.net/64-how-to-live-well-even-in-a-palace-the-abc-of-money-part-16) of this series, we introduced Marcus Aurelius’s self-reminder that it was possible to live well, *even* in a palace. We’ve since spent about 5,000 words unpacking that one word, *even*.
We’ve used it as a prompt for questioning [what does it even mean to be rich](https://news.moneyblind.net/64-how-to-live-well-even-in-a-palace-the-abc-of-money-part-16), and how would being so really make your life better?
We’ve used it to highlight [the difference between denunciation and renunciation](https://news.moneyblind.net/72-the-abc-of-money-part-19-denunciation-bad-renunciation-good), and [the danger of hypercorrectively leaping from realising one thing is a bit silly to concluding that it’s therefore wise to dedicate your life to its opposite](https://news.moneyblind.net/65-denunciation-is-still-attachment-the-abc-of-money-part-17)… [oblivious to the fact that psychologically it’s still the same silly, only in a different dress](https://news.moneyblind.net/67-the-abc-of-money-part-18-addicted-to-a-dream).
To round this off, it’s time to consider one final, still-deeper, meaning. A meaning that lies at the heart of everything vaguely meaningful you do with money. And that encapsulates what philosophers from both East and West have been banging on about for 2,000 years.
### Dis-illusionment
Eastern and Western philosophies are both, broadly speaking, encouragements to ‘see more clearly’.
By which we mean something about being better able to align our actions with reality.
Reality is important. In nature red signals danger, but when it comes to the dangerous crimson of reality or the anodyne azure of illusion, [we reach for the red pill](https://news.moneyblind.net/69-red-pill-financial-planning-escaping-the-money-matrix), and make an instant mockery of all those damn fool messages that encourage us to [confuse quality of life with access to comfort](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.5-enough-is-more-than-enough#quality-of-life-and-access-to-comfort-are-not-the-same-thing).
Imagine you feel you are in a committed long-term relationship, though your other half (unbeknownst to you) is being… less committed. Is it better to find out, or not? If you’re like most people, you’ll reject the soma of unshakable, certain, contentment, and plunge into the pain and suffering of red-pill reality.
We care extraordinarily deeply about things feeling ‘real’.
And yet we flee from reality all the same.
We construct our worlds, and when we do so, choose to build great palaces of illusion. **Money, and specifically how we live with it, is fundamental to both aspects of this.**
**Seeking psychological ‘safety’, we imprison ourselves in illusions**. And then wonder why we feel stuck, trapped, [inert](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.1#how-do-you-get-unstuck-from-financial-confusion). And why our escape plans are as unsuccessful as they are abundant. We keep making the same mistakes, oblivious even to the fact that, despite not working, they are, in fact, mistakes. As we saw [earlier](https://news.moneyblind.net/52-do-what-only-you-can-do):
**These mistakes are rooted in a belief that it’s external circumstances that determine the quality of a life, rather than how well one is set up to dance with those circumstances**. This belief leads people to dedicate their resources to changing the quality of their lives by changing their worlds, rather than their worldviews.
‘Enlightenment’ is coming to see that these mistakes *are* actually mistakes. It’s coming to see reality more clearly.
This is not to say it’s having some sort of crazy happily-ever-after breakthrough flash that opens your eyes to an ‘objective’ reality forever more. Enlightenment is a process, not a state.
Buddha didn’t walk out of the palace, into a blinding light and have a happy-ever-after breakthrough. We like to believe he did, because we love a breakthough moment. The perfect, end-of-struggle, end-of-suffering, end-of-having-to-contemplate-what-the-heck-to-do-ever-again-as-if-locked-in-a-perpetual-infantile-existence moment.
But the Buddha was on the road to enlightenment, not Damascus.
He was escaping fantasy, not playing out its favourite trope.
And, luckily for the rest of us, given how we [really don’t want certainty](https://news.moneyblind.net/69-red-pill-financial-planning-escaping-the-money-matrix) over how our decisions will direct our dramas, so are we.
If we want to avoid feeling stuck, flat, and inert, and especially if we want our money to help us do so, we want two things:
1. To lose our illusions.
2. To remember this at the right times.
This is what leaving the palace means in a psychological sense.
And it’s super important.
*We’ll see more precisely why next time, in the context of the reality of your relationship with yourself, others, and the world… and how money plays such a vital role in all three.*
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[#82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money](/82-the-overlooked-truth-of-reality-that-is-messing-up-how-you-live-with-money)
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# #78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
14th March, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter's 18-month-anniversary special!** This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that, with the right intention and attention, brains wired for mindless consumption can be rewired.
*Because it’s often* [*easier to get to the wallet-brain through the stomach-brain*](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same) *(because we can’t as easily hide from the effects of eating like an idiot as we can from earning and spending like one?), because it’s this newsletter’s 18-month anniversary, and because it’s just more fun than diving into the deep-and-meaningfuls every week, herewith a hopefully mind-expanding story about expanding one’s waistline in Vegas with a not-very-subtle application to why we fail to make more of the money in our lives.*
My stomach is an idiot. I’m sure it means well, but then so do enthusiastic but untrained folk performing CPR.
Given half a chance, it will lay down stores for a nuclear winter, despite having never gone truly hungry a day in its life. Believing itself a gastric Hercules, it mistakes digestive labours for heroic deeds. I digest, therefore I am, it pleads, while projecting its existential anxieties into the bit of my brain that controls access to Open Table and my Oyster card.
Some addicts look for meaning in the bottom of a glass. My stomach heads for bottomless brunch, where its behaviour leaves the rest of me reeling in embarrassment and praying that belts don’t feel pain.
‘So what?’ my stomach protests with laissez-faire air.
‘It’s not like “we” eat a load of shit. We just eat shitloads. It’s not my fault you don’t have a satiety response.’
‘Besides, you love a burpee. Our universe is in balance. Don’t rock it. Making 10,000 calories disappear is more than a magic trick, it’s a [life skill](https://news.moneyblind.net/74-kondo-your-credit-card-statements)! Embrace it!’
I’m not sure where this claptrap comes from. Perhaps the parenting tactic that cites starving African children when praising the spoilt Western child for cleaning its plate would not be praised by psychoanalysts in turn.
But with neither blame nor resignation having the best track record of improving one’s lot, it doesn’t really matter. I need a cure, not an explanation. A re-education, not a reassurance.
Unlearning something this hardwired can’t be taught in a normal classroom.
I need something more extreme.
Which is why I took my stomach to Vegas.
### Terrible times can be terrific teachers
The irredeemable abomination that is Vegas is the perfect learning environment. The truly terrible moulds memories in a way the merely awful can’t match. And it being impossible to eat properly in Vegas, you may as well try to eat purposefully – to build your character as well as your belly.
We were welcomed to the Bellagio’s buffet with posters championing exuberance and reminding the queuers that excess was not, as you may have thought, too much, but just the right amount.
The décor inside – a perfectly ordered wreckage of bright lights substituting for bright ideas – advertised what happens when people with no class try to be classy. It’s a vain endeavour at the best of times, let alone when the management have demanded wipe-clean surfaces.
The Bellagio buffet, like everywhere else in Vegas, is not a nice place to be. The city laws forbid such a thing. Nice places encourage people to stay there. And wherever ‘there’ is, it has a much lower profit margin than the Blackjack table.
My stomach didn’t care about the lack of hygge. It was excited. For it knew what the chefs had prepared for it, while knowing nothing of what my brain had.
### A cunning plan
‘I shouldn’t,’ the strangely spherical man at the barbeque counter said, with the sincerity of a despot’s press secretary, ‘I’ve probably had enough already.’ Given he looked like Mr Potato Head’s big-boned cousin, he may have had a point.
‘Sir,’ replied a man cheery in the way only Americans with serving tongs in their hands can be, ‘there’s no such thing.’
The pork-dispensing prophet’s words proved persuasive. I too was sold. And, being an equal-opportunities glutton, requested he bless my plate with everything he had.
The plan was underway.
I first heard about [neuroplasticity](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity) tricks long before I knew what neuroplasticity was.
It was from reading the bit about [associating bananas with vomit](https://thusspakeabubakar.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman/#:~:text=ways%2C%20read%20this-,BANANA%20VOMIT,-Now%2C%20a%20lot) in Daniel Kahneman’s *Thinking, Fast and Slow*. (The idea being that if you repeatedly made the association, you’d eventually be a bit disgusted by the idea of eating a banana, in a slightly more Radio-4-friendly version of the experiments in *A Clockwork Orange*).
I didn’t know then how it worked, but I knew that it did. In the six months after *Thinking, Fast and Slow* came out, I lost the 20% of my bodyweight that was made out of cocktails and tasting menus, and my bodyfat fell from over 20% to under 10. And, having got better at listening to what my body [wanted, rather than what it was addicted to](https://news.moneyblind.net/70-the-nasty-narrowness-of-number-governed-living#8.-the-needs-wants-distinction-is-needless-and-wanting-speak-instead-of-wants-and-addictions), over a decade later, it’s stayed effortlessly there.
With a short burst of sufficiently intense intention and attention, you can do all sorts of mental magic.
(The intensity is the key, of course: you’ve got to really believe it; luckily, because your body wants broccoli more than biscuits, momentum quickly builds on the back of the initial blind belief.)
### Enter the Zombie
The problem with mindless eating is that it’s, well, mindless. My plan was to override this.
With every bite, as my mouth consumed calories, my eyes consumed my fellow consumers: bedraggled beasts sweating from the strain imposed on skins stretched far beyond historical limits of anatomy, let alone decency. **The best behaviour-change efforts build bridges between short-term actions and long-term intentions. You become a portrait of your present-moment choices. I was training my brain to see the bigger picture.**
I was not merely idly observing the carnival of consumption, but breathing it in so deeply that the memory of the scent would come to substitute for my lack of a sane satiety response.
And what a scent it was. A stench worse than death. The stench of the undead.
The brainlessness of a Vegas buffet is the natural habitat of zombies. And the Bellagio was full of them. Mumbling not talking? Check. Shuffling not walking? Check. In company, but not together? Check. No care for personal appearance? More animal than human? Insatiable? Check, check, check.
Poor sods, zombies. Everything they eat seems to go straight through them. **They’re desperately searching for security, and foolishly believing psychological needs can be met by material consumption**.
*(<- hi casual scrollers! That’ll be the point, if you were wondering what this had to do with money 😊.)*
Both insatiable and insubstantial, ‘the zombie,’ the authors of *Zombies in Western Culture* tell us, ‘represents raw consumption’.
In taking my insatiable stomach to a Vegas buffet, I felt like Frodo returning the one ring to its source in order to destroy it. To touch a zombie is a death sentence. And I had an appetite to kill.
### Paradise lost and found
Leaping out of my corner for the fifth, or maybe sixth, round, I was held up by a couple arguing over what to go for next.
‘I prefer pizza,’ spluttered the male, ‘but we’ve got to get our money’s worth… so maybe the lobster is better.’
‘Oh, let’s just have both,’ said the female with lusty aplomb, albeit blind to the fact that **if you’re consuming everything in one go, buying in bulk isn’t necessarily the best deal**.
I didn’t mind. I felt like Rocky. Just keep slugging. Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear bibs. Which is basically a cape if you squint a bit.
I followed suit with feverish rapacity.
Screw you, dignity! I thought, as I strutted back to my throne to make a toddler-like mess of a lobster shell before stabbing a chunk of its flesh into a quattro formaggio. It is not a recipe I can recommend.
I made it through the round all the same, and celebrated by loosening my belt.
A man two tables over pronged a forkful of future heart complaints into his maw and looked at me with pride, like I was his son and I’d just slugged my first baseball over the garden fence. I had no time to rest on such laurels, though. There were twenty different types of sushi to sample before pestilence and his buddies rode into town.
Another round or two into the lesson, and the background white noise of sealions struggling to breathe, eat and talk all at the same time was pierced with a foghorn remonstration sent in my direction. Nibbling on a bagel, and distracted by my new neighbours, I was walking with the directional awareness of a supermarket trolley with a gummy wheel and nearly collided with one of the serving (or rather table-clearing) staff, who informed me that one was allowed to eat only at one’s table. Quite right. Where were my manners! Wouldn’t want to appear indecorous.
I scuttled back to my seat and continued to scoff and spy.
A woman entombed in the undead’s favoured attire, a faded US college sweater with the institution’s name marred by a mosaic of stains, was modelling what happens when you pamper something so much it decays into mush.
She waddled along, balancing two plates on one arm, while gulping from a soda in a manner that suggested she’d die of thirst if she waited until sitting down to have a slurp. Steeling herself with another swig, she entered the orbit of her husband, and together they danced the slow dance of beleaguered sit bones – thighs squirming and squishing themselves together in beautiful, practised, harmony.
I, meanwhile, ripped through another zoo full of flesh and tore down a forest of token-gesture greens, before going to war with a Terracotta army of tiny squares of tiramisu.
Unconscious consumption and conscious disgust were becoming one. I was undead, and primed for resurrection.
\*
It took another six months to be certain, but it worked. I was cured. Two-and-a-bit years later, and being able to buffet without becoming a beast is one of proudest life achievements. Bless you, my brainless, brain-changing, and profoundly unforgettable feast.
***There’s a tremendously important wider point to all this, which will become clear next week, as we dive into the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read, and come up clutching a treasure chest full of lessons for becoming wiser with money.***
*(And if you want more on performing brain surgery on yourself,* [*here’s one I made earlier*](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1)*.)*
# #79: Your money worldview is (literally) half-brained
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the single best thing you can do for your financial health is increase your awareness of the two distinct ‘takes’ on the world that exist in your head, and how left unattended, money fires up the self-destructive one, including:
* The most fundamental root of why humans fail to make more of their money.
* How the typical way you live with money is like having brain damage.
* And… ugh… you probably just want to read it: it’s too important for a pithy summary.
*Out of the tens of thousands of hours I’ve spent studying such things, Iain McGilchrist’s* The Master and his Emissary *is the best book I’ve read for understanding the world and how to operate within it. It also maps spookily well to everything I’ve written about our screwy relationships with money, and how we fail to make more of the money in our lives.*
*Therefore, to introduce this magnificent book to a wider audience, and to set it in the most practical of worlds (that constructed by your incessant interactions with money), and to hopefully enhance your understanding of both McGilchrist’s work and my own, I’ll be breaking down the book’s arguments and highlighting the implications for helping you live better with money.*
*(For the 15-20 hours or so it takes to read it, I’d still highly recommend prioritising* The Master and his Emissary *over 10x that time spent scrolling. And indeed the 100-150 hours or so to read McGilchrist’s latest,* The Matter with Things*, which I’ll also be borrowing from, though I appreciate this recommendation is unlikely to be universally followed 😊).*
**The single most helpful thing you can learn to understand why the way you fail to make more of the money in your life is how your brain has two different – and often contradictory – ways of paying attention to the world.**
\*
**Why do humans fail to make more of their money?**
It is the great puzzle at the heart of financial planning.
Extend ‘money’ to ‘time’, ‘energy’, and any other resource you care to think of, and it becomes the great puzzle of life. Why are we not getting any better at turning our resources, whatever they may be, into the Good Life, [whatever that is](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.4).
Humans fail to make more of their money, because they approach their money in an inhuman way.
They approach it in a mechanical, robotic, way. A soulless, zombie-like way.
This is why it’s possible [to talk of ‘having everything’ and yet still feel like something is missing](https://news.moneyblind.net/63-a-problem-shared).
It’s the reason that despite no other age being as good at plundering resources, or doing so with anywhere close to our current levels of efficiency, modern life – especially the lives of the highest-profile plunderers – is characterised not by a flowing, flourishing, fulfilment of individual human potential, but of flatness in the face of untold opportunity, loneliness in the face of unprecedented connection, and idiocy in the face of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom.
Indeed, it’s why, despite wanting wisdom, we plump instead for tips, tricks, and tactics, largely because we know where to find them, whereas where does one go for wisdom? Yet the hacks aren’t only insufficient, but believing they’re a remotely worthy substitute for wisdom is precisely most people’s problem.
We keep trying to solve this same puzzle in the same way. Over and over, oblivious to why each novel expression of the same ‘solution’ didn’t work last time, won’t work next time, or even that our latest hot new ideas are, underneath the advertising, the same cold, dead ends we tried before, merely reheated by hope and naivety.
**It’s the reason so many sacrifice so much in the way of time, health, and relationships, for so little by way of the chance to buy stuff they don’t really want to own, driven by pointless perceptions of people they don’t really want to know.**
One spoonful of ‘sensible’ solutions to isolated puzzles after another equals one pretty picture of Good at the end, yes?
In each individual moment, each weighing up of two sides of an equation (say, the price of a thing and your credit-card limit, or the macro trade-offs in your retirement plan), the ‘numbers’ make sense. That’s why you did what you did. So in sum, they must add up to something Good, right?
Even if *something’s* lost along the way, it’s not like this [mechanistic approach](https://news.moneyblind.net/73-i-robot-money-and-the-misleading-mechanisation-of-life-choices) doesn’t work well enough often enough to offer a hint that it’s probably at least not a terrible approach.
That, unfortunately, is *precisely* the problem.
Let me explain.
### Paying attention to money with only half a brain is no way to live a whole life
As I’ve had reason to point out in probably the most repeated phrase within the [78 previous newsletters](https://news.moneyblind.net/73-i-robot-money-and-the-misleading-mechanisation-of-life-choices), **it’s all very well breaking something down for analysis, but don’t forget to put it back together in the context of the human life that analysis is ultimately serving**.
Because, assuming you’re a human rather than a zombie, you’re never weighing up two sides of an equation; you’re only ever weighing up two ways of living.
**Inside your head is a brain that interacts with the world in two very different ways. Each of your brain hemispheres has a unique ‘take’ on the world**.
We’ll go into the details of these ‘takes’ one by one in due course. All you need to be aware of now is that these ‘takes’ lead you to live in contrasting ways.
By way of a quick example, consider that you are a bird. You’re hungry. You want to find some seeds amid a mangle of mud and microplastics. You peck around with a narrow, laser-like focus, highly attuned to spotting the difference between a satisfying snack and a choking hazard.
However, much as you want to eat, you also don’t want to be eaten. This requires a completely different kind of attention. You can’t compromise with the same attentional resource, or you won’t find your lunch, and you’ll probably end up as something else’s. The solution: have half your brain attend to seed-spotting, and the other to predator-detection.
**You may think you live in one world. But for all practical purposes, you don’t. The world you live in is shaped by how you pay attention. And you pay attention in two distinct ways: one governed by the left hemisphere, the other by the right.**
The way you pay attention to the world determines what world you experience as ‘reality’. If you’re not paying attention to something, it may as well not exist, as the wonderful ‘[Did You Spot the Gorilla?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo)’ exercise demonstrates so hilariously well).
(There’s also some super-freaky research involving people with a specific type of right-hemisphere damage that show the extreme version of this: people who *genuinely believe* that things in their left visual field – which is linked to their right hemisphere – literally do not exist, even if that exact same object did exist when they looked at it from another angle moments before.)
When things are working properly, your world is a blend of both types of attention. Though importantly, because it is only the attention of the right hemisphere that sees the whole (the whole is a distraction for the left, which is interested only in finding seeds as efficiently as possible), it is the right that should have the final say.
Your right hemisphere sends stuff to the left for it to break it down for analysis, but it is only the right that is capable of putting that analysis back into the context of your life.
**However, for many reasons, and with even more implications (some of them super-serious) we, especially in the West, are living in a world run by a runaway left hemisphere.**
**This is bad.**
**To make things worse, the way money typically influences our lives both expresses, and dangerously supercharges, the left-hemisphere’s take.**
**This is very, very bad.**
**Understanding the implications of this is therefore so, so important.**
Because the better we spot them, and the better we understand why dumb shit is the way it is, the better we can do something about it.
As McGilchrist wrote in *The Matter with Things*:
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find there governs the kind of attention you think it appropriate to pay in the future.
The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.
The brain is not just a tool for grappling with the world. It’s what brings the world about.
Paying attention to the world according to a runaway left-hemisphere creates a certain type of world. And, attending to the world in a left-hemisphere-biased way makes you more and more likely to see this world, rather than one better aligned with reality. So rather than correcting back to something more balanced, this unreal world becomes increasingly entrenched.
This entrenchment is further and faster reinforced by (and reinforces in turn) your screwy relationship with money.
**Pretty much every single point – and there are a lot of them – that McGilchrist makes about the way your left-hemisphere deceives you is a point I’ve made about how money is such a powerful self-deceptive force.**
Therefore, if you want to live better with money, understanding what this runaway left-hemisphere take looks like, so you are better able to catch it, and mitigate, or hopefully reverse, its pernicious effects, would be, I think, extraordinarily helpful.
As McGilchrist wrote:
Knowing about the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain helps us to know ourselves, to recognise our strengths and limitations \[…] helps us to become aware of who we are, what it means to be a human being at all.
This, like my claim that *The Master and his Emissary* is the best non-fiction book I’ve read, is not hyperbole.
**Your runaway left-hemisphere is leading you away from wisdom, and money’s accelerating the journey.**
**But money also has the map of how to get back.**
My hope is that taking McGilchrist’s main points one at a time and highlighting the links each has to money will not only provide easy access to a pretty dense but incredibly important work, but will also help you live more wisely with money in the process.
Your money worldview is constructed with half a brain. And it’s not the wiser half. This is the way to a whole lot of trouble, not the way to live a whole life.
***Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:***
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[#81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short](/81-financial-change-that-doesnt-start-from-your-financial-worldview-is-selling-you-short)
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# #80: Cost-consciousness beats cost-cutting
28th March, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that ‘life is more than the sum of its parts’ is profoundly true, so it’s better to pay attention to how it’s true than to gloss over it as a well-worn cliché.
*Because spaced repetition is cool (and because apparently I'm not above doing a clip show) for this, the 80th edition of Idiot Money, a recap of some stuff from the earlier days.*
**1. The six rubbish financial stress responses and the one good one**
\[From [Idiot Money #33](https://news.moneyblind.net/33-the-six-financial-stress-responses-whats-yours)]
* There are six typical stress responses. Here’s how they manifest with respect to money:
* **1. Fight** – Hustle culture. Money is about ‘winning’. Money, even if you’ve got millions, is a constant fight that you choose anew every day, despite the fact you can’t win a battle that never ends. Your money-based model of success is a straight-line down which you gallop as quickly as possible. Make more first, ask questions later.
* **2. Flight** – You denounce money (and thus remain obsessed by it). You say you want nothing to do with money, even though this isn’t something you can control. Flight does not indicate a lack of energy: you’re still running, just in the opposite direction.
* **3. Freeze** – When faced with a money decision, you spin in mental circles, but take no physical action. For example, you know you should invest, but you stay in cash. Where the flight type refuses to even engage with the concept of investing, the fawner continually thinks about it, but do nothing.
* **4. Fawn** – You submit to an adviser. In a testimonial for their website, you even praise them for taking all the decision-making stress away from you. Sometimes this is wise. But it’s highly context-dependent. Taking advice makes people turn off the bit of their brains that thinks for themselves. In finance, this is asking to be ripped off.
* **5. Fatigue** – You put financial stuff off. Money never affects your sleep; in fact, it sends you to sleep. You’re not paralysed; you do the bare minimum, but don’t engage. You don’t delay setting up a pension, for example, but you put working out what it’s actually all about on the ‘pretend I’ll do this later’ list. If you examine your spending, you use your credit-card company’s or your adviser’s cash-flow categorisations, rather than ones that are at all meaningful.
* **6. Flood** – Finances trigger an emotional overwhelm. You try to engage, but every time conclude you ‘can’t deal with this now’. This leaves you prone to manipulation, spending too much, and gambling it all on anything that looks like ‘the answer’.
* These six responses all spring from a craving for certainty.
* **Because a stress response is a *****response*****, you can choose it. And you can choose a better way: Face.** Emotions aren’t to be ignored. **Rationality isn’t about not feeling. It’s about a more refined appraisal of inputs into our predictive model of our place in the world – and feelings are very much part of these inputs.** Give your stress a hug.
**2. All investments are gambles, so understand what you’re betting on**
\[From [Idiot Money #30](https://news.moneyblind.net/30-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-3)]
* When working out investment returns, don’t forget that your time and energy is as much a cost as any explicit monetary fees.
* Amateur investment picks are often more a statement of how much someone likes the company’s products than they are a bet on that company’s future prospects being mispriced. Don’t do this.
* You’re not betting on a company doing well; you’re betting on it doing better than the aggregated views of the rest of the world’s buyers and sellers think it’s going to do. And of it not turning out to be Enron. Are you happy making that bet?
* The old-school financial-advisory model – you pick an adviser, who then picks a stock-picker for you – despite having a horrendous track record, endures because people are frightened fools, and advisers are good at sales.
* **The starting point for everyone should be to bet on the value of the world’s companies in aggregate, which is basically a bet on capitalism**. This is a bet most people are pretty happy making, not least because if it’s a long-term loser, then you’re going to be worried about a lot more than the value of your investment account. It’s easier to start by justifying deviations from this bet than to wonder which of a million other bets to make.
**3. Things (probably) not to invest in**
\[From [Idiot Money #34](https://news.moneyblind.net/34-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-4-betting-beyond-the-basics)]
* Cash. If you’re investing to beat inflation, as most are and all should be, cash obviously isn’t an ‘investment’ or a safe storehouse for your long-term money. Cash has some good uses, none of them is an investment.
* Property. Property’s benefits are regularly overblown and its costs regularly hidden, so we’re misled into vastly overrating property as an investment option. Not definitely bad. Just definitely overrated.
* Most alternatives (e.g. commodities, collectibles, crypto) don’t create anything much more than mischief, and are almost always bets on the greater-fool theory.
* Plenty of rich folk cling comically hard to the idea that their cash must at least open doors to the ‘best’ investments like it does the ‘best’ clubs. This is mostly nonsense.
* **If the return from the easily available, almost-zero money-, time-, and energy-cost option has left you wanting to risk additional money, time, and energy chasing something else, it’s at least a tiny bit possible that the problem you’re trying to solve has sod-all to do with the return.**
**4. Investing has obvious benefits and hidden costs**
\[From [Idiot Money #36](https://news.moneyblind.net/36-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-5-cost-benefit-investing)]
* **When comparing investment returns, you should capitalise your time and energy costs and factor them in**.
* You and your money are part of the same pool of resources, all aimed at the same thing: living a Good Life. Divorce the two, and you divorce your relationship with reality. This rarely ends well.
* Investment decisions without a cost-benefit calculation are idiotic. And the better life already is, the better your investment return must be to justify its non-monetary costs.
**5. Attachments are the enemy of good financial decision-making, especially the attachments you don’t believe are a problem**
\[From [Idiot Money #31](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2)]
* Attachments to possessions are unhelpful. Attachments to patterns of thinking are dangerous. The most dangerous are the patterns we don’t see because we’re busy congratulating ourselves for not being attached to possessions.
* If you do not see your attachments, or see them in a misleading way, you will remain self-deceived and at risk of nodding off onto your potential’s self-destruct button.
* **Attachment to simplicity is as widespread as it is dangerous. Surface-level simplicity is great for gaining followers in the fortune-cookie corner of Twitter, but it sacrifices effectiveness of thinking and meaningfulness of living to do so.**
* The roots of our acquisitive tendencies run too deep to be tackled with a motivational poster and a five-minute meditation. Believing otherwise makes it harder to both admit to, and remove them.
* It is not the wealth that traps us, nor the possessions that enslave us, but the inability to see clearly the connection between obviously silly mistakes and their subtler forms… such that those subtler forms can even feel like they are countering the silliness, when in fact they strengthen it.
**6. The most common misreading of ‘attachment’ is to believe it’s about compulsive desires. It’s not. It’s about a narrowing of your vision.**
\[From [Idiot Money #32](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)]
* If you misunderstand the problem, your solution is bound to fail, and you won’t know why. So you’ll keep trying the same dumb thing over and over again, wasting your money, your time, your energy, and therefore your life, in the process… none the wiser why you never became what you could have become.
* All of life is threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour because in order to operate in the world at all, we have to take shortcuts… but that same propensity to take shortcuts means we do all sorts of extremely silly things while remaining blind to both that we’re doing them, and that they’re extremely silly.
* We learn best about money when we see that those doing the dumbest stuff with it are playing the same deceptive, destructive game as the rest of us, only on a bigger screen and with faster Wi-Fi.
* **The compulsive-desire model suggests that the answer to avoiding being suckered by attachments is impulse control. This cons us into thinking that we can ‘quit whenever we want’. The narrowing-of-vision model, by contrast, recognises that the very machinery that helps you make sense of the world by filtering the infinite possibilities of every moment into something more manageable also leads you to bugger stuff up.**
* Making you believe there is no alternative is the dark art of attachment, just as it is of the unscrupulous salesperson: channelling your craving for certainty to persuade you that there is no alternative to the solution for sale.
**7. You’re addicted to things. It’s better to admit this than acquiesce to it.**
\[From [Idiot Money #35](https://news.moneyblind.net/35-the-abc-of-money-part-6)]
* **It is only when we treat the things we do that we deep down don’t want to do as addictions that we can hope to stop doing them**. The alternative leaves us so confused that the solutions we try never work that we keep on trying the same idiotic ones to the same idiotic ends, reinforcing unhelpful behaviours rather than rescuing ourselves from them.
* Simple, surface-level solutions act not as inspirations to dig deeper, but as substitutes for doing so. Like believing you’re dealing with uncertainty by slamming some numbers into a cash-flow model.
* Self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviour recedes to the extent that we let go of the whole framework of grasping. The forces that deceive us are overcome not by fighting, or by swapping one addiction for another, but by unhooking from the whole addictive circus.
* **To let go of worries – be that about money or anything else – requires more than being told to chill. It requires letting go of the framework that generated those worries, and will continue to generate new ones**, and relaxing into a less friction-fuelled framework instead. You don’t do this by denouncing the objects of your or other people’s obsession. For that is to keep the object as the focus: denunciation is still stuck in the framework of grasping. You do it by playing a completely different game.
**8. Lose your addiction not by playing the same game better, but by playing a better game**
\[From [Idiot Money #39](https://news.moneyblind.net/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence)]
* **Your money does not exist in isolation from your life. Your life does not exist in isolation from the lives of others. Yours and others’ lives do not exist in isolation from the world. Wise financial decisions are made in accordance with this understanding**.
* Central to becoming wiser are:
* living an examined life – and what better tool do we have than the unequivocal accounting record of our life choices provided by our credit-card statements?;
* understanding that everything is connected – both within ourselves, and between ourselves and the world (pull one bit of life in one direction, and the rest will react); and
* cultivating a way of living that affords caring for what you care about, rather than being blindly led astray by your addictions.
* If what you do ‘for a living’ leaves you with poorer physical and mental health and worse relationships, ‘living’ feels like an inappropriate term.
* In money terms: we do dumb shit with money because we’re attached to a deceptive, distorted, view of money, which affects the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world; these distortions are characterised by wishing money were some sort of ultimate certainty in an uncertain world.
* When you grasp that the ‘perfect’ solution is impossible, you stop wasting your life chasing it. You stop playing unwinnable games of comparison and consumption. You open up from a narrow vision that sees only crappy ways of playing the same silly game, to remembering that there are not only alternative ways of playing, but alternative games.
**9. The Good Life is more than the sum of its parts, so don’t try to build it up in bits**
\[From [Idiot Money #37](https://news.moneyblind.net/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4)]
* There’s a common misleading pattern of thinking that leads those that blindly crave certainty to live as if the Goodness of a life were measured by a weighted average across a bunch of isolated domains. Health a bit sketchy? No worries! Offset it with more money! Career in a rut? Focus on your relationship! Social life sucking? Use the time and money to redecorate!
* The sort of wishful thinking displayed by the ‘offset’ cultists is what leads people to stick with jobs they don’t like for money they don’t need to ruin the health and relationships they do. Or to try to fix family problems by taking them to a different postcode.
* **Being nudged to waste less money, say, is of limited use if a mind stays unconsciously wired for waste; and it’s no good at all if the avoided waste was seen as a denial, which is then compensated for elsewhere.**
* When we stop fobbing ourselves off by pretending these expressions are isolated, independent, incidents, we start to see the flow of life, not the stagnation of an object.
* When we stop running from money because we see it as scary, complicated, and boring, we start to realise [it’s none of these things](https://book.moneyblind.net/#must-money-seem-scary-and-complicated).
**10. And finally…**
[Idiot Money #38](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same) explained that diets don’t work for the same reason relationships with money are so screwed up: because selling magic beans is easier than editing life stories and that you can’t win a battle that never ends, so anything based on ‘denial’ is doomed.
# #81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short
4th April, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that you are the God-like creator of your financial world, and it’s much better to embrace this power than hide from it, including:
* Why financial planning advice that doesn’t link back to your brain is selling you short.
* Why paying attention to how you pay attention is the most important thing you can do.
* Why successfully tackling your finances requires tackling your financial worldview.
*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* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *of short lessons I hope to both introduce you to the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, and help you do something about this.*
**Typical financial planning focuses on half-brained hacks: clever tips, tricks, and tactics aimed at changing your financial behaviour. These quickly hit a limit of usefulness, and ultimately *****block***** you from making the most of the money in your life. The only way to transformative improvement in your finances has to start at the level of your financial worldview.**
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #1: If you want to make more of your money, you have to aim for brain-based worldview change, not action-based behaviour change
Imagine you are having a conversation with a close friend.
How’s your posture? Your tone of voice?
How do you react to compliments? To teasing? To a forthright critique of your life choices?
What messages are being sent by the micro-expressions of your face and the micro-gestures of your body?
How is the *friend* reacting to your reactions to *them*? Do those reactions alter how you react to them in turn, and so on, in a grand interdependent recursive dance?
Now imagine you are having a conversation with a child, or a pet, or your parents. How have you changed? Does your pet see the same you your parents do?
Now imagine you are about to have a conversation with a total stranger. You can choose to attend to this stranger in any way you like. Maybe like your mother, or a lost child, or a mortal enemy. Perhaps with suspicion. Perhaps with curiosity.
The way you choose to attend to them will shape your experience. You will, to some extent, find exactly what you go looking for.
*When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you…*
This isn’t just a cute thought experiment. **It’s fundamental to understanding how you express and experience your reality, from how you talk to your cat or how you appreciate poetry to how you approach solving problems or how you define success.**
**And, of course, it’s fundamental to making the most of your money.**
In McGilchrist’s words (my emphasis):
If you are my friend, the way in which I attend to you will be different from the way in which I would attend to you if you were my employer, my patient, the suspect in a crime I am investigating, my lover, my aunt, a body waiting to be dissected. In all these circumstances, except the last, you will also have a quite different experience not just of me, but of yourself: you would feel changed if I changed the type of my attention. And yet nothing objectively has changed.
*Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world*.
Approach a stranger with interest, and they will likely prove interesting. Approach them as your country’s Fascist newspaper of choice tells you to, and you will – in a sense as real as it is depressing – create a different world.
This is a self-reinforcing process.
How you attend to \[the world] changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.
The upshot of this is that [paying attention to how you pay attention](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity#pay-attention-to-how-you-pay-attention) **is just about the most important thing you can do**.
And paying attention to how you pay attention to the thing – money – that directs more of your decisions than probably anything else, is the most important part of this most important thing.
**I’m going to repeat that: paying attention to how you pay attention to money is the most important thing you can learn about personal finance. Nothing else comes close. And without it, everything else will prove of crushingly limited use.**
And yet, as near as makes no difference, everybody neglects it.
The main thrust of my thesis is that **money, thanks to the unique way it is woven into our daily decisions, is a great tool for helping us pay attention to how we pay attention, for examining our lives**. This is why ‘attention’ appears in about one-third of [the newsletters so far](https://news.moneyblind.net/), and why it’s right at the start of [the book](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1#pay-attention).
And yet **the vast majority of people, regardless of their wealth, act as if the role of money in their life is not as a means of examining it, but as an excuse not to**.
**Your relationship with money shapes the way in which you pay attention, which in turn shapes your reality: your relationships to yourself, others, and the world.**
### Understanding your understanding
I hope it’s not too controversial to suggest that understanding your financial world is pretty handy when it comes to making the most of the money in your life.
If how you attend to the world changes what you find there, then how you pay attention must be fundamentally linked to your understanding. **Your attention *****constrains***** your understanding.**
**The way we typically attend to money constrains our understanding of it, which in turn prevents us from making the most of it.**
We can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention.
This is why all financial advice is utterly pointless if doesn’t fit with – and ideally help to refine – the patterns of thinking mapped in your brain.
And it’s why **to become wiser with money you need to tackle money stuff at the level of your worldview, as opposed to fiddling about with** [**finding your ‘number’**](https://news.moneyblind.net/19-whats-your-number)**, hot investment tips, or early retirement hacks**, tempting as the certainty these sort of things are selling you can be.
As Richard Tarnas put it: ‘Our world view is not simply the way we look at the world \[…] world views create worlds.’
**And here is the point: the characteristics of the world created by your left-hemisphere – the narrowly focused make-believe world of models that would rather deny reality than adjust its model when that model is shown to have limits, as, being a model, will always be the case – exactly match those of the world created by the typical way we interact with money.**
You can faff about around the edges all you like.
You can draw up a more detailed plan.
You can use a more powerful calculator.
You can find a prettier chart-making machine.
But it’s all bunkum if you continue to attend to money in an idiotic way.
Which, given we – especially in the modern West – already live in a world that is increasingly subject to and screwed up by the shortcomings of a runaway left-hemisphere take on reality, you will.
Until you take conscious control. Until you pay attention to how you pay attention.
The case for this is colossal, but making it will take some time. I hope you’ll stick with me as we approach it from an array of angles, a few of which at least I’m confident will resonate in such a way, you’ll never look at – and attend to – your financial world in the same way again.
***Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:***
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[#83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention](/83-how-money-hijacks-your-hierarchy-of-attention)
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# #82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
11th April, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that reality is about relationships, not the things related to, including:
* The reality of your relationship with money, and why it’s so damn important.
* The two keys to understanding in-the-moment financial enlightenment.
* Overcoming your financial illusions at the time you most need to overcome them.
*This is part 21 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*. The (probably) final instalment will follow shortly.*
**Reality is relationships. Primarily, your relationships with yourself, with others, and with the world**.
Has it ever struck you as odd that some of the people who are most ‘go, go, go!’ can simultaneously describe themselves as a bit ‘stuck’?
But maybe it shouldn’t feel odd.
If you actively *wanted* to feel ‘stuck’, how would you go about it?
You wouldn’t do nothing.
On the contrary, I think you’d do a lot. **No one feels quite so stuck as the person that’s ‘tried everything’.**
The stickiest stuckness, like the flowiest flow, is rooted in constant movement. To paraphrase Niels Bohr, while the opposite of a trivial truth is blatantly bollocks, the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth.
**Money should be a ticket to flow-filled fun, but in the hands of most, it’s a means of getting stuck on a merry-go-round of meaninglessness.**
The framework of Buddhist philosophy that we’ve looked at in this series is a way to stop spinning in self-deceptive, self-destructive circles.
In this (probably) penultimate post, we’ll revisit how, and introduce the fundamental importance of relationships – to yourself, to others, and to the world – when it comes to seeing more clearly the reality with which you want to align your relationship with money.
Because reality literally *is* these relationships. As Iain McGilchrist explains in heroic depth in *The Matter With Things*:
> What we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions.
(and, as he notes in *The Master and his Emissary* (my emphasis): ‘**Perhaps indeed everything that exists does so only in relationships**.’)
Yet one of the mischievous messages of money is to pretend that the primary importance should be attached to the *things*, not the interdependent web in which they exist. Which is why, of course, so many not only exhibit so much stupidity [like trying to ‘buy’ connections by building isolationist lairs, but positively show-off about having done so](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions). We’ll return to this later, as part of our [McGilchrist series](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance).
### Financial enlightenment
[Last time out](https://news.moneyblind.net/77-seeing-your-financial-world-more-clearly-the-abc-of-money-part-20) in *this* series, we noted that:
Eastern and Western philosophies are both, broadly speaking, encouragements to ‘see more clearly’, by which we mean something about being better able to align our actions with reality.
And that:
> Seeking psychological ‘safety’, we imprison ourselves in illusions. And then wonder why we feel stuck, trapped, inert. \[…] We keep making the same mistakes, oblivious even to the fact that, despite not working, they are, in fact, mistakes \[…] Mistakes rooted in a belief that it’s external circumstances that determine the quality of a life, rather than how well one is set up to dance with those circumstances. This belief leads people to dedicate their resources to changing the quality of their lives by changing their worlds, rather than their worldviews.
> ‘Enlightenment’ is coming to see that these mistakes are actually mistakes. It’s coming to see reality more clearly.
We noted that if we wanted to avoid feeling stuck, flat, and inert, and especially if we want our money to help us do so, we wanted to do two things:
1\. To lose our illusions.
2\. To remember this at the right times.
**When Marcus Aurelius wrote that one could live well, even in a palace, he was saying it was possible to free yourself from illusion *****even in a place designed to protect that illusion***.
The Buddha, when he walked away from *his* palace, was walking away from the unchallenged but ultimately unsatisfactory ‘comfort’ of these illusions.
When, after trialling and erroring with a palace-denouncing aestheticism, the Buddha ‘awakened’, he was awakening to reality. Awakening to the fact that, ‘Liberation occurs through recognizing just by that which you are bound’. To the fact that **if you’re playing a game you’re not really enjoying and for which the only prize is to keep playing, you don’t have to keep playing just because everybody else is**. To the fact that you can choose to play a different game.
**There’s a certain comfort in the certainty of imprisonment, but it’s ultimately soul-destroying**. Which is why Buddha doesn’t talk about pain (and thus enlightenment would be relief). He talks about entrapment and enlightenment as freedom.
The feelings of being ‘stuck’ despite being in ‘go go go’ hustle mode and of something being missing even when you ‘have everything’, are deeply connected to being trapped in an illusion that disconnects you from reality, from the sense of ‘home’ derived from your relationships with yourself, with others, and with the world.
When these relationships are off, you feel anxiety, alienation, and absurdity.
**If you wanted to rob your life of a sense of meaning, replacing these real relationships with synthetic substitutes (hi there, money!) is exactly how you’d go about it.**
Money interacts with these relationships like nothing else. Which is why it’s both so dangerous when you remain blind to how you live with it, but also so useful when you get to grips with it.
### The end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
We started this series by looking at the ‘[three mental poisons](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons)’ of ignorance, desire, and aversion (or delusion, greed, and hatred if that chimes better with you).
We noted that:
> The key problem with mind-poisons is that the tool we use to identify them, let alone do anything about them – the mind – is the very thing that is poisoned. **How do you see more clearly if your vision is so caked in mental mud that you can’t even see that you don’t see clearly?**
Acknowledging that the poisons are even there – that the dissonance between your ideals and your actions is due to more than just ‘mystery’ or the wiles of advertising gurus – is the first step to bothering to look for an antidote.
We moved onto the [four ennobling provocations](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview) (or noble truths) that clarified the root of that dissonance. And from there we looked at the [eightfold path](https://news.moneyblind.net/39-the-abc-of-money-part-8-the-eightfold-path-and-interdependence) (rather a system than a path) as a way out of the madness. We then linked the whole lot to the [neuroscience](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity) of what’s going on in your head, and the [right](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is) and [wrong](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt) ways to meditate to make it go on better. And, of course, what it all has to do with [living better with money](https://news.moneyblind.net/48-living-mindfully-with-money-the-abc-of-money-part-12).
Each of these elements is part of the system of tackling the two points above: recognising the profound need for losing your illusions, and remembering to do so at the times remembering is most important.
Each element of this philosophy isn’t about popping a pill and wishing for ‘change’. It’s about challenge. **Do the challenging in the right way, and the right changes will happen by themselves. Focus on the change, and chances are you’ll just end up lost in a different way** (especially if the intention behind focusing on the change is to avoid challenging the beliefs that made the change necessary).
It’s about living in a way that is in effect constantly (but effortlessly) asking: Does this way I’ve been looking at the world ‘work’? Does it make life flow as freely as it could? Is this life-choice-governing belief true? Does it have to be true? What are the consequences if it weren’t true? How do I test it?
This is about skill development, not environment control.
**If you change your environment, maybe you make better decisions when you remember to do so. If you lose the illusions, you start to develop the skills to make better decisions by default, to live more in flow.**
Seeing more clearly is easier said than done, of course. When your vision is clouded by monetarily super-charged self-deception and you’re subconsciously craving a certainty that’s at odds with any idea of a ‘Good Life’, you can be looking right at something and still see shit.
Not everyone likes being provoked. Especially when it comes to life choices. **Clients in financial-planning meetings are very happy, almost proud, to not know about investment stuff. They are decidedly not happy to have someone question whether what they’ve done to make the money to invest, or what they plan to do with it later was perhaps maybe not quite unequivocally the wisest move every time**.
Not everyone likes to remember things, either. Because it reminds them that they forgot something in the first place.
The root of the word ‘remember’ is something like ‘be mindful of again’.
As we saw before, in the words of [John Vervaeke](https://youtu.be/EWumJSBqXa8), ‘Mindfulness isn’t about concentration, it’s about getting the right kind of concentration… It is about constantly renewing your interest.’
**Living mindfully with money is about *****living*****. It’s a *****system*****, not something to do in your lunchbreak. It’s about strengthening your mind so you’re better equipped to both see and deal with reality.** Which is why this has been a very long series, not a listicle linking some pithy quotes to some ‘simple steps you can take to rid yourself of your money illusions’. Because I’d like this to actually work for you, and I’d like to believe that deep down, you’d like it to too.
The type of remembering we’re talking about is a special kind of remembering. It’s not remembering a fact, but a lost mode of being in the world. It’s remembering that you are already free in the ways that matter most. And that it’s probably time to [make the most of that](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for), even before you have a certain ‘number’ in your bank account, and even if – nay, especially if – you live in a palace.
*(While I’m here, I cannot reasonably NOT leave you with another plug for Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series, especially, in the context of this post, episodes* [*36*](https://youtu.be/48Ch2x3DrfM) *and* [*37*](https://youtu.be/2kQooMZzR7w) *on Reverse Engineering Enlightenment.)*
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[#93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them](/93-some-personal-finance-puzzles-and-how-not-to-solve-them)
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# #83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention
18th April, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that money makes you pay attention to the wrong things, not the things related to, including:
* How you’re likely blocking yourself from maturing with money.
* How the typical way you see the money in your life is so similar to being brain damaged.
* And why if you’re thinking money sits outside of life, that’s a sign of brain damage, and therefore even more reason to pay attention to doing something about it.
*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* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *of short lessons I hope to both introduce you to the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, and help you do something about this.*
**Money hijacks your hierarchy of attention. It promises you a shortcut to purpose, but this is a trick, because purpose is beyond its purview. Without a conscious effort to keep money in its place, it’s simply a shortcut to simplistic stupidity.**
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #2: Money messes up the proper ordering of your hierarchy of attention
The world you inhabit is beset by infantilism.
A stubborn, child-like insistence that the world is divided into black and white, goodies on one side, baddies on the other, hangs over everything.
A lot of the time, this has nothing to do with you. Heck, in loads of ways, you may even be railing against it.
Perhaps you long for your big-screen heroes to be a little less super and a little more complex; more intriguingly fallible Greek gods than unrelatable, untouchable God God.
Maybe you bemoan the business-blinded ‘writing’ advice that says ‘f-you’ to adverbial aesthetics, and reduces ‘writing’ with all its beautiful, poetic potential, to a series of soulless bullet-points assessed only by their alignment with an algorithm.
Possibly you’re concerned that ‘cancel culture’, whatever the nobility of its origins, is demanding an inhuman intellectual purity so rigid that it really is cancelling ‘culture’, and trading a negatively minded comfort for a positively minded challenge.
A binary world is not a beautiful world. A world where people, having lost one faith, [make hypercorrective leaps right into another](https://news.moneyblind.net/65-denunciation-is-still-attachment-the-abc-of-money-part-17), is not a wiser world; it’s a different sort of stupid one.
When it comes to all sorts of things, you may well have matured out of this childlike [craving for certainty](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3). You may well delight in the nuance and complexity inherent in adult human affairs. You may well be perfectly capable of simultaneously holding the views that ‘If–‘ is a great poem and its author probably a bit of a shit, without your head spinning into nihilistic despair.
**But when it comes to your money, you’re likely not only trapped in your immaturity, but also blocking yourself from the opportunity to grow up.**
Let me explain.
### Money makes you immature
The theme of this [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) is that **the way we typically live with money is very much like being brain damaged**. Specifically, having right-hemisphere damage, thereby being over-reliant on the left hemisphere’s ‘take’ on the world. (Which, [you may recall](https://news.moneyblind.net/79-your-money-worldview-is-literally-half-brained), is very, *very*, bad, given it’s the right-hemisphere’s ‘take’ that is in touch with reality, and [reality is rather important](https://news.moneyblind.net/69-red-pill-financial-planning-escaping-the-money-matrix).)
If we want to make something meaningful of the money in our lives, we need to live in a more whole-brained way.
To say that someone is subject to a runaway left-hemisphere take on the world is not to say that in every encounter with life they’re in effect severely autistic. That would obviously be ridiculous.
> Both the scrub nurse and the surgeon are important members of the surgical team, and work together, at the same time, on the same task: an operation becomes hazardous in the absence of one, and impossible in the absence of the other. They work well together not because they have the same role, but precisely because they have different ones.
The point is that the left-hemisphere’s ‘take’ needs to be kept in its proper place. The signature moves of the left-hemisphere’s approach to how to live – the way it wields its narrow-focused attentional spotlight – is super helpful for certain calculations, but it’s completely crap at context. (And as I explained [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.4#how-does-money-fit-into-meditation), in the context of how to live, the spotlight is a terrible metaphor for wise attention.)
The proper processing of attention – your ever-flowing, two-way, participatory interactions with the world – starts in the right hemisphere, which is at least broadly in touch with reality, then pops over to the left when more detailed analysis is required, before returning to the right for any relevant worldview updating.
(This is something we’ll come back to in a future post. You don’t need to know any more than this three-step process right now.)
This process is the reason McGilchrist called his book *The Master and his Emissary*. Because it conjures up the image of a 'Master’ who has a good overview of everything, but can’t know the details of all the bits of his empire, so sends an ‘emissary’ off to find out and report back.
Things go well when the emissary, who knows bugger all about anything other than whatever they’ve been entrusted to investigate, sticks to dutifully filing reports, so that their findings can be integrated into the overall context that only the Master is aware of.
Things go awry when the emissary gets ideas above their station. When they start thinking they know best. When they start taking their narrow view as all there is, despite this narrow view being not of reality, but of the model they’ve built of a particular part of reality.
[Narrowing of vision](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions#clever-addiction-therapy-cure-the-addicts)… [simplistic synthetic substitutes for a complex interdependent web of humans interacting with the world](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3)… You can probably see where this is going…
**If being inside the heads of the people who have what everybody else believes they want (as was my job for a decade) teaches you anything, it’s that money is really rather good at reducing reality to a series of tempting mechanical puzzles, and yet those that have ‘solved’ these puzzles are perennially puzzled in turn as to why, despite having solved them, everything still felt just as unsatisfying as before.**
Bad things are prone to happen when, based on its models, the emissary thinks it’s clever because it’s reduced everything to a simple, mechanistic series of steps and guides actions based on this ‘understanding’ (which is of course not an understanding at all… for it’s just a collection of bits of [propositional and procedural](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2) information.)
This process, whereby we ‘see things whole with the right hemisphere first, before homing in on details with the sharply, but narrowly, focussed gaze of the left hemisphere’ is your ‘hierarchy of attention’. **It’s fundamental to the proper direction of your attention, and by extension, the construction of your world in a way that isn’t completely idiotic. And money screws it up**.
By way of an example, let me tell you something about the sort of slightly dodgy tax schemes you occasionally see celebs being hammered for on the front page of the papers. The sort that are completely legal, but perhaps against the spirit of why the people of a country sign up to a system of taxation in the first place.
I’ve been in meetings where these sorts of schemes are being sold to clients.
Clients could spend *hours* absorbed in the calculations, working out the puzzle posed by the rewards, the risks, the costs, and the benefits. They’d get visibly excited by the sums, and start to radiate smugness as if the loophole-abusing cleverness somehow reflected their own smarts.
And then…
They’d drop the whole idea in a second when (or rather if) asked: ‘Does this scheme reflect the sort of person you want to be?’
Suddenly all the clever calculations appeared pointless. It doesn’t matter how much tax you can theoretically dodge if you’d feel like a shitty human if the fact you’d dodged it end up advertised somewhere. **If you don’t want a life choice made public, it probably isn’t a life choice you want to make.**
We all, deep down, care far less for the numbers, and far more for what they say about us. But given every message we see around us sends us in the opposite direction we need regular reminders to stay on track.
**This is the importance of seeing how the typical way we see the money in our lives is so similar to being brain damaged.**
Because the problem with brain damage is that you can easily miss it: you’re relying on the damaged brain to notice that it’s damaged.
Instead, you want to train to notice the signature of the brain damage, to become aware of when the take on reality upon which you’re relying for guidance about what to do is probably leading you in a silly direction, however tempting and clever and internally coherent it may appear.
Helping you become aware of this signature is the aim of *The Master and his Emissary*, and my linking of its lessons to your relationship with money.
This isn’t about abandoning one way of attending to life. It’s about respecting the hierarchy of attention that enables you to function in a more flourishing, flowing, fulfilling, way.
And if you’re thinking the importance of this is overblown because money sits outside ‘life’ somehow… then know that:
Public discourse in a culture can accentuate some ideas, concepts, beliefs and values at the expense of others. And when this happens, it is not as if these ideas, concepts, beliefs or values are atomistic; they bring with them a largely coherent world-picture, which gradually forms itself in the culture, and over time is expressed in a myriad of ways.
And therefore if you’re thinking money sits outside of life, that very thought is strong evidence that you’re being blinded by your left hemisphere and need to pay even more attention to [these lessons](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance#the-lessons)!
***Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:***
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[#85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips](/85-financial-philosophy-greater-than-financial-psychology-greater-than-hot-investment-tips)
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# #84: The value of (almost) everything to you is nothing
25th April, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that money cons you into believing in a world of unconstrained time and energy, a belief that’s ironically unnecessarily constraining the goodness of your life, including:
* The dumbness of ‘dream homes’, owning what is better rented, and stuffing your ears with endless podcasts.
* How letting price tags make decisions for you is insane.
* And why if you find yourself declaring the benefit of money as ‘opportunity’ you probably want to think a bit harder.
**The value of almost everything to you is nothing because there is a finite amount of time or energy inside you to care for more than a handful of things. An implication of this is that the common craving for ‘more opportunities’ – for so long a main motivation for letting money drive your decisions – is a deeply deceptive, and downright dumb, determinant of your life choices.**
At some point during your childhood, I expect you made plans for your ‘dream home’.
I know I did.
Tennis court here. Home cinema there. Kitchen bordering on everywhere.
Everything I’d ever enjoyed – or at least the environments in which the enjoyment took place (not that child-me would’ve understood the implications of the difference) – all under one architectural marvel of a roof.
Many mature out of this. Even if they don’t understand it consciously, they harbour some inkling that maybe [who one is becoming is more important than what one has](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode), and, moreover, that ‘having’ is a *block* to ‘becoming’, not an effective enabler of or substitute for it.
Many others dedicate their entire lives to making their acquisitive ‘dreams’ a ‘reality’.
This is a huge shame.
**Because the end of the majority of acquisitive dreams isn’t to ‘**[one day](http://invalid//)**’ wake up in paradise, but to live asleep.**
Acquiring a thing doesn’t end the dreaming. It sustains it. Even in the face of each expression of these endlessly acquisitive desires failing to deliver on its promises.
**If being inside the heads of the people that have what other people believe they want teaches you anything, it’s that the reality of those that have ‘lived’ these dreams is marked more by frustration than fulfilment**.
Most common ways rich people use their money without making much difference to the goodness of their lives are characterised by privatising things. [Owning what is better rented](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent). Just like immature dream-home designers and their cerebrally perilous desires to own everything they’ve ever enjoyed.
Usually if not always, it’s not the ownership, or even the activity that makes for the enjoyment. It’s the companionship. Or the mastery. Or the chance to feel like a f-cking hero. This is all sadly – and foolishly – forgotten when one is afflicted both by the disease of mistakenly believing one can ‘own’ experiences, and by having the money that provides the devilish opportunity to try.
Gone is the automatic camaraderie of the tennis club and in is the frustration of not getting as good, or getting as much use out of the private court as expected (not to mention the maintenance).
Susan Wolf, in *Meaning in Life and Why it Matters*, speaks to the same point:
Even if basketball, removed or abstracted from its now established place in our culture, is not an objectively valuable activity in itself, it provides an opportunity for much that is of value. It provides an opportunity for the cultivation and exercise of skill and virtue, for the building of relationships, and for the communion that comes from enthusiasm for an immersion in a shared activity.
None of which is enhanced by ‘owning’ the activity. Yet **because we blindly bound from knowing something is good to trying to own it, we burn resources on ineffective attempts to meet inadequately understood needs**.
#### Being a junkie doesn’t become wise just because the drug is information
This isn’t only about houses, of course. Mansions are just magnifying glasses.
Consider too the insatiate information-scoffer, [life choices at the mercy of the stupid half of their brain](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance), ‘struggling’ to keep up with all their favourite podcasts.
The struggle isn’t to ‘find time’. **Failure to ‘find time’ is everywhere the mark of a fool**, albeit sometimes a delightfully optimistic one.
The struggle is to recognise the reality of the time there is.
To acknowledge that **if you could somehow be aware of every single podcast in the world, such that you could choose to listen only to those that really rocked your intellectual world, you’d still be left with more truly great content to listen to than was in any way sane to do so in the context of a moderately well-functioning human life**.
Or consider the person who sees all the subscriptions and all the supplements as substitutes for their respective underlying needs. Or talks *about* how many books they’ve read rather than talks *as if* even one of those books had transformed them in some way. Or that goes to a talk so they can claim to use a crossed path as a proxy for a moulded mind. And so on.
**The starting point – as it must always be – is not ‘what parts are good in isolation?’ but ‘what does a good life look like, and what role do the parts play in that?’**
**Consumption, even of the inherently good, is not inherently good *****for you*****.**
**Which leads us to a more general point, that all the opportunities in the world are useless if you’re so busy creating them that you miss creating something with them.**
This goes far beyond a casual idea of ‘explore, then exploit.’ For those not trapped in the ‘[arrival fallacy](http://invalid//)’ mode of believing that *making the most of* life is something that happens after they’ve made life out of a series of *somethings*, be that a job title, or a bank balance, or the acquisition of a fancy piece of exercise equipment, some sense of purpose runs through both exploring and exploiting.
Ask a ton of people – as I have – what money means to them, and a percentage bordering on ‘all of them’ will say something about ‘opportunity’.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with such an answer. But there’s a lot wrong in how this answer is usually applied in context, as, of course, it must be.
(And how strange – and incredibly sad – it is that appending to the question words you’d hope were naturally implied, so it becomes ‘what does money mean to you *in the context of your life*?’ changes both the answers and the thought behind them).
Typical applications betray an infantile simplicity, that takes ‘opportunity’ to be inherently good, and therefore anything you do to increase the opportunity *for its own sake*, for example, making more money – and also more obviously foolishly, but following logically from the same premiss, consuming more things – must be worthwhile, with no need to ask further awkward questions like ‘So what?’
No one consciously chooses to live in a world where [price tags are indicators of value](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent), and that therefore there must be an inherent goodness to all consumption, regardless of its experienced effects upon the actual goodness of your life. But just about everybody creates this world through their choices all the same. It’s suicidally stupid. **The value of almost everything to you is *****necessarily absolutely nothing*****, regardless of how much some other people are prepared to pay for them.**
Of course there are things out there that are good in isolation, just as there are podcasts that will offer you an interesting experience for an hour or two. And in analysing a good life, you can break it down and see that it contains these ‘things’ and maybe a decent handful of interesting podcasts (or your chosen equivalent). But a Good Life isn’t – *cannot be* – built up from the things and the podcasts. It – literally, metaphorically, and neurologically – doesn’t work *that way*.
This enormous error permeates so much of financial planning. It’s a poison that not only infects the process, but also affects the recipient’s ability to see the poison. This is something we’ll return to plenty of times as part of the [McGilchrist series](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance).
#### The limits of opportunity are smaller than you think
**You *****can***** care *****about***** everything. You *****can’t***** care *****for***** everything.**
Yet [money cons you into thinking that you can](https://news.moneyblind.net/51-align-what-you-care-for-with-what-you-care-about).
Because money makes you care about *it*.
But also not about *it* directly. *It* as a means of limitless opportunity.
Some element of opportunity is obviously important. But left unexamined, it’s unhelpful. How much ‘opportunity’ do you actually need to live well?
**Caring about infinite opportunity in the context of a finite human life is foolish**.
It’s tempting, for sure.
There’s a good argument that everything anybody does is in service of a reaching for immortality, [an attempt to deny death](https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Denial-Death-Ernest-Becker/dp/1788164261).
But many tempting things are foolish. And denying death is perhaps the most foolish of them all.
However, a warning to ‘Don’t deny death!’ is likely to change precisely zero people’s lives in precisely zero ways.
But maybe a call to catch yourself when tempted by ‘opportunity’ and just check whether the opportunity is really one of direction rather than distraction… maybe that has a chance.
This is also at the heart of what it means to become wiser – to become better at valuing what is actually valuable. We’ll see how in a future missive.
# #85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips
2nd May, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that without a financial philosophy, you’re making everything pointlessly difficult, including:
* The difference between information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, and how (and how not) to progress through their ranks.
* Why a grounding philosophical outlook is more important than a bag full of psychological tricks.
* And why, despite craving it, reassurance is not what you want from a financial adviser.
*This is part of a* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *mapping our relationships with money to the foundationally important work of Iain McGilchrist, as set out in the two best non-fiction books I've ever read. Because you know money with only half a brain, and it’s the stupid half. And this, more than anything else, prevents you making more (a lot more) of the money in your life.*
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance Lesson #3: Making more of your money starts with philosophy, not behaviour-change hacks
There’s a spectrum of how well behaviour change attempts actually work:
**1. No change** – It doesn’t work. Plans are in place, but they’re mostly ornamental. You tell yourself you’ll get to it later. You never do.
**2. Action change** – Actions change but it feels like a chore, and lasts as long as most New Year’s Resolutions. Those best at bullying themselves can sustain a desired action for longer, though it never stops being a matter for ‘grit’, ‘grind’, and ‘hustle’.
**3. Mindset change** – Here we start to change not only our actions, but our perceptions of the possible, and our stories of who we are. Either we change the story directly, or, more commonly, via sustained action changes. A six-pack goal can become an appreciation for living healthily. A weight-loss goal can become a realisation that [a ‘sweet tooth’ is psychological not biological](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same). Changes are domain-specific: becoming someone that can learn a language, say, does not improve exercise-based [decision-making skills](https://news.moneyblind.net/76-forget-about-improving-your-decisions.-focus-on-improving-your-decision-making-skills).
**4. Worldview change** – You make better decisions by default, end the merry-go-round of problem-creation and hack-hunting and embrace a self-reinforcing wiser way of seeing the world.
That fourth one sounds great! How do we do that? Is there a hack?
These four types of change can be mapped to a hierarchy of change-making tools and the type of knowing associated with each one:
**1. Information (**[propositional knowing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#1.-propositional-knowing)**)** – Knowing all the facts may feel helpful, but it’s a con. Just look at the ratio, amid those who have the goal of being healthy, between those who know eating crap and being sedentary is a suicidally bad idea and those who do it anyway.
**2. Knowledge (**[procedural knowing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#2.-procedural-knowing)**)** – Knowing how to do something ([having a plan](https://www.oxfordrisk.com/blog-posts/the-problems-with-plans)) is a bit handier, but it’s still a long way from actually doing it in flow, and it’s no guarantee that what you’re doing feels at all fulfilling.
**3. Understanding (**[perspectival knowing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#3.-perspectival-knowing)**)** – Doing something with an understanding of the context of your life is a big step up in the fulfilment stakes, though changes are still trapped within their specific domain.
**4. Wisdom (**[participatory knowing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#4.-participatory-knowing)**)** – Now we’re talking! This is the level of not merely what knowledge you *have*, and how you *use* it to *manipulate* the world, but of who you *are*, and how you [dance with the world](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money).
Yay wisdom!
However.
If you want information, you probably pop off to the internet to look up the facts.
If you want knowledge, you maybe go look at the science to find a hot new psychological hack.
If you want to move from mere explanation to something akin to understanding, perhaps you go and chat with an expert, to work that hot hack into your environment in a way that fits with your psychology.
**But where do you go for wisdom? How do you transcend the facts, the hacks, and the personalised environment control to transform how you both see and subsequently show up in your world?**
### Life isn’t a computer game
Much to the undoubted disappointment of those that came here looking for cheat codes as if ‘The Road to Financial Wisdom’ were a computer game, where you graduate from one level to the next, you cannot ‘buy’ the ‘solution’ to these questions, or ‘earn’ them by getting really good at the first levels of the game. Because it’s the very act of playing one game that’s stopping you from seeing the existence of another one, which requires a fundamentally different way of playing.
You can become the best information junkie in the world without that translating into becoming a jot wiser. It may do. But it may also get in the way. And it can even screw you over. Tempting as it is, you can’t lounge around satisfied that getting to grips with mainlining information and piling up knowledge is good enough to one day magically translate into something transcendent.
As McGilchrist put it:
> Knowing how to do something is not the same as understanding it; expanding know-how, our power to control, exponentially, without any concomitant advance in wisdom, is dangerous.
Because [how you do anything is how you do everything](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.3#5-how-you-do-anything-is-how-you-do-everything), the longer you spend in ‘explicit/explanation/having’ mode, the less likely it becomes that you’ll ever see the benefit of, let alone experience what it feels like to play in, ‘implicit/understanding/becoming’ mode.
**Blindly loading up on information, for example listening to a million personal-finance podcasts, won’t make you any better at living with money any more than reading about a million different exercises will make someone fitter**. And to the extent that doing so doesn’t challenge the belief that wisdom comes from accumulated information, it’ll only make it harder.
Central to appreciating McGilchrist’s arguments is understanding that in talking of the differences between your brain’s two ‘takes’ on reality, he’s talking about something truly foundational to your experience of your whole life… how you show up in relating with reality – your ‘way of being in the world’.
> The phrase ‘way of being in the world’ may seem a bit mannered, but I can’t think of a good substitute. It isn’t just about thinking differently, or feeling differently, or behaving differently, though each of those is an important part (and each is bound up with the others). It involves a difference in the type of attention paid to the world. It is about having a whole different take on the world, a different disposition towards the world, in which certain features stand forward and others inevitably recede.
Okay! When it comes to my finances, I realise I’m stuck in the propositional game, stuck seeing money as an isolated ‘thing’ rather than an expression and shaper of my way of relating with the world. How do I get unstuck? What’s the solution?
> Many readers who share my deep alarm at the world we are creating asked the obvious question: ‘So, what’s the solution?’ **Some may have hoped for a five-point plan, but of course there isn’t one. We need to address the problem at a much more fundamental level. We need to look at the roots of the malaise. We need to do nothing less than reconceive our world**, our reality in a way that, far from subordinating the right hemisphere, acknowledges that it alone has access to the world beyond us, ‘out there’. We need to learn again to look, to see. That’s to say, we need to redirect our attention to what-out-there-is-not-us in a way that rebalances the contributions of the two hemispheres so as to bring a world into being that is truer, richer and within which we can live less harmfully, more peacefully and with much greater fulfilment.
Which maps rather neatly to [this early part](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.1#how-do-you-get-unstuck-from-financial-confusion) of my book: ‘How do you get unstuck from financial confusion?’
**Which in turn leads to the importance of starting with philosophy, rather than seeing it as some esoteric 'nice to have' bolted on at the end, when you’ve ‘arrived’ at a point of sufficient satiety with all the explanatory stuff**. ‘True philosophy, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, ‘entails learning to see the world anew.’ As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.1):
> The journey towards financial enlightenment begins with philosophy. You can sort your finances ‘perfectly’, but without getting *your* philosophy sorted first, you may be less f-cked up, but you’ll be far from flourishing.
> Fertilising our neural soil with philosophy allows us to nurture an all-weather wisdom that transforms how we think, feel, and act with money, that strengthens us from the inside out, and that makes the right call the effortless one, forever more.
> This is wisdom in the sense described by historian Will Durant: ‘an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.’
McGilchrist calls upon Alfred North Whitehead to make the same point:
> **A philosophic outlook is the very foundation of thought and of life. The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, out control of our behaviour. As we think, we live.**
He also backs it up with words of his own:
> Philosophy is not, then, purely a matter of impersonal reason, but living: bound up in the temperament, character and history of the person who expounds it.
### Form, not inform
In short, **the point of philosophy is not to inform, but to form**.
If only this were so easy. As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#i-can-see-clearly-now):
> The trouble with philosophy for a lot of people is that despite its highly practical aims, there exists a chasm between abstract thought and its real-life expression. Some people’s minds are fluid enough to think themselves into better living with an obsessive openness to experience and a few rounds of reflecting on the helpfulness or otherwise of an action. Others… can’t. Money is the best bridge across the chasm.
> Western philosophy speaks of the importance of living an examined life. What better way to do this than with the unequivocal accounting record of your life choices that your credit-card statements provide? Eastern philosophy centres on a meditative process of overcoming self-deception. As we’ll see on just about every page of this book, nothing keeps the fires of our self-deceptions burning like money.
Philosophy is not something to look at; it’s something to look through. It’s a way of seeing. It’s a way of studying yourself, the world, and the interplay between the two. It’s a set of lenses that brings clarity to the complexity and fuzziness of your vision. It is lived, not possessed. It is brain surgery. If it doesn’t literally change you, and better equip you to interact with the world, then it’s not working.
Crucially, this goes beyond psychology. Where financial psychology describes, explains, and occasionally prescribes means of controlling an environment to improve in-the-moment behaviours, and consequently financial outcomes (which can be extraordinarily valuable!), financial philosophy is about rewiring your brain to defeat self-deception by seeing more clearly, rather than playing behavioural whack-a-mole.
Behavioural tricks are brilliant because they reduce the cognitive load of taking the right action at the right time. But **psychological tricks are less necessary when you defeat the problematic self-deceptive tricks that triggered their need.**
**Philosophy is a means of trusting your own truth so you don’t get waylaid by someone else’s. Personal finance therefore *****demands***** a philosophy. A way of understanding yourself, and how you live with money. Without one, you waste money, time, and energy chasing other people’s dreams, and flick from one siren-call of investment advice to the next, never sure if what you’re doing is right for you.**
Describing systematically silly behaviours and ‘nudging’ people away from them does help people buy better investments. This is a good thing. But the point of nudges is that their prescriptions are followed without the follower noticing. Unhelpful tendencies are to be side-stepped, rather than explained, understood, engaged with, and consciously changed. This again is a good thing… in most circumstances. Not only because through the new actions, one may become a new person (rendering the old problems redundant), but also because most things aren’t worth the extra effort engaged choice demands. When it comes to increasing the efficiency of collecting taxes, or reducing the inefficiency of washing hotel towels, it is better to be blindly led along society’s preferred path.
Your relationship with money is different. Because blindly following society’s preferred path is precisely most people’s main money problem. And save perhaps for a few dozen people living in anarcho-syndicalist collectives in hippie communes, whether you want to or not you engage with money every damn day, even when – especially when – you’re deliberately trying not to.
### Seek enlightenment not enablement
Most financial advice isn’t about providing convincing answers; it’s about providing persuasive reassurance. *Why* we’re spending or investing, and *what* we’re spending or investing on or in isn’t nearly as important as doing enough to stop the nagging feeling we need to do *something*. We pay advisers not to think up a suitable solution, but to avoid having to think of one ourselves.
**However, this reassurance illusion doesn’t *****change***** unhelpful behaviours. It *****enables***** them. Buying a blindfold stops you seeing, not the things seen.**
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.
***Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:***
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[#87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot](/87-sum-malfunction-a-sure-fire-way-to-spot-if-youre-being-a-financial-idiot)
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# #86: Five regrets of the rich
9th May, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that regrets (especially other people’s) can be a great teacher, but you’ve got to use them properly, including:
* Why you shouldn’t buy a holiday home.
* Why you should quit your job.
* And why, regardless of what you do and don’t do, when it involves making or spending money, you should at least think about doing or not doing it vaguely consciously, because you’re almost certainly not.
**Learn from others’ mistakes: regrets of the dying are all well and good, but the regrets of the living (especially the rich) are potentially more helpful. Here are five classic rookie errors people make when they come into a bit of cash.**
If you hang around in financial-planning circles for more than a few minutes, you’re likely to encounter Bronnie Ware’s ‘[Five Regrets of the Dying](http://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/)’:
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
The right response to which is of course to nod along sagely, mutter something about how sad it is that people don’t realise this sort of stuff until it’s too late, and perhaps blame society, or money, or mimetic desires, before patting yourself on the back that at least *you’ll* never regret those things, because even if you’re on track to do so, you can quit any time you like.
**Momentarily interesting as this list is, it’s also practically pretty damn useless.**
Who deliberately sets out to live inauthentically?
Who deliberately works *excessively* hard?
Who deliberately lacks courage?
Who, outside of the last video logs of maniacs about to shoot up a school, deliberately thinks ‘f-ck friends’?
Who deliberately *forces themselves to be unhappy*?
And therefore, who, upon reading these regrets, does a damn thing about avoiding them?
It’s like pointing out that no one gets to their end wishing they’d spent more time with people that judged them on their possessions and their postcode, or with colleagues over loved ones. Yet it’s not like we’re short of people actively living like these are important considerations.
**Turn these dying regrets into recommendations, and no one will argue with any of them. They’re thus as meaningless as a guide to living as a dating profile advertising a love of travel is as a guide to that particular potential paramour’s personality.**
### Money without wisdom is a peculiarly depressing sort of poverty
When I write about money, I’m really writing about wisdom.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.3):
> Abstract notions of wisdom are all well and good, but what to do with money is an intensely practical topic. ‘Wisdom,’ wrote Matthieu Ricard, ‘is precisely that which allows us to distinguish the thoughts and deeds that contribute to authentic happiness from those that destroy it.’
The Greeks – unsurprisingly – had a word for particularly practical wisdom: *phronēsis*. *Phronēsis* is pragmatic, variable, context dependent, and oriented towards action. It implies good judgment, helpful habits, and excellent character.
In some spirits it can mean ‘mindfulness’.
In others it simply means not being an idiot.
It’s less about knowledge of rules, and more about knowing what to do in a given situation. It’s the difference between telling someone to calm down and getting them to breathe deeply.
*The goal of phronēsis – of practical wisdom – is not only how to choose a path to an end, but how to choose the end most consistent with the aim of living well overall.* To want what you really want to want.
With that in mind, therefore, in a bid to be more practically helpful than the Five Regrets of the Dying, **here are my Five Regrets of the Rich: stuff pretty much all financial planning clients in my experience did, but rather wished they hadn’t**.
One of the best things a financial planner can do for their clients is to leverage the knowledge of other clients’ mistakes, so that the ones that haven’t made them yet can be saved from doing so.
**They are all recommendations you can legitimately argue with. Please feel free to do so by reply or in the comments.**
### 1. Don’t buy a holiday home
Buying a holiday home is the default move for a ton of people with a ton of ‘spare’ cash lying around.
Most regret it.
This is not because clients haven’t had genuinely great times in their hilltop villas and ski chalets. It’s *despite* absolutely having done so.
But **only idiots compare the greatness of a thing with nothing, rather than the counterfactual**. The counterfactual to owning holidays is [renting them](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent); it’s not sitting around at home. Great things can be terrible things *for you*. In fact, [they usually always are](https://news.moneyblind.net/84-the-value-of-almost-everything-to-you-is-nothing).
Aside from the maintenance and its associated hassles, pretty much everyone, were they to do it all again, would swap the holiday home for a multi-decade holiday budget.
(This failure to see financial decisions – even the really big ones – in the context of the life they should be serving is, incidentally, a distinctive form of the sort of half-brained worldview we’re working through [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance).)
### 2. Do quit your job
‘If in doubt, quit your job’ is [sound, well-supported advice](https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/). But this isn’t about that.
It’s not even about the specifics of crappy jobs. It’s about the worldview that keeps people feeling ‘trapped’ in them despite their crappiness.
It’s about breaking out of the mode of living that sticks with an unfulfilling job, primarily because of a salary which is primarily used to purchase purposeless things in a [performatively wasteful way](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste), to justify the sacrifices (time, energy, health, relationships, and other assorted good human things) made to earn that salary, in a merry-go-round of meaninglessness.
It’s about questioning if the square footage of [an isolationist lair](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions) is really such a great substitute for the human connection the lair is desperately but vainly trying to feel. And if appeasing addictions is really better than [breaking free of the system of belief](https://news.moneyblind.net/56-treating-your-hidden-money-addictions) that put them in charge of your life choices.
It’s about confronting the bullshit underlying the post-hoc rationalisation of the type we saw when we met [Nigel](https://news.moneyblind.net/19-whats-your-number), [Hugh](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.3-there-is-always-an-underlying-emotional-reward#rewarding-retirement), and the poor couple who managed to [spend £450,000 a year on being worse parents](https://news.moneyblind.net/4-spending-gbp450k-on-being-bad-parents). The same type you see when **despite all the resources any human in history could ever hope to control, someone’s dream life gets reduced to amateur interior decorating, and they live not for flow, and flourishing, but for pulling the levers on the John Lewis one-arm bandit in search of the next ‘Ooh, I like what you’ve done with the place’ reward.**
The regret these poor rich folk feel is of not understanding sooner that the point of making money is not so you [*don’t have to think about it*](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money), but precisely to encourage you to do so… as a tool for living an examined life. The major upshot of which (for non-psychopaths at least) is to see financial freedom in a much [cooler](https://news.moneyblind.net/58-the-abc-of-money-part-14-the-secret-shackles-of-financial-freedom), [healthier](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for), way.
(While we’re in ‘top five regrets’ mode, see also the [top five career regrets](http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/the_top_five_career_regrets.html), if you’re into that sort of thing; they’re basically all about quitting despite not feeling completely ‘ready’ to do so.)
### 3. Don’t gift your children a house
Right up there alongside ‘buy a holiday home’ in the list of ‘stuff rich people do with excess cash’ is gift some of it to their children.
Nothing wrong with this. Gifts, to children or to charity, are generally always better made when you’re still alive. Such gifts can very easily be the most magically transformative, opportunity-creating thing a parent can do for a child, or for people they’ve never met, or for themselves.
However, the way most rich people go about it is regretfully misguided.
Perhaps because they don’t trust that their children have been raised to make half-decent choices, or perhaps because they’re trying to re-live their own youths through their offspring, the default is to buy a house, usually of the parents’, rather than the child’s, choosing.
This may work, but it’s leaving a lot to chance, and unnecessarily so. **What parents really want to pass on is not a house, but a transformative experience**. For some children this will be best done with a house (though almost certainly one the child chooses with zero input from the parent). However, for some it could be using the same funds to enable the child not to have to look for a job for a few years, to work on something creative, perhaps. Or some other experience entirely.
It’s amazing how often the actual underlying goal isn’t even considered, because of some daft belief about some sort of ‘objective’ reality of financial dreams, or because ‘property!’.
**Another common error is to gift multiple children a house to share. Don’t do this**. Whatever the parents’ dreams of multi-generational memory-making, the children give far less of a sh!t, are perfectly capable of creating memories in many sets of external circumstances, and it’s generally a recipe for awkward conversations all round, with children tip-toeing around not wanting to appear ungrateful and not wanting to offend, but also really wanting one of their siblings to buy them out.
Also, while we’re on the topic of inheritances, let’s not forget [this](https://news.moneyblind.net/22-the-psychoanalysis-of-money-or-how-to-screw-up-your-childrens-financial-worldview):
> 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.
### 4. Do prioritise your physical and mental health (no, really, actually do)
This one feels almost so obvious as to be pointless, but it’s so damn ubiquitous, and so damn important, I’m including it anyway.
**I’ve never met a client that wouldn’t swap millions in the bank for better health into middle- and old-age. But hold up a mirror to how they’d dedicated their lives up to that point to doing the exact opposite and they’ll look away, refusing to acknowledge that they’ve firstly made some poor choices, and secondly still have plenty of time to correct them.**
They’d sooner use their money not for improving their health, but for making it ever-easier to stay sedentary, while conning themselves with some drivel about how they can buy all the health and relationships and things just as soon as they’ve saved enough money to do so.
Anything you hide that hard from is definitely something you want to [face](https://news.moneyblind.net/33-the-six-financial-stress-responses-whats-yours) as soon as possible.
All the good human stuff (health, belonging, connection and so on) simply *must* come before all the mechanical stuff (material attempts to buy the human stuff, which divert resources from actually experiencing the sought-for [emotional rewards](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.3-there-is-always-an-underlying-emotional-reward), because of believing that if a solution isn’t for sale it won’t work). And yet here we all are.
### 5. Don’t wait
**Regret number five of the living is dying while they’re still alive.**
There’s a wonderful quote, seemingly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, that goes ‘most people die at 25, but are buried at 75.’
Most people believe that retirement is the end of a job and the beginning of waiting to die. Despite at ‘retirement age’ likely having more potentially productive time left than has elapsed. And being less burdened by children and careers. And having more wisdom to know what lights their fires (fires that will of course flicker, and fade, and flare up in all sorts of different directions yet). And often having more money to fund everything too.
Thinking you’re broadly ‘done’ when you’ve enough time left to become the world expert in something three times over, not to mention physically glorious, is both depressing and insane.
A large part of being a financial planner is [encouraging old folk to just do stuff](https://news.moneyblind.net/44-a-story-of-lions-and-loss).
To not wait to experience long-dreamt-of things. To not wait to donate slightly uncomfortably large sums (and likely discover that seeing the effects of doing so far outweighs any ‘sacrifice’ reflected in a net-worth statement). To not wait to try a thousand things, and ‘fail’ at 999 of them. To not wait until you’re ‘ready’ or ‘secure’ or ‘free’.
This isn’t about not waiting too long to ‘enjoy life’.
**To set life up as a balancing act between frugality and frivolity is fundamentally foolish, and a strong indication that you’re stuck playing a damn silly game.**
It is, instead, about not waiting to examine whether, when it comes to the game you are playing – [the way you are attending](https://news.moneyblind.net/79-your-money-worldview-is-literally-half-brained) to your life, the world, and the role money plays in the grand dance between the two – you could be playing a less silly one.
Not least because we regret more [what we didn’t do than what we did](http://www.bakadesuyo.com/what-do-we-regret-the-most), so of course most regret-avoidant behaviours are buying emotional insurance against faulty predictions.
As Daniel Gilbert et al wrote:
> Research suggests that people routinely overestimate the emotional impact of negative events ranging from professional failures and romantic breakups to electoral losses, sports defeats, and medical setbacks. One of the reasons for this is that people do not realize how readily they will rationalize negative outcomes once they occur \[...] people are less likely than they realize to blame themselves for their negative outcomes.
If you treat life as a mad rush to build as big a pile as possible as quickly as possible, before swapping stress for therapy to deal with the effects, you overlook both the facts that if you have value to give the world, then the world will very likely reward you for it, and that the Good Life for which you are doing the rushing is not a destination.
### No regrets, well, maybe a few
What these regrets have in common is that they are all markers of a [self-deceptive money mindset](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2), seeing numbers where it should see narrative, valuing having things over becoming somebody, and prioritising unthinking over thinking.
The self-deceived mindset that gets us into fearful, regretful, positions also makes us flee from fear when it gets in our face. Dispelling fear requires changing not the circumstances, but the mindset, swapping self-deception for [courage](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear).
I said above that the problem with the regrets of the dying is that they are unlikely to make a damn bit of difference to anyone’s life choices. In truth, I doubt these recommendations will make anyone do anything differently either, but, meh, at least I won’t regret not having tried.
# #87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot
16th May, 2022
**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* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *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.
\*
A few weeks ago, [we looked at the fundamentally different ways you pay attention to the world](https://news.moneyblind.net/79-your-money-worldview-is-literally-half-brained), and how those different ‘takes’ are responsible for the reality you experience.
> 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.
And because making the most of the money in your life is about [your relationship with it](https://news.moneyblind.net/6-what-the-bloody-hell-is-a-relationship-with-money-anyway) and its role as an eye-opening [accounting record](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#i-can-see-clearly-now) 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 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
The silliness of seeing life as the sum of some parts is seen in every expression of the ‘[Arrival Fallacy](http://invalid//)’: 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 [here](http://invalid//), ‘The Arrival Fallacy tricks us into treating a human journey like a robotic production line. It’s oh-so-tempting, but oh-so-futile.’
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.
Yet, as I wrote about [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2#knowing-what-to-do-with-your-new-knowledge-of-knowing) when looking at construal level theory, and [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is) 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 [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money).)
**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:***
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[#89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview](/89-the-tell-tale-signs-of-a-poor-financial-worldview)
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# #88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely
23rd May, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the ratio of your income to expenditure is not a guide to how well you’re using your money, including:
* Why The Micawber Principle is really The Micawber Fallacy.
* Happiness is the result of becoming wiser, not becoming a miser.
* Numbers-based solutions are still ‘solutions’, but to problems we shouldn’t worry about, based on strategies for games we shouldn’t be playing.
**The ratio of your income to your expenditure is not a guide to how wisely you’re using your money. Advice on how to spend it or not spend it doesn’t work. Returning your attention to how you are allocating your resources in service of your relationship with money does.**
In Charles Dickens’s *David Copperfield*, there’s a famous passage where the character Mr Micawber says: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’
It’s so famous it’s even referred to as ‘The Micawber Principle’.
There’s a lot to like about The Micawber Principle.
It connects money to living a good life in relative, rather than absolute terms, i.e. it says that simply accumulating money and stuff does not automatically translate to living better.
It also acknowledges that living expensively is not the same as living well.
And it suggests the importance of expenditure, rather than focusing solely on earning more and more money, only [to waste it to justify the costs incurred in the making](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste): costs like time, physical and mental health, and relationships.
Principles, however, are rules. And as covered in more detail [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.3#good-rules-v-bad-rules), there are good rules and bad rules.
**The point of rules is to rank reactiveness over reasoning, so you don’t have to work things through to sensible conclusions when you’re in no mood to do so**: you can just jump to those sensible conclusions, having done the working through beforehand.
If you’ve not done the working through, however, blindly following a rule means the conclusions you jump to may not be very sensible. And to blindly follow The Micawber Principle – to believe and consequently act as if ‘living within your means’ means that all will be well – is to increase your self-deception around your finances, not dissolve it.
Living beyond your means isn’t living well. But nor, necessarily, is living within them. It could even be worse.
When living within your means is the result of obsessing over the price of everything the result isn’t happiness, it’s an entrenchment of picking the numbers path over the narrative one, and the consequent reinforcement of deceptive patterns of beliefs about money. And if you obsess over anything, it compounds into a shitstorm in your brain.
**Happiness is the result of becoming wiser, not becoming a miser.** The Micawber Principle rightly divorces the Good Life from an absolute quantum of money; but it wrongly enforces the attachment of our expenditure to our income: enforcing the idea that it is the ratio of your expenditure to your income that is important, rather than how you choose to spend your money.
**The ratio of your expenditure to your income is relevant only when you’re actually poor. Beyond that, believing otherwise leads to some seriously silly places**, like strengthening the story that all consumption is inherently good, that [somehow achieving the goal of living well is better when it costs you more to do so](https://news.moneyblind.net/47-idiot-profiles-lord-and-lady-jewellery-addiction-teenage-ozymandias-and-me), and that the aim of financial planning is to spend your last penny on your last day, to fail to see that aiming to ‘die broke’ is to live broken.
### FIRE storm
Just as there’s nothing inherently good about consumption, there’s nothing *inherently* good about frugality either. Living within your means is obviously important, but it should happen as a side-effect of making wiser life choices; it is not a measure of the quality of those choices itself.
Frugality for the sake of it may rid someone of the false belief that quality of life equals access to comfort, but it is still defined by equating cost of living with standard of living. It just reverses it. It turns it into higher savings rate equals higher standard of living.
The frugalista’s chance of wasting money resources is diminished, but the chance of wasting time and energy resources isn’t. This is much safer than the extravagant alternative, but it’s still focused on a numbers scorecard, and is therefore still doomed to fail.
Dropping the attachment to the numbers scorecard opens us to the opportunity to use a more meaningful one. For example (to borrow from Bruce Lee) to ‘seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion’.
As H.L. Mencken quipped, ‘There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.’ **Numbers-based solutions are still ‘solutions’, but to problems we shouldn’t worry about, based on strategies for games we shouldn’t be playing**.
Because of the ways we’re wired, and society is set-up, we’re tempted down neat, plausible paths that lead to playing the wrong games, and making mistakes with money that range from dumb to disastrous. The Micawber Principle should be renamed The Micawber Fallacy.
### How to spend it
A heathy relationship with money can be confusing to conceptualise. It often helps to compare it to a healthy relationship with possibly the only thing that our lives revolve around as much – food.
*The world has almost as many nutritional prophets and proselytisers as it does obese people. If dietary advice is working, it’s doing so awfully subtly. That the advice isn’t working isn’t because it’s too confusing or contradictory. The problem isn’t knowing which fad is best. The problem is that the unifying feature of all the advice that could work, and that’s probably responsible for 95% of any results, is the one bit of advice addicted minds don’t want to hear: cut the crap.*
While not everyone will benefit from going vegan, or keto, or carnivorous, or herbivorous, or other-fad-that-worked-for-its-promoter-ivorous, everyone will benefit from cutting out sugar and pretty much every ‘food’ that comes in psychedelic plastic wrapping that makes it look like it’s dressed for a rave. Every *body* knows what it really wants: something nutritious, not something engineered to abuse our addictive tendencies. Your cells ‘want’ hyperpalatable poison as much as your lungs want be to tarred. However, when the deceptive signals have become embedded in our brains, what the body really wants is as easily overruled as the part of a crack-addict’s brain that suggests selling one of its organs to a back-alley doctor for the next hit isn’t such a smart idea.
The same is true of advice on how to spend it, or not spend it. **Any advice beyond not buying stuff that makes your life worse (perhaps starting with psychedelically clothed ‘food’) however well-meaning, is useless; a projection of prejudices, not practical wisdom.**
### How not to spend it
Advice on how not to spend it is most notably expressed via the cult of extreme frugality – the ingenious ‘life hacks’ of the internet’s thriftiest underground communities. This is often accompanied by sound principles for both saving and investing, and often opens up important opportunities for examination, e.g. proving you can live just as well on less money makes it much easier to quit a crappy job.
However, as long as the focus remains on the frugality, it’s tackling – often in a painful ‘sacrificing’ way – the symptom, rather than the cause. The only sustainable answer is to do something about the self-deceptive wiring that screwed everything up in the first place, and will continue to do so the second the sacrifices prove too painful. Frugality still focuses on the arbitrary number of a price tag as an indication of the role something plays in a life.
**Living within one’s means is an almost certain side-effect of buying what you want, not what you’re addicted to. Penny-pinching is putting the proverbial plaster on a broken leg. And extravagance is the tip of the iceberg of poor life choices. The real danger comes from the unthinking, addictive roots of all financial decision-making,** the results of which aren’t always as obviously seen as supercars, square-footage, and seven-course tasting menus.
No diet – in the sense that most people understand the concept, i.e. as a temporary prescription akin to a course of antibiotics – ever works. [No diet based on denial can ever work](https://news.moneyblind.net/38-the-best-diet-advice-and-the-best-financial-advice-are-the-same). If you believe yourself to be a person with a sweet tooth, or who is hard-wired to like cake, crisps, and cola, no amount of denying yourself these things, however steadfastly you do it, will change these unhelpful – and unnecessarily true – stories that you are telling yourself about who you are and how you react to certain stimuli. If you continue believing that you are a person for whom the appeasement of such addictions is a reward, or a ‘treat’, rather than the satisfaction of a fix in the same way a smoker needs nicotine or a junkie needs heroin, then you will always be short-changing your body’s desire for health.
**The same applies to cutting your expenditure. If it’s equated with denial, it won’t work. You can’t win a battle that never ends**. Because even if you can keep up the fight, you’re still exhausting your valuable energy in an unnecessary cause, and that is no sort of victory. A trim-looking credit-card statement, like a trim-looking stomach, can be a sign of success, or of failure. It is, as always, not about the numbers.
# #89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview
30th May, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by training yourself to catch your money-triggered idiocy, including a foundationally important list of 20 things to look out for to catch yourself being an idiot with money.
*This is part of a* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *mapping our relationships with money to the foundationally important work of Iain McGilchrist, as set out in the two best non-fiction books I've ever read. Because you know money with only half a brain, and it’s the stupid half. And this, more than anything else, prevents you making more (a lot more) of the money in your life.*
**Learning to spot the signature of poor financial decisions can help you both stop making them, and gradually wire your worldview so you stop even thinking about making them.**
It is understandable, when someone recommends you read 3,500 pages of pretty dense stuff about the brain and the nature of reality – or, as I’m doing with this series of posts, to walk you through the main lessons from those pages as they relate to the screwy way we relate to money – to ask: ‘What’s the point?’
‘Is it really worth my while?’ some of you have asked. ‘Or is it just intellectual posturing?’
‘Am I really embarking on a transformative experience, or am I a pawn in your attempt to justify the sacrifice you’ve made by reading it yourself, just as you delight in pointing out how [most wealth is used purely to justify the sacrifices inherent in its acquisition](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste)?’
‘And *even if it is so brilliant*, what am I supposed to do with it all? How does learning about the two ways my brain pays attention to the world – even adding in how the less-helpful way maps perfectly to how money makes me view the world – help me make more of my money, let alone live a more flourishing, flowing, potential-fulfilling life?’
### Catch your crazy
As with any work of genuine artistic merit, the major benefits of a work as rich as this are ineffable. The real value is experiential; it’s not something that can be ‘extracted’. That would be like trying to paraphrase a poem, or transmit the value of a psychedelic experience through any medium short of telepathy. **If you can do something justice – or even *****improve***** something – by summarising it, it probably wasn’t all that valuable to start with.**
That said, the one thing that can definitely be stated is that **the better you recognise the ‘signature’ of your left hemisphere’s take on the world, the better you can check yourself before blindly doing dumb things with your money, and your life**.
Everybody I know that’s made friends with these books reports seeing applications *everywhere*. They better understand the previously mysterious quirks of themselves, their friends, and all the dumb sh!t they encounter throughout the day. ‘Why is that mad thing happening?’ becomes ‘Oh, that’s so left hemisphere!’
As I wrote [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/83-how-money-hijacks-your-hierarchy-of-attention#money-makes-you-immature):
> you want to train to notice the signature of the brain damage, to become aware of when the take on reality upon which you’re relying for guidance about what to do is probably leading you in a silly direction, however tempting and clever and internally coherent it may appear.
Because [all behaviour change is brain change, and brain change is a discipline of where, and how, to pay attention](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.1#pay-attention), **becoming wiser with money is ultimately about catching yourself possibly about to blindly do something dumb and consciously checking in before acting, in a way that gradually refines your decision-making skills so you make better decisions by default**.
Changing a worldview means changing your brain: training to catch the times when you’re most in danger of viewing things through a shoddy set of lenses, and consciously checking if you’re maybe being an idiot, and, if you are, dancing off down a different path, until eventually you build a better set of default patterns, such that the right way becomes the easy way, whether that’s automatically being drawn towards the foods that your body actually wants to build itself out of, not being a dick on the Internet, or making better financial decisions because of developing better financial decision-making skills, rather than because of some cumbersome and unreliable cognitive effort.
**Learning to spot the signature moves of your left hemisphere gives you a major advantage in this process.**
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #5: To improve your financial decision-making skills, learn to spot the signature of poor financial thinking
Twenty of the left hemisphere’s signature moves*,* together with some quick examples of what they look like in money terms, are listed below.
Though broken down into a list for easier consumption (as the left hemisphere likes!), do not forget to see these in context (a right-hemisphere skill), as an interdependent web: the shapers and expressors of a worldview, not a series of isolated, independent quirks.
This list is far from exhaustive; we’ll cover even more as we work through these [lessons](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance).
Most quotes below come from McGilchrist imagining ‘what the world would look like if the left hemisphere became so far dominant that \[…] it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere’s world altogether. What would that be like?’ I contend it would be a lot like what happens when [money hijacks the way in which we pay attention to our lives](https://news.moneyblind.net/83-how-money-hijacks-your-hierarchy-of-attention).
1\. **Prioritising mechanical parts over human wholes** – ‘A narrow focus that sees only details, or parts, with no sense of how they fit into a coherent whole. Indeed, the whole, because it cannot be clear or certain, is simply disregarded.’ For example, [believing that excess money ‘offsets’ poor health](https://news.moneyblind.net/42-the-dumbest-damn-thing-ive-ever-read-in-personal-finance-part-1), or [getting lost in the calculation of a tax scheme with no sense of what that scheming says about you](https://news.moneyblind.net/83-how-money-hijacks-your-hierarchy-of-attention#money-makes-you-immature).
2\. **Prioritising the material over the living** – ‘Because there are no whole things, there are no human things. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. This includes prioritising the virtual over the real.’ Hi NFTs! Also hello [believing that consumption is a substitute for connection](https://news.moneyblind.net/7-what-fund-managers-can-teach-us-about-what-really-matters).
3\. **Prioritising information gathering over experiential understanding** – ‘Because of an ever more narrowly focussed attention, there is an increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge, and a substitution of information for experiential understanding, and wisdom, because it can’t be grasped, would be usurped by mere knowledge, which comes with a stamp of approval from the Gods of randomised controlled trials.’ For example, [financial planning that even when it says it’s about people is still seeing the world through product-selling lenses](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.3#when-is-delegation-dangerous), treating the problem, not the patient.
4\. **Prioritising expert knowledge over expertise** – ‘In turn, expertise would be replaced by “expert” knowledge (that would have in fact to be based on theory) and in general one would expect a tendency to replace the concrete with the theoretical or abstract, which would come to seem more convincing.’ For example, expertise in living well (philosophy) is overridden by investing tips and life hacks. See also how there are more courses on how to make better decisions through quantifiable and repeatable processes than there are on [how to improve your default decision-making skills.](https://news.moneyblind.net/76-forget-about-improving-your-decisions.-focus-on-improving-your-decision-making-skills) I’ll have a lot more to say about financial ‘experts’ one day.
5\. **Prioritising algorithmic decision-making procedures over developing decision-making skills** – ‘Skills themselves would be reduced to algorithmic procedures which could be drawn up, and even if necessary regulated, by administrators.’ For example, believing that budgeting well is about finding a cleverer spending app, rather than examining your life.
6\. **Prioritising abstract work over real work** – ‘Fewer people would find themselves doing work involving contact with anything in the real, “lived” world, rather than with plans, strategies, paperwork, management and bureaucratic procedures.’ For example, replacing (often extraordinarily subtly, and very convincingly) an understanding of what it means to live well with playing with a cashflow model (something I’ll write about extensively before too long, given what a well-intentioned distillation but ultimately depressing disease it is of the financial-planning world.)
7\. **Prioritising numbers over narratives** – ‘Numbers, which the left hemisphere feels familiar with and is excellent at manipulating (though, it may be remembered, it is less good at understanding what they mean), would come to replace the response to individuals, whether people, places, things or circumstances, which the right hemisphere would have distinguished.’ For example, basically half of my book, especially [numbers over narrative as a major expression of financial self-deception](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-narrative-path-v-the-numbers-path), and [confusing price and value](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent).
8\. **Prioritising conspicuous consumption over context and connection** – ‘Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place \[…] would be neglected \[…] There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members.’ For example the myriad lessons contained in [this story](https://news.moneyblind.net/63-a-problem-shared) from the Italian mountains.
9\. **Prioritising competition over collaboration** – ‘Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world.’ Collaboration is the combination of competition and co-operation, except money cons us into drastically seeing only the former. This really messes up our view of reality, which, as we’ve seen, [*is our relationships*](https://news.moneyblind.net/82-the-overlooked-truth-of-reality-that-is-messing-up-how-you-live-with-money).
10\. **Prioritising uniformity over uniqueness** – ‘Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others.’ For all the appearance of money driving increased personalisation and therefore uniqueness, seen below the veil-thin surface, this is clearly nonsense, for the personalisation in this context is proof that you’re playing the same silly performative game.
11\. **Prioritising pigeonholes and passive exposure over people and creative expression** – ‘Individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on \[…] In relation to culture, we would expect people to become increasingly passive. They would see themselves as “exposing” themselves before culture, like a photographic plate to light, or even think of themselves as “being exposed” to such things.’ For example, tying net worth to self worth, or identity to job title or consumption (rather than the other way around). And of course [buggering up ‘buying experiences’](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.2#how-not-to-buy-experiences).
12\. **Prioritising freedom to and freedom from over freedom for** – ‘Talk of liberty, which is an abstract ideal for the left hemisphere, would increase for Machiavellian reasons, but individual liberty would be curtailed.’ For example, [the three types of financial freedom](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for).
13\. **Prioritising opportunity having over opportunity seizing** – ‘In such a society people of all kinds would attach an unusual importance to being in control.’ For example, [seeing the value of money as ‘opportunity’](https://news.moneyblind.net/84-the-value-of-almost-everything-to-you-is-nothing), and failing to see that [ability and responsibility are intertwined](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent#the-only-thing-we-dont-want-to-own-is-the-only-thing-we-should).
14\. **Prioritising ‘security’ and ‘certainty’** – ‘There would be a preoccupation, which might even reach to be an obsession, with certainty and security.’ Something about ‘security’ is of course the first thing just about everybody says when asked what matters about money to them. And ‘certainty’ is the curse that runs through all financial planning (again, something I’ll write about in much more depth when I dare to take on cashflow modelling).
15\. **Prioritising inflexibility over fluidity when considering the future** – ‘There would be a rise in intolerance and inflexibility, an unwillingness to change track or change one’s mind.’ Another one for the cashflow can be calamitously misleading file. See also the pervasiveness in planning one’s future of the end of history illusion.
16\. **Prioritising acquisitive desires over self-fulfilment desires** – ‘There would be a lack of will-power in the sense of self-control and self-motivation, but not of will in the sense of acquisitive greed and desire to manipulate.’ For example, [this](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.3/2.2.3.2-is-it-better-to-own-or-to-rent#the-onanism-of-owning) on acquisitiveness, and [this](https://news.moneyblind.net/49-give-give-give-me-more-more-more) on the focus on fitting in at the expense of living in a flowing, flourishing, fulfilling way.
17\. **Prioritising the ‘what’ over the ‘how’** – ‘We could expect a rise in the determination to carry out procedures by rote, and perhaps an increasing efficiency at doing so, without this necessarily being accompanied by an understanding of what they mean.’ For example, [mistaking standard of living with access to comfort](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.5-enough-is-more-than-enough#quality-of-life-and-access-to-comfort-are-not-the-same-thing).
18\. **Prioritising surface stimulation over marrow-deep meaning and the novel over the new** – ‘It would become hard to discern value or meaning in life at all; a sense of nausea and boredom before life would be likely to lead to a craving for novelty and stimulation.’ For example, money’s role in the meaning crisis (see, e.g. most posts in [this series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)) and [how we can talk of someone ‘having everything’ and yet still feel like something is ‘missing’](https://news.moneyblind.net/63-a-problem-shared).
19\. **Prioritising the explicit over the implicit** – ‘As a culture, we would come to discard tacit forms of knowing altogether. There would be a remarkable difficulty in understanding non-explicit meaning, and a downgrading of non-verbal, non-explicit communication. Concomitant with this would be a rise in explicitness.’ For example, [the dominance in knowing money only propositionally and procedurally](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2), and [the underlying idiocy of ‘retirement’ as a goal](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#retirement-is-a-terrible-goal).
20\. **Prioritising racing towards conclusions over revelling in ambiguity** – ‘There would be a loss of tolerance for, and appreciation of the value of, ambiguity. We would tend to be over-explicit in the language we used to approach art and religion, accompanied by a loss of their vital, implicit and metaphorical power.’ We’re back at the calamity of cashflow modelling (as it is commonly used in practice) again. See also the foolishness of most ‘goals-based planning’ approaches. And the ignorance of the fact that [life is a dance, not a race](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money), something to make soulful art out of, not something to direct towards buying art to adorn soulless walls.
### Money: know your place!
**I refer to the left hemisphere as the stupid half of your brain largely for dramatic effect. It’s obviously not completely crackers. It’s very good at what it does within limits, but it’s very bad at knowing those limits and staying within them.** Because of the way money is uniquely woven into your worldview, this is especially true – and especially important – when it comes to making the most of your personal finances.
As McGilchrist wrote:
> The main point in Part I has not been so much to demonstrate the left hemisphere’s weakness in this or that area: it has been to demonstrate that the differences are stark in every area relevant to making sense of the world. What I think I have shown in these chapters is that **the left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters**.
We link money to ‘what matters’ in a bizarre, bastardised, way. Everything I write is an attempt to help correct this.
‘The left hemisphere,’ wrote McGilchrist, ‘appears to have difficulty understanding the real world, the one in which we actually live, and move, and have our being. But then comes the realisation: it doesn’t have to.’ **Money doesn’t have to play the role it does in most of our decisions. Which, given the way it messes them up, is rather good news. But it will only stay in its place if we make a conscious effort to keep it there**.
***Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:***
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[#94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up](/94-the-main-reason-your-relationship-with-money-is-so-messed-up)
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# #90: Wanting wisdom, craving financial fortune cookies
6th June, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that however much you crave fortune cookies, you don’t really want them.
*Because spaced repetition is cool (and because apparently I'm not above doing a clip show) for this, the 90th edition of Idiot Money, a recap of some stuff from the earlier days. Other clip shows can be found* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-clip-shows)*.*
### 1. Life isn’t a race, it’s a dance
\[From [Idiot Money #40](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money)]
* Advice to say ‘yes’ to everything, or ‘no’ to everything is pointless fortune-cookie crap. Constraints are the key to getting shit done. However, the problem with getting shit done is that sometimes what you get done is shit. **It’s simpler to always say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ than it is to admit that the point of life is to continually increase your capability to master increasing levels of complexity.**
* Any idiot can climb a ladder. Non-idiots check it’s against the right wall. Wiser folk still, right wall or not, wonder if perhaps climbing the same simple steps for all eternity is really the best metaphor for living in the first place.
* You become wiser as a side-effect of a way of living. A way of living defined by the exact sort of consciousness fortune-cookie trivialities work against.
* Financial advisers are in the perfect place to leverage knowledge of what has worked (and what hasn’t) when it comes to financial decision-making. Yet they are incentivised to enable lacklustre life choices, not challenge them.
* **The winner of the rat race is still a rat**, yet countless rich folk pay advisers stratospheric sums to brag about the ‘winning’, not to be questioned about what it is they’ve actually won.
* People don’t seek advice to be guided to the work they have to do. They seek it to be told the work is all taken care of. Yet you can’t delegate living wisely.
### 2. How money is mapped in your brain determines how well it serves your life far more than how you spend or invest it
\[From [Idiot Money #41](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity)]
* **It doesn’t matter how well you can afford things if those things don’t afford living well.**
* You can hack your habits to make you more productive at doing anything, but it’s kind of pointless if you’re still trapped in a worldview that thinks personalised numberplates are a sign of class.
* **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.**
* The worst thing about money – its ubiquity in our decision-making – is also the best thing about it. Because the same machinery that spirals us down when we don’t attend to it spirals us up when we do.
* You are not what you think or do. You are what you’ve thought and done. You become what you think and do… what you pay attention to.
### 3. The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance
\[From [Idiot Money #42](https://news.moneyblind.net/42-the-dumbest-damn-thing-ive-ever-read-in-personal-finance-part-1)] \[From [Idiot Money #43](https://news.moneyblind.net/43-the-dumbest-damn-thing-ive-ever-read-in-personal-finance-part-2)]
* **A first-class way to be dumb with money is to believe that having money means you aren’t dumb.**
* The dumbest thing I’ve ever read in a respected personal finance book is that there is a direct link between salary and intelligence. This is not only laughable, but also dangerous, for it sets its believers up to make some truly terrible life choices.
* We live in a world where money excuses a lack of wisdom, character, and virtue, and therefore one in which on some level we believe it must be a substitute for those things.
* **If you think money worries go away when you have lots of money, you don’t understand money, or worry.**
* We believe other people are drastically more self-interested than they are… so we publicly praise self-interested motives (and denigrate their absence) to fit in not with others but with the collective myth.
* We want to live well, not expensively. We want the Good Life, not the appearance of it. This requires seeing clearly what our Good Life actually is. What we actually want at the level of our souls, not the level of our ability to respond to adverts.
### 4. Personal finance isn’t about making the most money, it’s about making the most out of your money
\[From [Idiot Money #44](https://news.moneyblind.net/44-a-story-of-lions-and-loss)]
* Delegation shouldn’t be the end of confusion, but the beginning of understanding.
* A common retired-client scenario is to ask about ‘objectives’ or ‘goals’ and get a typical ‘oh, you know, tick along, continue with our current lifestyles’ as an answer, with maybe a ‘fund the grandchildren’s education’ thrown in here and there. Ask a silly question, get an unusable answer.
* Opportunities, potential, life… their impermanence is the *source* of their value, not something to try to remove, be it through hoarding, believing happiness comes from having rather than becoming, or pretending life is lived tomorrow.
* **If you only live once, then the thing to do is to take *****more***** conscious care over your decisions, not less (and conscious care does not mean ‘abundance of caution’).** Equating YOLO with ‘don’t think, just do’ works only in a world where we’re so terrified of thinking through what we really want to do with our life that we’re sometimes better off not thinking.
* We regret more what we didn’t do than what we did. But we often regret what we did too. We never regret doing what we deep down know we want to do, regardless of the result.
* **‘The way to make your life as good as possible is to aim to spend your last penny on your last day’ is about as idiotic a take on the value of money in a life as it’s possible to have.**
* If you’re driven by what you can afford, rather than what you care about, you’ll be taken for a ride to places you don’t care to go. And at some point, it’ll be too late to turn around.
### 5. Living mindfully with money
\[From [Idiot Money #41](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), [#45](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt)]
* Meditation isn’t relaxation. It’s not listening to a soothing voice telling you to relax your eyelids and think happy thoughts for five minutes.
* There’s nothing wrong with plain old relaxation. You should do it now. Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw. Breathe into your hips, not your sternum. But meditation (for our [neuroplastic](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity), better-living, purpose) is different. Not least because if the only time your shoulders are dropped, your jaw unclenched and your breathing deep and horizontal is when you remember to sit on a cushion for ten minutes every now and then, then… well, I shouldn’t need to spell out why that’s perhaps a touch troubling.
* **The best intentions are pointless if they’re forgotten when they’re needed. The fact you don’t live in a meditation hall makes a money philosophy rather important. Because a philosophy is a way of living, and if you’re living something, it’s with you in everything you do.**
* Lunchtime mindfulness sessions may be all the anti-rage in workaholic-enabling offices, but they reaaaaaaally miss the point. If your job sponsors your slow suicide by keeping you simmering with stress and sedentary for more than six hours a day, making it a bit easier to stay there for 10 hours a day isn’t a plus point. Padding, whether it’s on a shoe or in a cell, doesn’t treat pain, it incubates it.
* Rewiring your world is an active, participatory, process. A constant cascade of choices to remember to live your life in [becoming not having mode](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2#the-becoming-mode-v-the-having-mode), to continually refresh your interest and your intention in aligning what [you care for with what you care about](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#i-can-see-clearly-now).
* Meditation isn’t contemplation. Meditation and contemplation are cognitively opposing processes, not synonyms.
* Meditation is looking at the lenses – looking not *through* the way your mind is framing things, but looking *at* the framing. It’s getting a better grip on how you make sense of and indeed contribute to constructing your world, to become better at constructing it more consciously.
* **Meditation isn’t turning off, it’s tuning in. Turning off from what’s irrelevant can help us tune in to what’s not, but if the focus is the turning off rather than the tuning in, you’re most likely to simply replace one irrelevance with another, in a doom-laden spiral of passively-absorbed distractions.**
### 6. Looking AT the money lenses you normally look THROUGH
\[From [Idiot Money #46](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is)]
* **You see the world *****through***** your relationship with money. Therefore, if you want an easy, flowing life rather than to be swept along by a flow of easy distractions, there are few more valuable things you can do than look *****at***** your relationship with money.**
* Meditation is attention-paying training: paying attention to how you pay attention. Think of the difference between making a conscious spending decision and being conscious of how you make spending decisions. The difference, in the context of your life – which is probably the context in which you want to think about life choices – is huge.
* If you want to make better decisions by default, the answer isn’t to pay greater attention to every decision. It’s not even to make your decision-making better, e.g. by carrying around a checklist that you crack out on special decision-making occasions. It’s to make your decision-making machinery better.
* Just as a child learns a language less by formal language lessons and more by living in a world shaped by that language, **you improve your decision-making machinery less by specifically training your brain and more by living in a world shaped to do the training for you**.
* Meditation is insight-generation training. because of its unique role in our decisions and the thoughts that drive them, there’s no better conduit to conscious, examined-life, world-construction than money. Insights arise when we break the frames through which we’re so used to seeing the world we forget we’re even looking through them, and look through new ones. If you’re looking how you’ve always looked, you’ll see what you’ve always seen.
* ‘Being present’ – the poster-child of living meditatively – trains you to be more insightful. But it doesn’t work by you toddling off into nature and Instagramming the shit out of some sun-splashed woodland; #shinrinyoku. It works because when you scale down your attention, you train your mind to be less representational and inferential – i.e. to jump to fewer conclusions in a way that means you are paying less attention to everything.
### 7. Money could be the best catalyst for conscious living, but we choose to make it the worst
\[From [Idiot Money #48](https://news.moneyblind.net/48-living-mindfully-with-money-the-abc-of-money-part-12)]
* To live well with money requires remembering that you are a human, not a robot – you operate according to a philosophy in an inherently uncertain, impermanent world, not according to an algorithm driven by a simplistic set of numbers. Alas, that the narrow view with which we choose to look at money persuades us otherwise. **Living meditatively is a way of remembering the implications of being human in a world set-up to encourage you to believe that where money is involved, you become a robot**.
* Because our relationships with money, and the world-building consequences of them, are within our control, we can choose to become wiser with money, rather than blindly hoping that making it, spending it, and investing it with something like blind abandon (largely unconsciously, but sometimes deliberately so) will somehow result in us making the most of it.
* We fail to really know money beyond its features and function and into its fittedness with our worlds and end up wasting god knows what because of this.
* **It’s so sad that it often takes making millions for people to stop and really think about what they’re making it for (and most don’t stop even then).**
### 8. And finally….
* From [Idiot Money #47](https://news.moneyblind.net/47-idiot-profiles-lord-and-lady-jewellery-addiction-teenage-ozymandias-and-me), three stories to demonstrate that **living well and living expensively are not the same thing** and that we show off only our insecurities.
* And from [Idiot Money #49](https://news.moneyblind.net/49-give-give-give-me-more-more-more), **some satire** (probably my favourite post to write).
# #91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as well
13th June, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that desperation for The Answer (so common in personal finance) should be a warning sign, not a reason to go looking for somebody to sell you a solution, including:
* recognising that what draws people (possibly you!) towards shifty salesmen is the very thing that should make you run from them;
* a nudge to question what unintended consequences may come from your own desires to ‘just get \ done’…
* …wrapped up in a mad story from a mad country.
**Desperate times draw us towards desperate measures, and there’s no more desperate measure than money.**
I’d like to tell you about a former prospective client. Let’s call him Mr Murphy, because that’s his name, and the chances of him finding me are pretty damn remote.
I’d like to tell you about Mr Murphy because when it comes to our personal finances, there’s a little bit of Mr Murphy in all of us. And this is not a good thing.
\*
Though Mr Murphy’s psychology couldn’t be more common, his circumstances when I meet him in one of Doha’s ubiquitously soulless hotels are not.
Mr Murphy is desperate, and in debt. He’s hiding in the Middle East, having run away from the UK: the unhappy home of his ex-wives, his ex-lives, and the ongoing consequences of the luck that finally ran out.
Mr Murphy is an honest-enough man trying to make an honest-enough buck. He’s one of those middle-class souls who’s offensive to no one save his own long-lost childhood dreams. He slips through time in the type of timid perma-embarrassment that drives a man to spend his days in a safe-as-houses 9-to-5 career and his nights in a characterless-as-a-9-to-5-career house.
Unfortunately for Mr Murphy, the safety of his career was shorter-lived than he was himself, the house disappeared in a divorce, and his savings got sucked into the void known as ‘investments that friends tempted me into.’
However, all was not lost.
For Mr Murphy possessed one of those precious old-school ‘final salary’ pensions – the sort that pay you an income until you die, rather than give you a big pot of cash that you invest and from which then draw an ‘income’ as and when you feel like it. The trouble was, he was still a few years from being legally able to access it.
This sort of trouble can compound. A nice guy who’s a bit lost, a bit confused, and a bit more than a bit desperate is perfectly primed for being exploited by unscrupulous financial salesmen. And that’s exactly what’s happening when I meet him.
### The Answer
**Unscrupulous financial salesmen,** [**as we’ve seen before**](https://news.moneyblind.net/8-i-want-money-so-i-dont-have-to-think-about-money)**, prey on those desperate for ‘The Answer’. They don’t create or exploit desires,** [**as is often mistakenly believed**](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions)**; they narrow visions**. They get you to compare obviously-awful A to obviously-better B in a way that makes you blind to C through Z, as well as the rather important context of your life in which any option should be seen.
In Mr Murphy’s case, options A and B related to that valuable final-salary pension he had. Could he somehow use some of that value to propel him out of his pit?
A shark dressed in a financial adviser’s suit has promised he can. It’s a promise that’s got Mr Murphy very excited. Turn the pension into a pot of money. Clear the debt. Start again. Sleep at night. There are, so the shark has told him, a couple of ways he could do this (of course!): the only decision Mr Murphy has to make now was did he want A or B?
Even leaving aside the fact that both A and B are completely illegal (which Mr Murphy cannot be convinced of) the fees these bastards charge, which can easily top 10% of their victim’s life savings, may not be illegal, but they bloody well should be.
Not that Mr Murphy seems to have noticed. Not only has the fee been ‘disclosed’ in a way that deforms the definition of disclosed to a point not even its mother would recognise it, but people aren’t exactly brilliant at calculating the value of a secure income for life (most of which is non-monetary) at the best of times; those mathematically compromised by the dollar signs flashing in their desperate eyes have no hope.
Even amid the junkyard of shifty sales techniques perpetrated by the various vision-narrowing salesmen slithering around this great Gobi of morality, this type of pension-breaking is a *really* shitty move.
This is something I try to explain to Mr Murphy when he comes to see me armed with the report the snake (or rather one of the snake’s back-office bugs) has prepared for him.
I’ve rarely seen anything so shocking.
Even more shocking was what Mr Murphy *hadn’t* seen when he’d read, or at least skimmed through, it. Shocking, but not surprising. **Because, Middle East or Middle England, who ever reads personal finance stuff with a view to understanding what they’re doing, rather than how to just get it bloody done?** Wherever you are, this is asking for trouble, and worth dropping every desperate attachment to finding ‘The Answer’ to avoid it.
### The best way to get ripped off is to turn off
To Mr Murphy, as to so many others, ‘pension’, like ‘investments’, or ‘markets’, is a trigger to believe that everything is too complicated and scary to understand: a reason to turn off, rather than tune in. The fact that in this case his life savings are at stake is, apparently, no reason to change this.
This is understandable: **faced with the choice between amplifying its potential customers’ perceptions that everything is scary and complicated and impossible to deal with without professional help, and pointing out that it’s really not, which option do you think the industry plumps for?**
However, the fact there are people that want to exploit you is not a great reason to let them.
I open Mr Murphy’s report.
‘To the extent that this is a decision you need to make based on the numbers (which it really isn’t),’ I tell him, ‘there are only two that are important. The first indicates whether this may possibly be worth considering; in effect the conversion rate used to turn your income into a pot. The second is the fees.’
I find the first.
Sort of.
I find where it would’ve been, had the report’s author bothered to replace the old ‘underscores before a percentage sign’ (\_\_%).
‘If you do nothing else,’ I plead, ‘and assuming you remain convinced this is even legal, or wait until it actually becomes so, then please at least ask them to fill that bit in before you come within a thousand miles of signing on the dotted line.’
Mr Murphy looks reluctant. The underlying insecurity that had been peeking through with each misplaced ‘yourself’ and ‘myself’ was now on full display with every movement, and every breath.
If financial decisions worked how everybody acts as if they did, pointing out the missing numbers would’ve been enough to end the sorry saga there and then. Of course, they don’t, and it wasn’t.
**This may be an extreme, but it’s illustrative of a relationship with personal finances that’s incredibly common. The percentage of people that are in a position (psychologically, not mathematically) to verify that they’re not being taken for a ride rounds to nothing**.
Desperation is a powerful filter, one that catches anything resembling nuance, doubt, and unwelcome realities. Scared people don’t tend to make great life choices. A man who's lost hope doesn't want sensible advice. He wants more hope to lose. ‘*All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest…*’ And alas, bemoaning the existence of rat-bastard salesmen taking advantage of this doesn’t change any of this.
### The Question
In all, I spent two hours walking Mr Murphy through the illegality, the insane fees and their effects on compounded returns, the psychological mess that surrounded everything, and the whole horrible history of how this situation had even arisen… how illegality did not mean impossibility and how people who didn’t believe this at the start tended to find out only when it was impossible to go back.
I hoped that by slowing right down, explaining how the whole sorry system had been designed with the sole purpose of ripping people like him off – people that couldn’t possibly be expected to know any better – I’d save Mr Murphy any sense of embarrassment, get the message to sink in with a ton of repetition, try to get him to a space of thoughtful calm, rather than desperate dreamy panic…
Did this work?
Did it bollocks.
For a second, it looked like it had. Mr Murphy looked crestfallen. Disconsolate. Resigned. All sure signs, or so I thought, that the penny had actually dropped. He left our meeting with a sullenness suggestive of giving up on the quixotic quest for the quick fix.
And then…
All of a day or two later, I’m at the golf club, and I see Mr Murphy leaving. I think he saw me but pretended not to, though I may have made that up. I look to see where he’s come from. I see one of my ‘colleagues’, Chris, a man who lies so effusively you can sense them from the other side of the golf course.
Chris comes over with a big grin on his face. ‘Just landed one of those gold-mine overseas pension transfers. Took about ten minutes for what’ll be a 20 grand fee! Some other outfit had already done all the hard work persuading him. But he’d got a bit wary. Just needed a bit of a shove, and a pretend fee discount. Easiest money ever.’
# #92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?
20th June, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the price of something should be a final check on the sense of a spending decision, not the starting point, including:
* How most people read wine lists the wrong way around.
* How this same tendency expresses itself even more egregiously when buying houses.
* And uncovering the coalitions of rewards in every trade.
**Your enjoyment of an experience relies on the story you tell yourself about it; high expense is an unnecessary, even foolish, ingredient of such stories.**
You’re in a restaurant, and you’ve just been handed the wine list. After getting over the initial hurdle of red, white, rosé, or orange (or perhaps something bubbly) where do you look?
Is it to the left – guided, perhaps, by matching the tasting notes to your meal? Or perhaps by a nostalgic yearning for a much-loved holiday in southern France? Or maybe you’re drawn towards a vineyard with a funny name? Starting on the left, you make your choice, and then see if you can afford it.
Or do you start on the right – looking at the prices and working back from there?
If you’re like most people, you start at the right more often than not. And if you ask for help, the first question a standard-brand sommelier – just like someone selling you a house, a car, or just about anything else – will invariably ask is: ‘what’s your budget?’
Yet does this work?
At one end, you could miss getting exactly what you want for a fraction of your budget. And at the other, is discovering that what you wanted you don’t want enough to pay what it costs a disappointment or a lesson?
(There is of course a ‘snob’ value to wine, but it can easily backfire. I once had a drink with a particularly egregious oaf in Qatar, who took one sip of whatever was open and proudly declared ‘I can’t drink this’ before making a show of ordering the most expensive bottle on the list. He made an impression, but I’m not sure it was the one he was going for. **Being guided by something other than price makes you instantly less of a twat.**)
We adopt the same attitude with most purchases. Nowhere more obviously than with the biggest purchase most of us will ever make: buying a home.
The common approach is to work out what is the most expensive house we can afford – and not even that, the most expensive house we can afford with the most borrowing the bank will give us – and work backwards from there. Even if we could have had all our needs met for a much smaller sacrifice of current and future resources.
**And, perhaps more to the point, regardless of if we could get everything we want or not, for any size of sacrifice, if you don’t think there’s inherent value in questioning what it is you want before someone incentivised to upsell you gets involved, then please reply and explain this to me.**
We do this despite being well aware that the most emotionally salient features of house-buying (e.g. the once-a-year garden party) that play the starring role in our purchase decision play a miniscule role in the quality of our lives compared to duller daily things like a commute or a living environment that encourages us to do the stuff we most want to do.
### Reductio ad poor life choices
**We’ve trained ourselves to unthinkingly reduce everything to a number, so we instinctively collapse inescapably complex decisions into simplistic shortcuts to mistaken conclusions**.
That this is understandable – complexity inspires just the sort of discomfort and highlights just the sort of lack of confidence we run from at any cost – doesn’t stop it being really, really, stupid.
**When we’re uncomfortable and unconfident thinking about money, higher stakes don’t inspire greater reflection, they inspire bigger mistakes**. Failures to think things through wouldn’t be too bad if they were restricted to the realms of coffee and cat food. Unfortunately, as the size of the spend increases, so does our tendency to bugger it up.
Houses are especially complex because a single object is used to meet myriad needs. Houses are palaces of self-deception. Primarily (one hopes) they provide shelter and somewhere to store sustenance. They are a place to recharge, and a canvas for creative expression. They are an environment that enables and encourages us to fulfil our potential.
But such intrinsic values are often dwarfed by extrinsic ones. **Every house is bought partly for ourselves, and partly for our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us. Partly to house what is integrally valuable to us, and partly to showcase what is incidentally valuable to the world, that we may bask in its reflected glorification**.
There’s often a fine line between stuff that says something important about oneself and stuff that says, crudely, ‘look at what I can afford’. We attach ourselves so enthusiastically to the latter that we’re prepared to not only spend all our resources on it, but to borrow some more and make a leveraged all-in bet on it too.
Again, if this worked, no one could argue with it. But it often doesn’t work at all, or when it ‘does’, it does so at unimaginable and unnecessary cost – which, if you view your life choices in the context of your life, as you really probably should ([despite your left hemisphere insisting that you needn’t bother](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance)) is just another form of ‘not working’.
### It’s okay to talk about important stuff – like your relationships with the important people in your life – with those same important people
One day, a good friend of mine asked for my advice because he was thinking of moving to a bigger house. Intrigued, knowing both the existing spaciousness of his existing abode and that his children were settled in both size and number, I dug into what he really wanted. For **no one who says they want a bigger house actually wants a bigger house. They maybe want to put some distance between their children, or put a cricket net in the garden (or** [perhaps give psychoanalysts something to theorise about](https://news.moneyblind.net/22-the-psychoanalysis-of-money-or-how-to-screw-up-your-childrens-financial-worldview)).
It turned out that this friend wanted to get away from his wife and children. In a nice way. Everyone needs their personal space, and no one needs to be co-dependent.
I suggested that before he committed to the extra couple of decades of work that a bigger place would necessitate, he told his wife what he’d told me. Having been party to many years of husbands and wives surprising each other during financial-planning meetings when they let slip long-simmering wants of which the other was oblivious, I suspected that if he’d like more time to himself, then his wife probably did as well.
She did.
They now treat the study as a time-share. Hundreds of thousands of pounds – and goodness knows what knock-on physical and mental costs – saved by two easy interrogations of what was actually wanted.
Wine or houses, this isn’t about spending specifics.
(The closest I’ll get to advice on that score is borrowing from pioneering designer William Morris: ‘If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’)
It’s rather an explanation of why***, if you get the fundamentals right, you don’t need such advice, any more than you need to be told crisps are not what your body wants when you’ve gone without them for a few weeks. You already know what you want to spend your money on. You just don't know how to know you know. That is, or at least should be, the role of advice.***
# #93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
27th June, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and all that jazz are more than a cute angle with which to view your relationship with money, including:
* Moving beyond surface-level financial itch scratching to living in a non-itchy way in the first place.
* Clever solutions beat being an idiot, but they’re usually only ever a shoddy substitute for something actually meaningful.
* Noticing the point when we have to admit it’s not the manipulations of advertising agencies, but the lost agency we have over our own life stories that’s the real source of the repetitively stupid circles we’re running in.
*This is part 22 of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*. This (and the next one) are a summary of what all this feels like in the context of a life full of financial decisions. The following, final, instalment, will be an attempt to answer the question of how you can apply all this in your daily life.*
**You live your life guided not by reality, but by the map your mind draws up to model reality. This means you con yourself into not seeing the most important stuff to be attending to, and so keep ‘tackling’ ‘problems’ in ways that work unreliably, if at all.**
### The great personal-finance puzzles
Thinking about personal finance, if you do actually bother thinking about it, makes you confront some odd stuff:
* Why do we struggle to make more out of our money? How did we end up making more and more money while making less and less out of it?
* How is it possible to ‘have everything’ and still feel like something important is ‘missing’?
* Why do those in ‘go go go’ mode still so often feel stuck?
* Why do we believe that achieving the same result with fewer resources is better, except when it comes to the only result that ultimately matters: living a good life? Why do people brag about spending 10,000 a month to live as happily as someone spending 1,000?
* Why do we want money so we ‘don’t have to think about money’, as if we make better decisions when we do so without thinking about them?
* Why do we sacrifice our best time and energy in jobs we don’t enjoy, to earn money to then waste in ways driven by our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us – people we don’t even care about, and probably don’t even know?
* Why do we – almost constantly – use money in ways that don’t make our life any reliably, consistently, or sustainably better – that contribute little if anything to living in a more flowing, flourishing, fulfilling way?
* Why do we commonly use the word ‘treat’ to describe something that leaves us poorer and in worse health?
* Why do we distinguish between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ as if we didn’t ‘want’ a roof over our heads, or ‘need’ shared experiences with friends?
* Why, having heard that it’s better to buy experiences than stuff, do we then buy experiences in a way that turns them into material goods, e.g. watching a gig through a phone, or going on holiday in search of the perfect Facebook profile picture?
* For all the curated Instagram stories, no one would be happy to have their credit-card statements made public. Why?
* Why do we act as if quality of life were measured with quantity of consumption?
**We live in the richest-ever age.**
**You, reading this,** [are almost certainly in the top 10% of wealthy people in that richest-ever age](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.1/2.1.1)**.**
**If more money, or better knowing about money (**[in an isolated rather than integrated fashion](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2)**) were really what was needed to make more of life, the multi-millionaire clients in whose heads I worked for a decade would have provided evidence of this.**
**Reader, they did not.**
\*
When you listen to the seekers of timeless wisdom, rather than the seekers of a quick sale, the answers to these puzzles are, rather than being characterised by a money-induced blindness, actually blindingly obvious.
The millennia-old framework of Buddhist philosophy, when viewed with the depth we have done in this [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly), demonstrates this (I hope).
I started this series because I saw a bunch of connections between the Buddhist philosophy highlights reel and the stuff I’d written about living better with money and thought it’d be cute to weave them together.
Perhaps, I thought, it’d also prove a handy way to get money people to think about thinking, and thinking people to think about money.
On the second of these, I was completely wrong.
There is both an ironic aversion to all things financial among those with the Team Buddha t-shirts and motivational posters, and a lack of interest in enlightenment-style freedom from those busy being blinkered by unenlightened and unenlightening views of escape-style ‘[financial freedom](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for)’.
Fortunately, in the course of writing these posts, they proved to be far more than a cute overlay of what I’d already thought about.
**The deeper understanding engendered by working through this stuff has made it easier for me to show up in a less-idiotic way each day, and I hope if you’ve been paying attention, the same goes for you too.**
I wasn’t at the start, and nor am I now, a ‘Buddhist’. I’m happy, to paraphrase Bruce Lee, to absorb what is useful and discard what is not. And **when it comes to becoming wiser with money, the ideas we’ve worked through in this series are as useful as anything you’re ever likely to encounter**.
But they do require paying a form of attention rather different to that required to scroll through Twitter, or delegate all financial decisions to someone else, be that buying decisions to a price tag, or investment-planning decisions to a seller of investment products.
They require more than just avoiding idiocy. They require not stopping at the first clever ‘solution’ either. They require becoming wiser with money.
### Enlightenment isn’t relief from pain, but freedom from entrapment
Most financial advice, be it based on a spreadsheet, or a list of psychological ‘biases’, is surface-level scratching.
This is hardly surprising.
Scratching itches provides instant satisfaction and relief in a way that getting surgical on the roots can’t match. And because there are a million ways the roots express themselves on the surface, there are a million ways to market clever itch-scratching techniques.
**It’s idiotic** to invest in something [because the fund manager is based in Blackpool](https://news.moneyblind.net/30-my-favourite-way-to-think-about-investing-part-3), or to use the word ‘treat’ to describe something that leaves you physically and financially worse off.
**It’s clever** to control your environment so you do this sort of stuff less often, or with less costly consequences.
**But it’s wiser** to do something about the wiring that led you towards both the original idiocy and the need for the clever solution in the first place.
Environment control [manages temptation, it doesn’t cure it](https://news.moneyblind.net/85-financial-philosophy-greater-than-financial-psychology-greater-than-hot-investment-tips). We’re attracted to clever solutions because they promise certainty, and they’re for sale: two defining characteristics of the [half-brained world we’ve constructed around money](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance).
But clever solutions are only ever [shitty substitutes](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3) for what we really want. And as we’ve often had occasion to remark, [we’re not bad at knowing what we really want, we’re just terrible at paying the type of attention that allows us to see it](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity).
**To rely on a series of clever snapshot solutions (another stupid** [signature move of your half-brained world](https://news.moneyblind.net/89-the-tell-tale-signs-of-a-poor-financial-worldview)**) is to play behaviour-change whack-a-mole rather than realise that it doesn’t matter how good you get at reactive whacking when it was perfectly possible at any point to just stop playing and go do something more fulfilling instead**.
As we saw last time:
> If you’re playing a game you’re not really enjoying and for which the only prize is to keep playing, you don’t have to keep playing just because everybody else is.
**So much about becoming wiser with money is realising that the aim isn’t to play the numbers game more smartly, but to realise it’s an irrelevant waste of your time to play it at all**. To see that it is not grasping for particular objects, but the whole framework of grasping that is the issue. To see that it’s not a smarter series of steps you want, but a smarter interdependent system – a disposition, not a mere position ([hi, Eightfold Path!](https://news.moneyblind.net/37-the-abc-of-money-part-7-financial-nobility-step-4)).
**Idiot** financial planning is all about plans.
**Clever** financial planning moves onto planning, and purpose (albeit in a limited, short-sighted sense).
**Wiser** financial planning recognises that those are all side effects of seeing more clearly the interdependent web of relationships with yourself, others, and the world that determine the Goodness of your life, and the role money has to play in making it so.
**But this web – despite it being the only way to wisdom – isn’t reducible to a series of steps, and isn’t for sale, so to the modern mind, it’s as if it didn’t exist**.
### Just stop deceiving yourself! How hard can it be?
**This sort of ‘seeing more clearly’ must mean dissolving your self-deception.**
In [the first post in this series](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons), we saw that our overriding problem was that:
> Our self-deceptions lead us to use money as relief from pain, as opposed to freedom from entrapment, and to succumb to the self-destruction it enables, rather than to embrace the opportunities it creates.
It is not news to anybody that we commonly do stuff to earn and spend money that does not contribute to something we could describe as a ‘Good Life’ ([however one may wish to define that](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.4)).
Why not?
We [don’t do it deliberately](https://news.moneyblind.net/86-five-regrets-of-the-rich), of course. When you can see the labels clearly, who (other than perhaps Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man) chooses to swig from the bottle with the skull on it?
The [three mental poisons](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons) with which we opened this series, ‘delusion, greed, and hatred’ are not qualities anybody aspires to! Therefore if you find your life being governed by them, something’s gone wrong and you want to go about fixing it.
However, a worldview that gave rise to delusion, greed and hatred is not a worldview best placed to do something about them.
**Which is why even when we do things that turn out not to work (and even when they didn’t work last time, or for anyone else in a trillion attempts) we do so fully believing they’re going to work bloody brilliantly**.
And while it’s easy to blame advertising agencies for this, **there comes a point when we have to admit it’s the lost agency we have over our own life stories that’s the real source of the repetitively stupid circles we’re running in**.
All roads lead to self-deception, though because these roads show up only in reality, rather than on the maps our self-deceived minds drew up to model reality, we don’t see them, think the problem lies elsewhere, and so keep ‘tackling’ it in ways that work unreliably, if at all.
As Stephen Batchelor put it:
> Genuine contentment is found in realizing that what one previously assumed to be capable of providing satisfaction is actually unable to do so. It is in accepting this fact and not in an ever more strenuous attempt to force the world into an impossible shape that a realistic outlook is achieved which ceases to expect from the world something the world can never provide.
You don’t see – let alone start to do something about – a loss of agency over your life stories by focusing on environment control hacks. You have to go deeper. You have to look not at your environment, [but at the lenses you’re looking at that environment (and its interaction with ourselves) through](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is).
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[#96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth](/96-deep-wealth-v-shallow-wealth)
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# #94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up
4th July, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that money makes you blind to what is most important to be seeing, including:
* Why, despite promising otherwise, money tends to make you less adaptable, not more.
* Why you should seek the ‘security’ of a waterfall, not a stagnant pond.
* And the importance of being on guard not only against stupidly blind thinking, but blindness to the blindness.
*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. This is part of a long* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *of short lessons mapping the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read (Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things) to our relationships with money, in the hope of helping you do something about this in the most foundationally practical (long-term workable!) way.*
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #6: The half a brain that controls your financial decisions is the blind half
**The way money makes us blind, and the way it makes us blind to our blindness – the way it supercharges our self-deception – are big problems. Because money has such a dominant role in our daily decisions, and by extension how we both shape and express our worldviews.**
The exact same thing can be said about the left hemisphere.
> Our own culture is unbalanced in the degree to which the left hemisphere’s take predominates. And, unfortunately, the left hemisphere is decidedly imperceptive – and so is unaware there is a problem.
It is, as McGilchrist put it, ‘not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, \[that] is the death of knowledge.’
(While I’m here, for those of you who’ve just had the words ‘Dunning’ and ‘Kruger’ catapult into your neocortex, you may like to read [this](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/).)
Most folk that have read more than the odd bit of airport fiction can valuably and accurately say something about ‘survival of the fittest’ being about your ability to adapt to inevitably shifting circumstances rather than your ability to kill stuff before it kills you.
**Despite promising some nonsense about ‘**[**opportunities**](https://news.moneyblind.net/84-the-value-of-almost-everything-to-you-is-nothing)**’, money (at least in the typical way it is attended to) doesn’t make adapting to shifting circumstances easier. It makes it harder**. Because it reduces everything to ‘buy the answer’, which, if repeated often enough, leaves its believer incapable of doing anything other than opening their wallet. It *excuses* rather than *encourages* character development.
Think of all the common uses of big chunks of cash – are they not to try to control circumstances? Are they not vain attempts to fix everything external in place, [as if then, and only then, one may live happily ever after](http://invalid//)?
> When it comes to detecting unexpected change, the left hemisphere is relatively blind compared with the right hemisphere.
Because…
> Focussed attention, the only kind the left hemisphere can offer, makes us blind to almost anything, however arresting and however close, that happens to be going on outside our sphere of concern at that moment in time.
As I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#who-or-what-is-your-self):
> ‘Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition,’ wrote Daniel Dennett, ‘is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are.’
> We saw earlier the protective shell-like function of this story. When we talk of strengthening it, the immediate temptation is to thicken the shell. However, it is not a fatter fortress we want, but a more flexible one. **We see fortresses and spring into a story about strength. To do so is to forget that the fortress’s strength was an adaptation to its environment, and it is the adaptation – the fittedness to its environment – not the thickness of its walls, on which we should focus**. When threats change, thick walls are not easy to change with them; the signs of domination can become the seeds of decay. The perfect shield against medieval weaponry becomes the perfect screen for being blind to opportunities.
And [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.1/1.1.2#retirement-is-a-terrible-goal):
> **Much of financial planning is about seeking security. Yet poorly done it is more often the security of a stagnant pond, not a beautiful waterfall**.
### Tunnel vision is for running races, not dancing, and life is a dance, not a race
The left hemisphere, like money, makes us ‘see’ in a very specific way. A way that is helpful for analysing things within a narrow context, but truly horribly unhelpful at seeing things in a more meaningful and purposeful way… a wiser way.
> Staring is a special kind of vision, in itself predatory: left hemisphere attention gets locked onto its target. As a result it more easily misses everything else.
This in itself would be a pretty big issue, worthy of being constantly on guard against. However, it gets worse. Because **when you’re stuck in left-hemisphere mode (or when your money-blinkers are welded to your face) you not only don’t see what you should see, which is stupid, but also don’t see the stupidity**.
The right hemisphere-damaged subject, overly committed to the left hemisphere mode of simply putting together the pieces, joining the dots, and following procedures, is unable to appreciate that the picture he arrives at is bizarre and incoherent. He placidly accepts the preposterous nature of his conclusions, and, if things seem improbable or awry, he no longer feels the strange or surprising nature of them. They fail comprehensively to alert him, in the way that they normally should, that there is an aberration.
**Please don’t think this doesn’t apply to you because you don’t have ‘actual’ brain damage. Because when money gets involved, the effect is the same.**
McGilchrist goes on to link this to something we’ve covered plenty of times before, namely how money gets us stuck repeating the same mistakes. How it makes us fail to observe and internalise that whatever we’re sure will work this time didn’t work last time, or didn’t work for the people that tried it a thousand times before we did.
> In the modern Western world, we are constantly crashing, and puzzled as to why; constantly faced with paradoxical outcomes to our actions \[…] We often find that we strive for something and achieve its precise opposite. Why is that? I suggest it is because our currently dominant model of reality is mistaken.
I’m reminded here – as I hope one or two of you may be – of the Krista Tippett passage I quoted in [Idiot Money #63](https://news.moneyblind.net/63-a-problem-shared), in which she recounts a story from her days as a foreign correspondent in then-divided Berlin, that made her rethink the role money played in a life well lived, as it had been shaped by growing up in money-blinkered America:
> This realization \[being drawn more and more to the ‘poor’ Eastern side of Berlin] unsettled my sense of personal progress and education: it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to ‘have nothing’ in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.
As I commented then:
> Does it strike you that it’s possible to read a line like that and not be stopped by its strangeness? You may have just done so. **If you live in a world where you can (without noticing) in effect say ‘intimacy and dignity and beauty are nothing’ then it’s probably time to question that’s the right world to live in**.
And yet how many – despite feeling like something is off, or ‘missing’ despite ‘having everything’ – ever question if ‘having’ another ‘thing’, rather than being the answer, is actually the problem?
> When \[the left hemisphere] is presented with evidence that what it is doing is not working, its invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it: because that’s what its theory dictates, and for the left hemisphere theory trumps reality.
Which is another way of saying what I said [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/77-seeing-your-financial-world-more-clearly-the-abc-of-money-part-20):
> We keep making the same mistakes, oblivious even to the fact that, despite not working, they are, in fact, mistakes \[…] Mistakes rooted in a belief that it’s external circumstances that determine the quality of a life, rather than how well one is set up to dance with those circumstances. This belief leads people to dedicate their resources to changing the quality of their lives by changing their worlds, rather than their worldviews.
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson #7: Money is the universal convertible, but prompts a way of seeing that shuts you off from seeing alternative solutions
A little bonus lesson on inductive reasoning and the Einstellung effect:
> Inductive reasoning lies behind the so-called Einstellung effect. This is the tendency to get fixed in one’s method of approach, so that one fails to see other, better, ways of seeing a situation, or of tackling a problem. Once one has mastered a way of doing something that works well enough in one situation, one tends to carry on applying the same method to situations or problems in which it is inferior or inappropriate.
Which is about a fine a summary of both believing the answer to a problem is ‘more money’, and most of the financial-planning world’s box of sales tricks. (See also [this](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#local-and-global-maxima) from me on local and global maxima).
Back to McGilchrist:
> In a test devised by Abraham Lucins in 1942, \[The Einstellung effect] increased with age in adults, and was somewhat more marked in females than in males. \[…] It has since been found, as mentioned, to be less prominent in non-Westerners, who are more flexible in their thinking.
That would be the West that is increasingly beset by a hyper-individual, excessively narrow-minded, money-based worldview.
> Westerners ‘may never even consider that the problem could have multiple solutions, until explicitly told “Don’t be afraid to try new things” which clearly states the possibility of multiple solutions.’
The left hemisphere, in effect, ‘says’: ‘It’s seemed OK round here to date, so there isn’t a problem.’ The right hemisphere is on alert for things you should adapt to. ‘The left is too busy getting the next bonus.’
***Next post in the Whole-Brain Personal Finance series:***
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[#98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem](/98-making-more-of-your-money-isnt-a-maths-problem)
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# #95: The tyranny of the takeaway
11th July, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that a craving for takeaways – especially in personal finance – is an affliction to treat, not a shortcut to success, including:
* When numbers are an adequate answer, and when they’re a dangerous distraction.
* Avoiding the death-trap siren calls of summaries of stuff that shouldn’t – can’t – be summarised… which is everything to do with how to live better.
* And the tension between how we typically think about money and how we must think about it if we’re to use it well, which should shape any financial-coaching relationship.
**Personal-finance ‘nuggets’ are junk food. Save yourself from getting burned by a bonfire of bullshit bullet points by creating your own ‘takeaways’, not desperately consuming someone else’s.**
‘Before we get going, let’s quickly go around the room: what are you hoping to get out of today?’
The facilitator’s words cast their usual spell. The misdirection of suits gathered for this workshop starts twitching in a haphazard yet harmonious manner: freeform jazz meets middle-aged men (and the occasional woman) desperately searching for a more professional-sounding answer than ‘because I need the Continuing Professional Development points.’
‘A key takeaway or two.’
‘A couple of nuggets I can share with my team.’
‘A few killer stats I can use in front of clients.’
No need to specify what those ‘takeaways’ may be. As long as they don’t look out of place next to a bullet point, the information-guzzling mission can be considered accomplished.
Any notion of a transformative effect from the wise application of that information can be swept out of the way with Occam’s Broom (see footnote for the definition of your new favourite thing).
There’s a reason feedback forms are handed out long before anyone’s able to tell if anything important has actually changed, and why you should never trust a review of a habits book that’s posted within a year of reading it.
You may never have been to a financial-planning workshop. Don’t worry, you’ve not missed much. Every man, woman, and investment banker that’s spent any time in any sort of corporate world has probably experienced something similar, from the disappointing half-time sandwiches to the fear of being put on the spot by those rare questions for which there actually *are* wrong answers.
You may also never have been to a financial-planning meeting, either as adviser or client. While they may look different to the workshops on the surface, similar psychological monsters lurk in their depths.
Those same monsters that make us believe the workshop’s purpose is defined by its summary slide also stalk our individual relationships with money, reducing aims to numbers and life to a series of sums based on them. Learning to slay these beasts is key to worrying less about money, wasting less money, and generally making more fulfilling lives with money.
### When the reductionist mindset that made the model is the problem, don’t chase a better model
**There’s a tension between how we typically live with money and how to use it to live a Good Life. In short, money narrows visions by stripping them of their context. It’s about summaries, simple steps, and easy answers. Everything about a Good Life – whether you’re cultivating your own, or advising another on theirs – demands the opposite.**
Nothing blinds us to reality like the model of the world built by money. Wherever humans are sailing through the choppy waters of uncertainty, sirens are sure to be circling, tempting terrified folk onto the rocks with songs about summaries and using ‘action’ as a verb.
Financial-planning meetings can talk a game good enough to look like they’ve moved beyond a fixation on takeaways. They swap obviously silly things like pretending to know where a specific share price is heading for smarter stuff like a percentage chance of running out of money before a certain date. They even caveat all the assumptions that underpin such a calculation. Except the rather important assumption that until that date, one lives like a robot in a mechanically well-behaved model of a world.
Beneath the bells and whistles and clever-sounding words like ‘stochastic’, it’s all still future-prediction. The focus is still a nonsensically inconsequential, inhumanly decontextualised number; a bullshit appeasement of a craving for certainty. But it’s seen as fine because it’s also a can-kicking, peace-of-mind-promising takeaway.
What questions an adviser asks aren’t as determinant of insightful answers as the way in which they ask them. **What you think about your personal finances isn’t as determinant of how well you transform them into a Good Life as the way in which you think about them.**
The most dangerous mistakes we make with money are the ones we don’t see because we’re blinded by specious sophistication like clever cashflow models.
### When taking a short cut, check what you’re cutting off
This is not to say we should ignore all numbers-based approaches. They just need to be kept in a sensible place: a place where they serve, not rule, where they’re recognised as simple inputs into a wider complex web, not an objectively correct conclusion, fit to be jumped to.
As we’ve often had reason to remind ourselves in [the last 90 weeks or so](https://news.moneyblind.net/84-the-value-of-almost-everything-to-you-is-nothing), most fights between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are misguided. If a wise-enough person has thought themselves through to a certain conclusion, it’s unlikely to be completely ‘wrong’.
**We too readily dismiss entire ideas as ‘wrong’, when we’d be better being clearer on the limits within which they are true**. Einstein didn’t prove Newton ‘wrong’, he just highlighted the boundaries within which Newton was right.
(Not coincidentally nor incidentally, this simple-minded seeing of everything in either/or terms is [a signature move of the left hemisphere](https://news.moneyblind.net/89-the-tell-tale-signs-of-a-poor-financial-worldview).)
As Alfred North Whitehead put it: ‘In scientific investigations the question, True or False?, is usually irrelevant. The important question is, In what circumstances is this formula true, and in what circumstances is it false?’
And as J.S. Mill wrote: ‘the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.’
It’s a mistake [McGilchrist](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) refers to as seeing truth as *correctness* rather than *unconcealing*.
The numbers are fine – helpful and without adequate substitute, even – for technical matters, like tax calculations, and isolated decisions that spring from them, like when and where to make a pension contribution, or extract money from a business, for example. Here, ‘truth’ is about correctness.
But **specific answers to technical problems, where the answer for you is same as for a robot make up a negligible proportion of personal-finance puzzles. Yet most people, including most advisers, act like they are all there is**. (And possibly hide behind [guff like how if you can’t explain something in simple formulaic terms, you don’t understand it well enough](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3).)
This is a bit of a bitch, because anywhere where the answer for you is different than it is for a robot, you need a different approach.
McGilchrist describes this in more exalted terms than are typically found in finance:
> Everything which is 'technical' in the broad sense of the term, whether we are talking about the exact sciences or the humanistic sciences, is perfectly able to be communicated by teaching or conversation.
> But everything that touches the domain of the existential – which is what is most important for human beings – for instance, our feeling of existence, our impressions when faced by death, our perception of nature, our sensations, and a fortiori the mystical experience, is not directly communicable. The phrases we use to describe them are conventional and banal.
If you think thinking about money is a technical, context-free matter, then you couldn’t be more misguided, and moreover your life will become banal.
**Where stuff that matters in the context of a human life is concerned, if something can be summarised – if there is a direct, practical, actionable, takeaway – it’s probably not actually something that matters**. It certainly doesn’t need more than a very specific, time-limited, narrowly-focused analytical attention, with the aim not of arriving at an ‘actionable’ answer, but of contributing to the wiser overall view of the world, and [how you dance with it](https://news.moneyblind.net/40-the-dance-of-becoming-wiser-with-money).
To think otherwise is another form of our old friend the [Arrival Fallacy](http://invalid//). It’s to prioritise arriving at an answer over prioritising which questions to ask in the first place. It’s to blindly favour simple matters purely because they take less effort to understand, despite the whole business of human life being to get more comfortable with increasing levels of complexity.
(We’ll return to this idea in more detail soon, so if you’d like to make that piece better by defending the authority of the summary, hit reply.)
### The road to success is a spiral, not a straight line
**Construct your own takeaways. Don’t consume them, create them.**
The craving for summaries is a drive for passivity. To be spoon-fed ‘insights’, even when insights, by their very nature, cannot be consumed.
This is another expression of the widespread problem that **we confuse consumption with what we want, yet nothing we really want can ever be consumed**.
We want the understanding to be able to create our own takeaways, to know that we know.
Yet we confuse consuming someone else’s summary as evidence that we’ve internalised the inescapably [participatory knowing](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.3/1.3.2) that got them there, and done so damn efficiently.
**Yet wisdom is a way of life, not a thing. You can’t buy it. It doesn’t burrow into your brain if you bookmark enough articles or plough through enough podcasts.**
It seems silly to have to say it, but the non-technical process of cleaning up your life is a fundamentally different proposition to the technical one of cleaning up your kitchen. Only one can be efficiently accomplished with some takeaways extracted from a YouTube video.
There’s a reason when people ask me for advice I ask them to dump down everything that’s on their mind about money. Every question. Every 3am thought. Anything that feels remotely relevant, from assets to anxieties.
Like a workshop facilitator wanting to avoid the collective squirming that accompanies undirected assignments, I used to give prompts: lists of information to provide, questions to answer, puzzles to think about. This made the task easier, and the results worse.
The place for prompts is later. Introduce them too early and they shape the very reality of the relationships with money I’m trying to understand.
When it comes to this sort of understanding, you’ve got to go the long way around, because the shortcut doesn’t go anywhere anybody really wants to go.
#### *Footnote: Occam’s Broom*
*Occam’s Broom is a term coined by Sydney Brenner to denote ‘a device that helps one sweep under the carpet any findings that cast doubt on the current paradigm.’*
*‘So powerful are contemporary tools for extracting answers from nature that pausing to think about the results, or asking how one might find out how cells really work, is likely to be seen as a source of irritating delay to the managerial classes, and could even endanger the career of the questioner … I found that many people were applying what I called Occam’s Broom, which was used to sweep under the carpet any unpalatable facts that did not support the hypothesis … The orgy of fact extraction in which everybody is currently engaged has, like most consumer economies, accumulated a vast debt.’*
# #96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth
18th July, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that everybody fears the depths of personal finance, but that’s a reason to plunge into them, not to spin about on the surface pretending you’re doing something clever or important, including:
* The one personal-finance thing people are most terrified of.
* Evidence that however smart we think we’re being when we chat about personal finance, we’re missing something major.
* And how to see your relationship with money in a way that changes *everything*.
*This is the penultimate instalment of our series on using Axiomatic Buddhist Concepts as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*. This week we look at why it’s impossible, in the sense people tend to crave, to ‘apply’ all this to your daily life in piecemeal, ‘takeaway nuggets’ fashion. The final part will be an attempt to do that anyway.*
**Because money is so inextricably woven into the fabric of your life, as soon as you overcome the hurdle to engage with your personal finances at all, you run into the temptation to do it in a shallow way. Your past demons, your present decisions, and your future dreams are all in play, and can all be haunting. Yet how do you dive into depths you don’t even fully recognise exist?**
What’s the one thing people talking about personal finance are most terrified of?
Is it knowing which investments to pick?
Is it missing out on the next Google?
Is it falling victim to a scam?
Is it running out of money?
No, no, no, and no.
It’s depth.
### Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring
[From paupers to princes](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.2/1.2.1#how-do-you-get-unstuck-from-financial-confusion), I’ve had thousands of conversations with people about what their money means to them.
Sometimes the answers are material: ‘It allows me to buy things! Things made of gold! So many golden things!’…as if the story of Midas were meant as a *guide* to the Good Life, rather than a warning about wishing yourself into a wretched oblivion.
Sometimes there are tears, as stories from own childhoods concluded and other childhoods currently being cared for collide in a way that both transcends money and yet becomes more intimately attached to it.
Even when there are tears, and even when those tears reflect lifelong fears, there’s a comforting therapeutic quality to them: the crier is still broadly at ease. (That is, as I wrote [here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear), the point of fears: to put a comforting face on an otherwise uncontrollable existential anxiety.)
*Un*ease, by contrast – discomfort, resistance, and bodily contortions suggestive of a sudden and very localised outbreak of hives – comes only with the realisation that ***the way in which one lives with money***** is far more deterministic and expressive of how well lived a life is, than *****what one does with it***** on the surface**.
This is terrifying.
People like talking about the whats. They show off the whats. Yet of course *we show off only our insecurities*. Insecurities that are rooted in the deep knowledge that our way-in-whiches are often way off where we feel they ought to be.
I’ve poked enough financial psychologies to know that the merest hint that *making something of one’s money* should outrank *simply making it* can trigger someone to snap from boasting about their CV to squirming like a politician trying to defend the indefensible on the morning news. You needn’t even directly elicit what they’ve actually made out of it for decades; that knowledge is riotously rattling the bars of the itching cells in which it’s imprisoned.
### The best questions are quests, not journeys
[Last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/93-some-personal-finance-puzzles-and-how-not-to-solve-them), we looked at a list of personal-finance puzzles. For example:
* Why do we struggle to make more out of our money? How did we end up making more and more money while making less and less out of it?
* How is it possible to ‘have everything’ and still feel like something important is ‘missing’?
* Why do we believe that achieving the same result with fewer resources is better, except when it comes to the only result that ultimately matters: living a good life? Why do people brag about spending 10,000 a month to live as happily as someone spending 1,000?
* Why do we want money so we ‘don’t have to think about money’, as if we make better decisions when we do so without thinking about them?
* Why do we sacrifice our best time and energy in jobs we don’t enjoy, to earn money to then waste in ways driven by our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us – people we don’t even care about, and probably don’t even know?
And so on. The full list is [here](https://news.moneyblind.net/93-some-personal-finance-puzzles-and-how-not-to-solve-them).
It’s not like we’re short of evidence that the way we live with money (as exemplified by the fact these puzzles aren’t completely trivial) doesn’t work. And yet we keep playing the same game anyway.
**This suggests that there’s something we’re *****not***** seeing that’s more fundamental than the evidence we *****are*****.**
**Something that requires not looking at our *****circumstances*****, but** [***looking at the way we look***](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is)**.**
**Something that requires the exact sort of depth that most would rather pretend didn’t exist than dive into.**
### Deep > deepity
It’s tempting to give pithy solutions to all the above puzzles. You can easily bring in some psychology, some economics, some philosophy, some sociology... and say something that sounds sane and insightful enough to excuse jogging on to the next issue lucky enough to get your hot take on it.
Heck, with a big enough following, you could probably sell thousands of books ‘answering’ just one of them.
There are lucrative careers to be made selling fortune cookies stuffed with ‘deepities’ – Daniel Dennett’s term for propositions that *seem* important and true and even profound, but that achieve this effect by being ambiguous. Trying to define ‘wealthy’ or ‘rich’ or whatever in a Tweet will always find a bigger audience than questioning what the point of doing so was in the first place.
Create or consume these fortune cookies, and sure, you’re just spinning in circles, but ever-more smugly so.
(See also [the distinction between trivial and profound](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#profound-or-trivial).)
**But what if *****that very desire for pithy answers***** is precisely the problem?**
**What if the direct, explicit answers are what’s keeping us stuck in the same bonkers behavioural loops despite apparently having ‘solved’ these puzzles?**
The value of the ideas we’ve covered in this [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly) is in showing not only that this is the case, but also that **the typical way we attend to money in our lives worsens this narrow, trivial, and** [**addictive**](https://news.moneyblind.net/55-identifying-your-hidden-money-addictions) **pursuit of explicitness**. For what could be more explicit than a price tag? What collapses complexity into certainty more than money?
My hope is that having worked through this [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly), you will feel the answers to the above puzzles are so obvious as to not need spelling out, but – moreover – **you will** **realise that there’s only so far direct, explicit answers can take you**.
You will realise that what you want isn’t the psychological, economic, philosophic or whatever ‘knowledge’ to ‘solve’ these puzzles, but the deeper understanding of what the questions are pointing to in a way that *by definition* can’t be spelled out, but is *far richer for that*.
You will realise that while the journey is obviously more important than the destination, most of the time when you hear that phrase, it’s being uttered by somebody desperately *transforming the journey into a destination* – a *thing* to be acquired – rather than just enjoying the damn ride, thereby both missing the point, and staying stuck playing the same silly game as the one they’re denouncing, without, of course, even realising that they’re doing so.
### Unresolved anxiety leads to decadence and decay
To return to where we came in…
The very fact that somebody can find the words to voice their fear of running out of money is a good indication that they may fear it, but they’re not terrified by it. The really terrifying stuff goes deeper. It is the intangible fear of fear. [Fear happens when we put a face on this deeper sense of unease](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.4/1.4.2#the-difference-between-anxiety-and-fear). It is by definition a sign that something scarier lurks in the depths.
Let this terror rule your life, and you get decadence and decay.
Decadence, by the way, despite being the surface-level ‘goal’ for oodles of lost souls dreaming of sun-lounger retirements, is not a good thing.
As John Kaag wrote in *Hiking with Nietzsche*:
> You will realise that decadence goes hand in hand with, yet also shrouds, decay. It is the denial of life, not its pinnacle. ‘To choose instinctively what is harmful to oneself,’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘is virtually the formula for decadence.’
Let that sink in. To *choose*. *Instinctively.* What is *harmful to oneself*.
That is, what doesn’t make one’s life, when seen as a whole human life [rather than an inhuman sum of its parts](https://news.moneyblind.net/87-sum-malfunction-a-sure-fire-way-to-spot-if-youre-being-a-financial-idiot), *better*.
What more instructive examples could there be of this than how we *instinctively* use the word ‘treat’ to describe something that leaves us physically and financially worse off, and how, in the typical-yet-nonsensical categorisation of our expenditure, we talk about our ‘wants’ [like a smoker talks about tar](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1).
**Don’t do this. The first step to *****choosing***** to use your money in a way that is *****instinctively***** Good for you, rather than harmful, is to not do this.**
Embrace the anxiety. Rip off its comforting mask. Get below the surface. It’s really not as bad as you think it’ll be. As Henry Miller wrote: ‘On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface.’
**See your relationship with money like *****that*****, and *****everything***** changes.**
Next time, in the final post in this series, we’ll look at five real-life examples that dance around what we’ve covered in a way I hope engenders or reinforces such an understanding.
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# #97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
25th July, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding how to see, including:
* The limited role of your eyes in your experience of seeing as a metaphor for life.
* What seeing the world in a wiser way looks like in real-world practical applications.
* And a grudging listicle 😊.
*This is the final part of our series on using the framework of Buddhist philosophy as a practical means to help us live better with money. See the series menu* [*here*](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly)*. This final instalment looks at some personal financial puzzles (and ranges of dealing with them) to see how your relationship with money could show up differently in practice when the changes this series has tried to inspire are applied in the real-world. It’s twice as long as normal; I believe if you treat it to your attention, it will treat you in turn.*
**Your money is worth nothing without a philosophy. Philosophy, whether eastern or western, isn’t an arcane academic exercise, but a way of living. It’s worth nothing if it doesn’t make your life better – if it doesn’t make you wiser with money. However, to conclude this climb around the framework of Buddhist philosophy with a bullet-point list of ‘takeaways’ would be to miss the point of the series entirely. A listicle linking each spoke of the eightfold path to a well-worn way to invest like less of an idiot would be of negative use to the world. The value is in seeing whole lives more clearly, not in extracting clearly compartmentalised fortune-cookie conclusions.**
‘Vision,’ writes Donald Hoffman, in *Visual Intelligence*, ‘is not merely a matter of passive perception. It is an intelligent process of active construction. What you see is, invariably, what your visual intelligence constructs \[…] your visual system intelligently constructs useful visual worlds based on images at the eyes.’
Vision, in other words, is a complex, embodied experience, not a simple function of your eyeballs.
This goes not only for the *physical* experience (let’s [not call it a mechanism](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance)) of seeing. It goes for the *philosophical* one too – i.e. what we’re on about when we talk about a world*view*, the way in which you *see* yourself, and other people, and the world, and the interdependent integrated interactions between them. And of course how you can ‘see more clearly’, which in essence is what this whole [series](https://news.moneyblind.net/#the-abc-of-money-using-buddhist-philosophy-as-a-framework-for-seeing-money-more-clearly) has been about.
The physical experience of vision described in Hoffman’s paragraph above is an instructive metaphor for understanding how to see the money in your life more clearly, and therefore for making more of it. There are three key points, each of which is vastly more important to internalise than anything you can find in the FT:
* *‘…an intelligent process of active construction…’* – **Context matters! Money has meaning only in its interactions with your life**. You construct this meaning by [the way in which you pay attention](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) to it. This process of paying attention is [active, and participatory](https://news.moneyblind.net/41-building-a-better-money-brain-the-abc-of-money-part-9-neuroplasticity#pay-attention-to-how-you-pay-attention).
* *‘…useful visual worlds…’* – **You construct not only isolated snapshots of meaning, but your entire worldview**. How you see the money in your life is both shaped by and expressed by every interaction with it. This is why it’s so damn important to both [start with a financial philosophy](https://news.moneyblind.net/85-financial-philosophy-greater-than-financial-psychology-greater-than-hot-investment-tips), and [to take it seriously](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.2).
* *‘…based on images at the eyes…’* – Based on. Just as the signals received by your retinas are merely one of many inputs into a process that determines what you ‘see’, so **numbers are mere circumstantial scene-setters**. They may be more in-your-face (sorry 😉), but on their own, their importance is vastly overrated.
As promised [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/96-deep-wealth-v-shallow-wealth), what follows is a response, of sorts, to the ton of people that have asked me to spell out what all this Buddhist-framework stuff looks like when applied to real-life situations.
I hope those that have been paying attention for the whole series will understand that, by definition, to answer this with a list of ‘do this’ / ‘don’t do this’ bullet points would risk being massively counter-productive.
**Equating seeing more clearly with a series of step-by-step instructions is emblematic of precisely the sort of thing that leads people to make less of their money than they really should**. This is not a piece of information that can be simplistically transmitted through a bunch of words; it is an understanding that can hopefully emerge as you attend to those words.
Operating manuals are for machines and the sort of brain-damaged productivity-obsessed tech bros that wish they were built of cogs and silicon in order to more reliably run their morning-routine programmes. They are not for beautiful, complex, humans. Believing otherwise is to believe that you can force falling in love, or meditate by telling yourself to relax.
This warning is necessary but insufficient. As we saw [last time](https://news.moneyblind.net/96-deep-wealth-v-shallow-wealth), the more Deep Down You is in need of depth, the more Surface Level You is likely to not only run from it, but not even know what it is it’s running from. **The brain wired with typical responses to all things money is not the brain that sees that the typical responses to all things money are f-ing stupid**.
With all that said, onto the listicle.
### 1: See your addictions: understand that giving up the framework of grasping beats giving up the objects grasped
**Idiots** hear that life is ruled by desires and decide that the answer must be to keep trying to fulfil them, by [competitively and conspicuously consuming the shit out of everything](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#the-conspicuous-consumption-con).
**Clever people** see that this is idiocy. They consume instead the fortune cookies about not being [possessed by possessions](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2). They say things like: ‘I’m not extravagant’. By believing that the problem of ‘attachment’ is about being attached to specific objects, they can justify anything, like spending mindless millions on their children because it aligns with a ‘value’ (however narrowly framed, and [however ineffectively this works](https://news.moneyblind.net/4-spending-gbp450k-on-being-bad-parents)), or on yachts that are fine because they aren’t as big as [Abramovich’s](https://news.moneyblind.net/9-idiot-profile-an-oligarch-with-a-gun).
**Wiser people** understand that [*no one thinks they’re extravagant*](https://news.moneyblind.net/65-denunciation-is-still-attachment-the-abc-of-money-part-17). They understand that the problem isn’t attachment to specific objects, but the whole framework of attachment: the worldview that is stuck seeing [quality in quantity terms](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2.5-enough-is-more-than-enough#quality-of-life-and-access-to-comfort-are-not-the-same-thing), that can become attached even to the identity of being someone that isn’t attached to stuff. [Attachments to possessions are unhelpful. Attachments to patterns of thinking are dangerous](https://news.moneyblind.net/31-the-abc-of-money-part-4-financial-nobility-step-2). And the most dangerous are the patterns we don’t see because we’re busy congratulating ourselves for not being attached to possessions.
Wiser people realise that grasping for a certain type of car is really to try to grasp an ungraspable certainty. So they dig deeper. They see cash-flow modelling not as an appreciation of uncertainty, but as a subtler means of appeasing a craving for it, and a dangerous means not of modelling life, but of forcing life to fit a model.
Wiser people don’t play the same game better; they play a better game.
### 2: See ongoing complexity, not simple conclusions: understand that all of life is threatened by self-destructive, self-deceptive behaviour
**Idiots** hear that the noble truths are something about ‘suffering’, decide they have no suffering, and therefore no use for such truths.
**Clever people** break complex concepts down for analysis. They dodge particular pitfalls. They catch enough isolated ‘biases’ to fill an infographic. They jump to sane-sounding conclusions. Every problem is only some spreadsheet-fiddling away from being solved. Before buying something, they ask themselves if they need it, or if they merely want it, believing the two are different.
**Wiser people** take those conclusions and put them back into the context of the life they should be serving. They understand that you cannot reasonably talk about (let alone tackle) any common behavioural misstep without understanding that its roots are *irreducibly* complex, and therefore [no hack, however hot, is going to help](https://news.moneyblind.net/85-financial-philosophy-greater-than-financial-psychology-greater-than-hot-investment-tips). The same system that spirals you down also spirals you up. It’s an inescapable part of being human. It is [not to be succumbed to or denied, but channelled](https://news.moneyblind.net/29-the-abc-of-money-part-3-financial-nobility-step-1).
‘All of life is suffering’ tells you nothing. Not least [because ‘suffering’ is an incredibly unhelpful choice of word](https://news.moneyblind.net/27-the-abc-of-money-part-2-financial-nobility-an-overview). However, dig a little deeper, and understand that this has nothing to do with ‘pain’, and it tells you something ridiculously important: it is not the fact you are self-deceived that is relevant, but *the way in which you become self-deceived*. And that therefore **your starting point for becoming wiser is** [*not what you’re attending to, but the way in which you’re attending*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance).
Wiser people don’t ask ‘Do I need this, or do I want this?’ They recognise that needs and wants are the same thing, because do you not ‘want’ a roof over your head? And is some form of meaning or purpose or a hug not a ‘need’? They understand that a more helpful distinction is between ‘wants’ – things that make your life better – and ‘[addictions](https://news.moneyblind.net/67-the-abc-of-money-part-18-addicted-to-a-dream)’ – things that make your life worse, but which you continue to choose to do anyway. They ask: ‘Will this make my life better or not? Do I want this, or am I appeasing an addiction?’
They realise that what matters most – love, connection, whatever actually makes a life ‘Good’ – can’t be quantified, nor pursued directly. Moreover, they realise that [*if something can be measured, it probably doesn’t matter all that much*](https://news.moneyblind.net/95-the-tyranny-of-the-takeaway). Wiser people are masters of side-effect living. They have to buy ‘things’ of course, but the ‘thing’ is never seen as the ‘answer’, rather an imperfect means of circling around whatever cannot be bought directly.
### 3: See your shoddy substitutes: understand that ‘things’ do not meet needs
**Idiots** see money as a scorecard, a measure of everything from [their intelligence](https://news.moneyblind.net/42-the-dumbest-damn-thing-ive-ever-read-in-personal-finance-part-1), their worth as a human being, or how much they love their children.
**Clever people** see money as a scorecard too, they just do so on the sly, not admitting it even to themselves, even when it’s as blatant as swapping income = goodness for savings rate = goodness. Clever people don’t talk about money directly like idiots do. Instead, they say things like: ‘provide for my family’ to justify never being present with their family because they’re too busy providing them with holidays designed to embed the idea that the value of a destination is measured by a per-night price tag.
**Wiser people** see money as a better reminder than a scorecard. [A tool to examine a life](https://news.moneyblind.net/1-the-correlation-between-having-money-managing-it-well-and-living-a-good-life), not as an excuse not to. They realise that if you’re not careful, you start to construct a world in which your entire view of value becomes beholden to the mechanics of the world’s supply and demand, and ceases being anything to do with you. Right up to allowing De Beers to dictate how you demonstrate your love for someone.
The most common form of [silly substitution](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/intro/0.0.3#the-siren-call-of-simplicity-and-succumbing-to-substandard-substitutes) is ‘having’ a thing for ‘becoming’ somebody. Wiser people see the danger of living as if something doesn’t really exist unless it fits in a cash-flow forecast. Wiser people [keep the analysis in its place](https://news.moneyblind.net/83-how-money-hijacks-your-hierarchy-of-attention).
### 4: See a system, not a path: understand that the ‘arrival fallacy’ is an ever-tempting trick
**Idiots** design their lives around step-by-step instructions towards a fixed destination. As if they were machines. Even when that ‘destination’ is something like ‘security’ or ‘freedom’ that cannot in any way be ‘arrived’ at.
**Clever people** say things about it being about the journey, not the destination. Clever people have plans. Savings plans. Investment plans. Retirement plans. They ‘do’ mindfulness. They control their environments, sometimes so expertly that they achieve states, be they physical, professional, or financial, that are genuinely impressive, and often result in achieving valuable psychological states as a rewarding side-effect too.
**Wiser people** are conscious that it’s maddeningly easy to talk about ‘the journey not the destination’ in a way that simply turns the journey into a destination. As if the journey were about answering a series of questions, rather than being a quest. As if ‘here and now’ were about hedonism, rather than a realisation that it’s the only place you ever are. Wiser people know that the problem with plans is that the way most people see them is misleadingly mechanical: clearly defined inputs that lead to a clearly defined output. Life becomes about waiting, and Goodness gets tied to ‘[arriving](http://invalid//)’ somewhere. A ‘planning process’ can be a bit better. It at least hints at conscious engagement. But as 99% of uses of cash-flow models demonstrate (albeit sadly apparently not obviously enough for their dispensers nor subjects to realise) a ‘planning process’ can easily be the same nonsense repackaged. Exposition does not always equal internalisation. One’s good for profit. The other’s good for Good. Ever caught a Ryan Holiday interview?
Wiser people realise, as per the first sentence of the [first post](https://news.moneyblind.net/25-the-abc-of-money-part-1-the-three-self-deceptive-poisons) in this series, that: ‘To see money more clearly requires a systematic approach to insightful vision, not mental shortcuts.’ They use environment control, too, but the ticks on the wall chart are a tool to help expand consciousness to embrace an embodied experience anew everyday, rather than an end in themselves.
They do mindfulness too, but [don’t confuse it with relaxation, or contemplation](https://news.moneyblind.net/45-the-abc-of-money-part-10-what-meditation-isnt). They see it as [neuroplasticity and attention-paying training](https://news.moneyblind.net/46-the-abc-of-money-part-11-what-meditation-is) that highlights the opportunities to become wiser with money, all day, every day. They see that **financial advice that doesn’t lead back to how your worldview of money is mapped in your brain, while it can be helpful in several ways, is always, always, always, going to run into a dead end long before your life has been remotely transformed**.
### 5: See your faulty take on financial freedom, understand that responsibility and ability are intertwined
**Idiots** chase ‘financial freedom’ in the ‘[freedom to…](https://news.moneyblind.net/59-the-abc-of-money-part-15-freedom-to-freedom-from-freedom-for)’ sense, believing it to be the pot at the end of the rainbow that will rid them of their money worries, at which point they’ll live happily ever after.
**Clever people** are more inclined to think that being able to say ‘f-you’ to your boss, or indeed anyone else, is a pretty dumb-ass life goal. They’re more about the ‘freedom from…’ From worry and unwelcome obligations and whatnot. They grasp for the sorts of freedom that enables [wasting resources](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/2/2.2/2.2.1/2.2.1.1#want-not-to-waste) and not having to ‘worry’ about doing so. Though of course they don’t see this.
**Wiser people** know that part of growing up is developing the courage to challenge self-deceptive beliefs, to become comfortable with increasing levels of complexity, rather than continually rushing back to the fortune cookies and cognitive stabilisers. Wiser people realise that pretending ability (be it having loadsa money, loadsa brains, or loadsa followers) doesn’t entail responsibility is the way to [‘have everything’ and still feel like something is ‘missing’](https://news.moneyblind.net/63-a-problem-shared). The Four Noble Truths are a means of cultivating calm and kindness within yourself *so that* you may better help cultivate them in others.
### Symbolic sight
**You can’t see what you can’t see. But you can act as if something is true, do what that suggests you should do, and see where that leads you. You can fake a view until you make a view.**
If it leads you nowhere, what have you lost? One of the aims of this series has been to persuade you of a few things that, while you may have no way of experiencing them immediately, there’s certainly strong enough evidence for thinking that maybe there’s something worth exploring in them.
For example:
* Assume that you are probably self-deceived in some way when it comes to how you view the money in your life. How you relate to it, what it means to you, and so on. Ask yourself: in what ways might this be true?
* Examine your language. Do the words you use around money mean what you think they mean? [Here](https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4https://book.moneyblind.net/the-book/1/1.5/1.5.4) are some example words and phrases to start with.
* Examine your actions. What picture do the priorities as shown by your calendar and credit-card statement paint of who you are becoming? If this isn’t who you deep down want to become, if this doesn’t vibe with your soul, duuuuuude, what needs to change? And when is it going to? Are you pretending that what needs to change is something external? Or falling for any of the other mistakes in [this post](https://news.moneyblind.net/32-the-idiocy-of-ignoring-impermanence-the-abc-of-money-part-5)?
* Assume that you are probably addicted (in the sense that you dedicate resources to things that do not make your life better because for whatever reason you saw no better alternatives at the time). Ask yourself: in what ways might this be true? What role does money play in narrowing your vision?
* Expand your vision. Pick any use of money that wasted your time, or energy, or had a deleterious effect on your health, or a relationship. What underlying need were you trying to meet? What else could you have done?
* Ask yourself: In what ways do you try to ‘fix’ problems in an isolated way, e.g. by buying a thing, blaming some specific set of circumstances? What if this were actually a vision issue? A systematic way in which you attend to the world that doesn’t actually work as well as it feels it will in the moment? By all means break a life down for analysis, but if the aim is the living, not the analysing, don’t forget to put it back together again.
* Challenge everything. For a bit. Language. Actions. Thoughts. Assume they’re all possibly wrong. Challenge them. The right ones will survive. You know what to do, you just don’t pay attention to the fact that you know. Do the next right thing.
### I can see clearly now the left brain has gone
In [Idiot Money #85](https://news.moneyblind.net/85-financial-philosophy-greater-than-financial-psychology-greater-than-hot-investment-tips), we asked: Where do you go for wisdom?
If you’re after information, knowledge, or even understanding… it’s clear enough where to look. Wisdom? Not so much.
In the world [as run by a runaway left hemisphere](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance), because wisdom is not something that can be certificated, measured, and managed, it may as well not exist.
‘Fear not!’ The Bay Area bros cry, on their way back from Burning Man, ‘We’ve designed an AI that has allowed us to really understand wisdom. It’s spat out a checklist, and got a neuroscientist to sign it off, so we know it’s right.’ When you try to ‘solve’ the hole you’ve dug yourself into by swapping your spade for an industrial digger, you get entrenchment, not enlightenment.
**Knowing how to invest well takes maybe a couple of hours to get comfortable with the relevant processes, and then ultimately a couple more hours each year to manage it**. That is it. And no I’m not being flippant.
You should totally do this. But it’s possible to do it perfectly and still live terribly with money. And assuming you’re more interested in making more of your money rather than merely making more money, knowing how to live well with money is vastly more valuable. Getting to grips with how to do that also takes maybe a couple of hours, though because it’s a way of life for a human, rather than a recipe for a robot, it is something you continually step into, rather than something you set up and then step away from.
‘In the view of all philosophical schools,’ writes Pierre Hadot,
> mankind's principal cause of suffering, disorder, and unconsciousness were the passions: that is, unregulated desires and exaggerated fears. People are prevented from truly living, it was taught, because they are dominated by worries. Philosophy thus appears, in the first place, as a therapeutic of the passions. \[...] Each school had its own therapeutic method, but all of them linked their therapeutics to **a profound transformation of the individual's mode of seeing and being**.
‘Such a transformation of vision,’ Hadot continues, ‘is not easy, and it precisely here that spiritual exercises come in. Little by little, they make possible the indispensable metamorphosis of our inner self.’
Little by little. **By paying attention to how you pay attention, your vision, and therefore your life – your worries, your fears, your joys – are *****profoundly***** transformed. That is the message of this series. It’s one I hope everyone gets to experience.**
# #98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem
1st August, 2022
**Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter**. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that when you see a number-shaped answer, you’re probably looking foolishly narrowly, including:
* How being ‘rich’ can literally be an act of self harm.
* The danger of turning ‘difficult to convey’ into ‘easy to ignore’.
* And an alternative allegory for when you’re sick of the Mexican fisherman one.
*This is part of a* [*series*](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance) *mapping our relationships with money to the foundationally important work of Iain McGilchrist, as set out in the two best non-fiction books I've ever read. Because you know money with only half a brain, and it’s the stupid half. And this, more than anything else, prevents you making more (a lot more) of the money in your life.*
**It’s probably pointless to suggest that lives are screwed up by prioritising money simply because it can be measured and because it promises an easy answer to a complex, existentially terrifying conundrum. Because no one thinks that’s what they’re doing when they’re doing it. But with the help of a story about an olive harvest that’s got nothing to do with olive harvesting, I’m going to do it anyway.**
During my time in face-to-face financial planning, there was one quote I found myself revisiting more than any other.
It’s from Bertrand Russell – no stranger to either personal wealth and power, or the contemplation of what it means to live a Good Life. In *The Conquest of Happiness*, he asked: ‘What is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?’
To this I would add: ‘What is the use of “buying time” if you don’t use that time wisely?’
And: ‘What is the use of the common strategies to address these questions, if, much as they may make you feel momentarily clever, do damn all for the ultimate quality of your life? I.e. if the point of having money is to make your life better, why is everybody so crap at it?’
### Whole-Brain Personal Finance, Lesson **#8**: Putting everything into numbers is a game with only losers
In *The Matter with Things*, McGilchrist relates the following story:
> It is early November, the time of the olive harvest: the days are still warm and filled with sunlight. But over the valleys there comes the constant whining and braying of engines \[…] the olives are now shaken from the branches by the flailing arms of a sort of strimmer.
>
> This means that the local farmer’s olives are now gathered in in one morning by a gang of eight men, each armed with a machine. In the past it would have taken the family, men, women and children, three days to do the same work. How wonderful is that?
I hope the fact that framing a way of life as a maths problem immediately strikes you as cause for concern. McGilchrist continues (my emphasis):
> Well, **it depends what you think life is about**. Picking olives with friends and family was a companionable event. It involved singing and laughter. It brought together communities across the generations. It was work, but not in truth terribly hard work when the labour is shared. It would be punctuated with pauses to sit, chat, eat and drink.
>
> **It had a meaning which is difficult to convey**, surrounding the relationship between the often ancient trees, a proper reverence for them, their harvest, and its place in Greek culture, the process of gathering in something in the nature of a gift, in the peace of the autumn landscape, that would be stored and enjoyed over the whole coming year.
To the modern Western mind, especially when it’s thinking about something in which money has a role (which, given it has a role in everything we do to make it and use it, is basically everything) ‘difficult to convey’ becomes ‘too easy to ignore’. And everything goes to shit because of it.
> It is also true that the olives were more carefully harvested, and there was less detritus – branches, leaves, odd plastic attachments from the flails – that got into the mash.
‘Externalities’ the economists would call this. To which of course the ‘solution’ is some sort of tax. Turn what can’t be measured into what can and all is well, right?
> But it’s more about what it does to us and our relationship with nature than to the oil. A generative experience has been turned into a sort of violation: this was in fact the word used by the woman whose trees were being harvested in the village yesterday. Something the children would have remembered and hoped to repeat in their lives is gone. And so as **to ‘create time’ – for what, exactly?**
I hope you can see that asking ‘to create time – for what?’ isn’t about Greek olives. It should ring in your ears every time you hear some productivity obsessive preaching about ‘using money to buy time’ or its 1,001 variations.
I also hope you can see that this isn’t about just finding the right way to tax externalities, or the right way to manipulate the numbers more broadly. When the game you’re playing is the problem, the answer isn’t changing the way you play, it’s changing the game.
> If we want to ‘tackle climate change’ we most certainly do have to take whatever steps are necessary to stop destroying the rain forests. But **if we go on thinking of the extraordinary richness and beauty of abundant life in them merely in terms of what it can do for us, what it is ‘worth’ to us in terms of utility, which ultimately translates as economic value, we might as well forget trying to save ourselves, and allow ourselves to sink**.
### If being rich is literally an act of self-harm, is it really such a great goal?
McGilchrist tells another story, this time on [the Metalearn podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ0iA98OhFo) (incidentally hosted by one of this newsletter’s wisest commenters), about Helena Norberg-Hodge, who went to Ladakh in the 70s, to a community where they largely lived in a way that was uninterrupted for thousands of years.
In McGilchrist’s words:
> She saw all the beautiful buildings. She was shown where people lived and what they did. And she said: ‘Now, I want to see where the poor people live’. And they said, ‘but there are no poor people. This is how we all live.’
Some 20 years later, she went back. In that time, Ladakh had imported advertising, television, and other gleaming baubles of Western culture. With them had come ‘unhappiness, disquiet, a sense of falling behind, the need to compete, and greed.’
When Norberg-Hodge first visited, ‘self-harm was unknown.’
*Was*.
‘And when she spoke to the people,’ says McGilchrist, ‘they said: “we’re just so poor”. These people had had a true wealth, which they had lost. They had become truly poor.’
McGilchrist asks: ‘If we wanted to destroy the happiness of a people, what would you do?’
His answer maps to what happened in Ladakh – you’d build everything ‘efficiently’ with rulers and set-squares, you’d replace food with an economically scalable sugary synthetic alternative, and so on.
Which of course is what we continue to choose for ourselves because of [the way in which we pay attention](https://news.moneyblind.net/whole-brain-personal-finance), and the forces to which we decide to delegate our life choices:
We would alienate them from nature, alienate them from the idea that there's any kind of spiritual or divine or sacred realm and divide them one from another and destroy their traditions and history and say, it's whatever you want. That doesn't achieve happiness. It achieves high levels of unhappiness.
Later on, McGilchrist references some studies on immigrants into the US:
> Immigrants into the United States come with low levels of mental illness, but after they've been in the United States for 20 or 30 years, they, and their children, show higher rates of mental illness; they approximate more and more to that of the native culture.
And, echoing a finding you see every time the ‘French paradox’ comes up:
> I also noted these fascinating studies of relatively cohesive communities. There's one particular Italian community Rosetta, which was closely studied, where people had high rates of smoking and drinking and didn't take enough exercise and all the rest and had low rates of heart disease and led happy lives and so forth. They were fulfilled psychologically, socially and physically.
Sitting around smoking obviously isn’t the wisest move. But it’s not the barrier to living well that being stuck pursuing synthetic success is.
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