Wednesday, August 21, 1996
The Good of Money
At 54 it has been awhile since I was a teenager, but what I remember of that time of life is that I was far more attracted to spending money than investing it. Despite earning my own money for everything but rent and some food since I was 15, I did not take money seriously. I don't remember that anyone in my crowd did, least of all the adults. By the time I began to view money other than as something one used to soak up as much pleasure as possible, I was long gone from my teenage years. I suppose I had fun, but with just a little prudence, as readers of this forum are showing, I could have had my fun and still made a few investments. What a difference that would have made!
Human beings like to pride themselves on being rational, but if this were true wouldn't most of us be living tasteful, stylish lives, always saying and doing just the right thing? We know what to do; why don't we do it? Most of us have glaring weaknesses, well-known to ourselves, and against which we valiantly struggle, often for our entire lives. Is this rational? No, the first thing we must understand about ourselves is that we are sometimes rational and often irrational. "Sometimes" is the fateful word.
The greatest philosophers in the world concur and incite us to do one thing. "Know thyself," they say. "Be a light unto thyself." This means that living in denial of who we really are is living incorrectly. Denial is humanity's great sinkhole. Small denials expand into larger ones as each small escape from self-examination modifies the next until we lose entirely the ability to see ourselves as we are and as others see us.
If we were to see a truck bearing down on us while we were legally in a crosswalk, do we stop to argue before jumping out of the way? Do we see as directly that denial is also a truck bearing down on us? We are imperfect beings, and that is trouble enough, but to live in denial of what we are invites great disorder and complication into our lives. Our understanding of this cannot remain at the level of the intellect. We must feel the truth of it at the deepest level, the same place that impels us to get out of the way of a speeding truck. At this level everything is authentic and beyond argument. We know. At this level, change is possible without effort.
In our society we are often counseled to use our willpower to change things. That seems rational enough, but that approach to change relies on us being rational, which we are very often not. If willpower were the answer, diets would work and there wouldn't be any need for clinics, pills, endless books and articles, personal trainers and motivational tapes. No, real change occurs naturally as we deeply understand what we are, and only superficial change depends on the use of the will.
If we can see that human beings are essentially irrational, and that we cannot "will" change into being, we are in a position to understand our relationship to money, and everything else.
No one has to tell us that money is important in our society, but what is money for? Pleasure? Security? Power? Fame? Sure, whatever. But what is it really for? We've all heard that time is money. Even without having read this forum, I am sure that readers have learned that time has an enormous effect on money through compounding. Chances are good that when you begin to invest early in your life, your investments will earn more money for you than your job. It certainly takes time to acquire an education, and there is no greater indicator of future earning power than a solid education.
But aside from the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, and the things we want such as a family, entertainment, and to make a contribution to our society -- what will we commit this money to?
Marxists believe that profit is evil. To them the capitalist game is a zero-sum game with the worker always drawing the short straw. But Marxists do not see that people working together willingly (rather than as part of a forced program) achieve more than they do by themselves. Profit, instead of being evil, is a kind of surplus and is a measure of how much society values the work being done. As investors we perform a significant social function. We provide capital to the market. Without it, this society would wither, just as all the socialistic societies are withering. Without capital, people cannot easily join together to make valuable social contributions. We ought not to forget this!
The surplus money we earn by being valuable contributors to our society can be put to a marvelous use. It can buy us time. Have you noticed that a great many people die soon after retirement? Time weighed heavily on them; they didn't know how to utilize this precious commodity. Time is in short supply, yet many of us have not judged its proper value, nor have we discovered what to do with it.
When we are young, we use time to take us from one activity to the next, preferably as quickly as possible. While this is fine for our youth, this is not an admirable way to spend an entire life. Why, you might ask, if we feel we have time on our hands would we would want to buy more of it? How about to know ourselves? With time on our hands -- leisure -- we can either observe ourselves or rush away from that into some sort of diverting activity. The workaholic and the pleasure-seeker are not so fundamentally different. They both escape from being with themselves, and, accordingly, do themselves a grave disservice. Being alone, with nothing pressing on us, is when we are most easily able to see who we are and to awaken to life. While one can be awake while being industrious, it is difficult and not the place to begin.
I think teenagers prefer the company of other teenagers simply because teenagers are generally a lot less neurotic than adults. At that stage in life they are still acting out of goodness rather than from a misguided quest for fame and fortune, or escapism at any cost. Rushing, however, from activity to activity can become an impaired way of life, because there's no room on the agenda for the important task of self-discovery. Most of us stop living at around 40, when denial of what we are has severely complicated our lives and we see no easy way out. Self-awareness shuts down and the light in our eyes dims. There is no question that we must have grit and drive to pursue an education and absorb the staggering amount of information surrounding us. Our drive, the energy to get things done, is a great asset, but as we speed along, we ourselves can become an endangered species. We can become solely goal-driven, no longer doing something for its own sake, but to attain a future reward, a distant, often intangible satisfaction, which even when reached ultimately leaves us feeling empty. Diversion, escapism, is an easy, banked route to follow. It's well-paved, well-publicized and well-traveled; millions have taken it before us. There's no mystery as to why entertainers are the highest-paid people in the world. They make that kind of traveling bearable!
Ironically, when we act from goodness, we are free to do what we will. When we are motivated to reach a goal, however, one part of ourselves is attempting to control another part of ourselves. This is a prescription for inner turmoil and wastes the energy needed to observe ourselves. We can easily become indifferent to whom we run over, and to the (often steep) price we are paying to get what we want. This is not difficult to observe if we care to do so. Acting with integrity in all that we do is its own reward, but may initially seem unprofitable when people are leap-frogging to the head of the class through sinister means, but after a lifetime of right-action we tortoises will still be living entities when the hares will have long since extinguished the light within themselves. Nothing will act in our favor more over a lifetime than our integrity. Never underestimate its power.
The good sense of acquiring plenty of money while simultaneously avoiding goal-driven behavior (just as we avoid speeding trucks), is one of life's paradoxes. What we understand deeply, we can do easily and we don't continuously need to perceive it on an intellectual level. If we love to walk in the woods, we do not set a goal of walking in the woods, we just do it. If we think that it would be wonderful to have a perfect body and we set out with that goal in mind, what happens? Conflict, comparison, failure. Out come the motivational tapes or some other form of whip, which one part of ourselves insensibly uses on another part. We are visited by guilt and a sense of shame when we do not achieve what we have set out to do. What a waste of energy! On the other hand, if we see the necessity of making plenty of money, there is no problem in acting on that understanding. Learning comes easily. Passion comes into our lives. No articulated goals prey on our minds. We intuitively do what we know is necessary to do. Goals are poor substitutes for the work of understanding ourselves and discovering just what is our relationship to people, nature and things, including money.
"Know thyself," are the words that have come to us from the wisest people the world has ever known. Those words are the meaning of life. We had best heed them. When we understand what we are, what we are changes, and when we change, the world changes.
[Editor's Note: This Fribble comes to us via the Teen Folder. Take a moment to visit this area soon; it's one of the most Foolish spots in the forum.]