Getting Back to Basics

I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life when I took money for granted. Maybe being born at the tail end of the Great Depression meant that some of its lessons rubbed off on me, somehow. However it happened, my attitude toward money has always been pretty much the same, whether I had a lot of it (comparatively speaking), or very little. It’s useful, but not all-important. There are a lot of unrecognized advantages to having grown up at the lower end of the economic scale. At least they’re advantages if out and out grinding poverty didn’t traumatize you to the point where money did become the be all and end all.

When I hear these tales of woe, I’m often tempted to give a big “Well, boo hoo!” But I don’t. I think about the lives people lead, how hard they work for “stuff.” All that stuff doesn’t even make them particularly happy, but it’s a catastrophe when they lose it. I feel a twinge of pity, but I’ll be darned if I let them see it.

The American middle class has been experiencing downward mobility for some time, but it’s been somewhat disguised. The slow creep upward of goods and services has almost, but not quite, been matched by pay increases. Overall, the value of income has been going down fairly steadily, but now, with a sharp rise in prices, mortgage foreclosures and job losses, the truth is hard to miss. The American dream: steady upward mobility, a home of your own, sending the kids to college, and the hope that they will do better than their parents, has exploded into dust.

There may be some comfort in looking around and seeing that most people are in the same boat, but there is also resentment and indignation. “Why did this happen to me? Why should I have to give up so much of what I’ve worked hard for?” Those feelings are natural, but they can get in the way of examining your values and needs, and making changes that can minimize the negative side of lower expectations. It’s a hard blow when your hopes and dreams prove the truth of the old adage: what goes up must come down. Your future depends on how you deal with it.

If you grow up in a family with very limited financial resources, there are two ways you can go as an adult: you will make the getting and spending of money the center of your life, and base your self-esteem and self-valuation on how much of it you have. Or you will have learned to appreciate its value so that you can use it to enrich your life rather than let it control you. Two very different relationships to money, and two very different interpretations of “learning the value of money.”

It’s possible that those two different approaches can also be true for people who’ve grown up with so much money that they take it for granted. But being able to take something completely for granted usually means that you fail to appreciate it or understand its true value. It’s a simple fact of human psychology that we place more value on what we’ve worked for than on what we’re simply handed, almost as a matter of right. Money that you’ve worked for represents your skills and the investment of your time. Money that is handed to you represents the work of others. It has little value aside from what you can spend it on.

If you’ve grown up poor and you work for your money, you understand its importance; you understand the fear of its loss and the possibility of sliding into real poverty. You understand what it means to others like yourself and you can empathize with them, and try to work for a society in which no one needs to fear going hungry or losing their home. If your money is handed to you, what you fear is having less to spend on the luxuries that you feel are your right. You have no understanding of what it means not to have enough for the most basic needs.

The real value of money is what it tells us about ourselves if we have the courage to listen.