money stories and what it means to have enough

from MINE via yanis

of all the things capitalism tells us we should strive for—money, fame, power, beauty, youth—money is the one i’m most sympathetic to. we need [some amount of] it to survive, after all. (socialists and other non-capitalist -ists, don’t @ me, i know this is a debatable assumption.)

for most of my adult life, my answer to the “what to do about money?” question has been to throw money at it, like a model capitalist. without realizing it was what i was doing, i struck an implicit deal with the safety-seeking part of myself: if i make “enough” of it, you’ll be quiet and leave me in peace. and i won’t have to think or worry about this money stuff too much. looking back, this wasn’t the only reason i sought jobs in finance and tech, but their salaries made it easy for me to hold up my end of the bargain. 

it’s been almost nine months since i left my “we’ll pay you enough to live in san francisco” tech job. for most of that time, the safety-seeking part of me has been, well, very unchill. i empathize with her. we had a deal, which i broke in a dramatic fashion. i didn’t have another job lined up before i left. i haven’t committed to a deadline by which i’ll start looking for jobs. “what’s your PLAN??” she keeps imploring me, eyes wide with disbelief and barely-held-together panic. i can hear her muttering, i didn’t sign up for this! you promised me security, not thinning hair because i haven’t had a restful night’s sleep in months.

when i was still at pinterest and on the “known” side peering into the unknown, i remember thinking that the hardest part would be that first leap, the grand gesture of quitting without a plan. which, to be clear, was hard. it took years of angsty soul searching and conversations with therapists, coaches, and friends to gather the courage to make that move. 

but it’s not like that one decision meant i could ride off into the sunset, never to revisit or question my choices again. like a long-term relationship, i’m realizing you have to keep recommitting to the journey along the way. there will be many “flight to safety” moments where you’re tempted to go back to what you know, the quote unquote safer path. 

for me, money is a consistent and insistent flight to safety trigger. when i hear a friend just bought a house, i congratulate her even while my stomach drops and my chest constricts. purchases i wouldn’t have thought twice about when i was working full-time, like a coaching course, i now seesaw over, weighing the pros and cons. i’ve been lucky to consider a few job opportunities since leaving pinterest, and i’ve noticed it can be hard to untangle how much i actually like the role vs. how much i’m just relieved by the idea of a regular paycheck and benefits. 

what’s most frustrating, and a testament to the reality-warping powers of capitalism, is that my anxieties are, for the most part, divorced from the facts of my financial situation: i have enough savings to live off of for some time. 

of course, if rational arguments alone could calm our money fears, this would be a short essay. in a capitalist society we need money to meet basic physiological needs like food, shelter, and clothing. not having enough, or perceiving that we don’t have enough money, elicits a strong fear response. my belief that i shouldn’t be spending more money than i’m bringing in (even if i have savings) is a visceral, embodied one: i shiver and feel an urge to shake off an unwelcome visitor that’s landed on me. 

so what to do in the face of millennia of survival-focused adaptation and several hundred years of cultural conditioning that “more is better”? i don’t have all the answers but i can share what i’ve explored and found helpful in evolving my relationship with money and what it means to have enough. 

uncovering my “money stories”

we’ve talked about why logical appeals hold little sway with the safety-seeking part of us. if we want to work with this voice, a good first step is to understand what it actually believes and why it believes those things. in the art of money, bari tessler describes a journaling exercise to help you do this. 

here are her prompts:

1. describe your current relationship with money

   • spend a few moments writing about your current relationship with money. how do you feel about earning, spending, saving, giving, borrowing, loaning, and receiving money? what feelings or memories do these activities stir within you? do you notice any beliefs, patterns, or conditions attached to these areas?

2. visualize your money past

   • let your mind travel back into your childhood memories. look around, see your home and its surroundings. what did you learn about money, here? what beliefs did you receive? what decisions did you make? do you recall others who had more or less money than you? what did you feel about that?

   • now, think about your family. what was your mother’s role, in terms of family finances? what messages did she give you about money, verbally and through her unspoken behavior and emotions? in what ways have you echoed her role or rebelled against it? ask these same questions about your father, your grandparents, your siblings, and anyone else significant to you in your childhood.

   • did you receive messages about money from your religion, culture, or lineage? what were they?

   • trace the ups and downs of your life in relation to money. did you experience any big financial successes or hardships? how have they affected you, your life, and how you relate to money?

3. connect the dots between past and present

   • how are you keeping that past alive in your relationship with money? considering everything you were taught (and not taught) about money, how are you living out old or inherited beliefs, patterns, and stories? have you repeated the past, rebelled against it, or struck out on your own?

   • how is your past money story affecting your relationships with your parents, siblings, friends, boss, clients, or larger community? how does it show up in your self-talk, in your behaviors, and in your thoughts about the future?

there’s a lot packed in here so take your time. when i did this, i ended up with eight, single spaced pages worth of notes (typed!). 

journaling about these questions helped me clarify my explicit money beliefs, uncover implicit money beliefs that i didn’t know i was carrying, and trace the origins of both to specific events in my past, some of which surprised me with the depth of emotional charge they still held. 

one of these memories was the collapse of the dot com bubble in 2001. i remember my mom saying that we could have bought a house in san diego with the money we had lost. but what sticks with me the most is the regret, anguish, and anger in her voice when she talked about it. 

i didn’t realize it at the time but i absorbed a deep lesson here about how hard-won money is and how easily it can be lost. how you could spend years working to earn what could disappear overnight. what can possibly feel like “enough” in a world where that’s true?

revisiting events like this from my past helped me empathize more with the safety-seeking part of me, and to really get where she’s coming from. while i may have let this memory fade into my subconscious, she’s never forgotten. in our desire to move on or move past, we often forget that a prerequisite to change is creating space for our fears to be heard, acknowledged, and appreciated.

and not all your money stories will be negative. i stumbled upon a few memories—getting my first paycheck in high school, covering my own dorm & food expenses the last two years of college, helping my parents pay for their home in cash—that reminded me of the ways money can support values i care about. 

i added one more step to bari’s exercise. rereading my notes, i highlighted the money beliefs that i want to evolve because they’re motivated by fear that doesn’t match reality, and/or don’t fit the role that i want money to play in my life. i made a table with each belief i want to evolve and the corresponding new belief i want to move towards. something like this: 

i like this summary view and its reminder that our beliefs are malleable.

defining what is “enough” 

a central question remains, perhaps the biggest of them all: what is enough? what do i really need, from a money standpoint, to live a meaningful, happy life?

the two things i know about this question: it’s extremely personal, and almost everyone finds it a hard one to answer. 

one reason it’s hard is because we’re used to letting other people—family, peers, employers—define “enough” for us via their expectations or what they’ll pay us. the pandemic has been a wake-up call for many to stop and consider what we really need to be happy. kinda crazy that it took a pandemic !

it would be impossible to prescribe One Right Answer here but i can offer some different ways of thinking about this, starting from the qualitative, felt experience and then getting numbers involved:

1/ scarcity, abundance, and sufficiency

it’s become very popular to talk about money through the lens of scarcity vs. abundance (and not just money, but any part of our lives where we tend to feel like we don’t have enough: time, energy, love). 

in the world of scarcity vs. abundance, there’s an obvious “right” choice and an obvious “wrong” choice that are both predetermined. so why is it that we still so often struggle to make the “abundant” choice? 

is abundance really the opposite of scarcity and what we want to strive for? or is it just another expression of our fear of scarcity—a state of craving based on the belief that more is better? 

maybe “enough” is rejecting this false dichotomy and choosing the harder, messier middle ground of sufficiency. harder and messier because while many of us know what lack and excess feel like, we’re out of touch, out of practice, with what sufficiency feels like. hunger and too full are old friends, satisfied is a stranger. 

in the words of author lynne twist:

“in the mindset of scarcity [and abundance], our relationship with money is an expression of fear, a fear that drives us in an endless and unfulfilling chase for more . . . we judge, compare, and criticize; we label winners and losers . . . in the conversation for sufficiency, we acknowledge what is, appreciate its value, and envision how to make a difference with it. we recognize, affirm, and embrace.”

2/ primary and secondary satisfactions

in this excerpt from an interview with psychotherapist francis weller, he draws a distinction between what he calls primary and secondary satisfactions:

weller: anesthesia and amnesia are the two primary “sins” of modern society.

we go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. the levels of addiction in our society are off the charts, and i’m not just talking about alcohol and drugs; i’m talking about shopping, working, sex. addictions are an attempt to cope with intolerable states. the meager lives we are asked to live, in which we are often reduced to “earning a living,” are themselves intolerable. we are meant to have a more sensuous, imaginative, and creative existence. as children we are enchanted with the world, yet as adults we end up, as poet mary oliver said, “breathing just a little, and calling it a life.” that’s the anesthesia.

mckee: and the amnesia?

weller: we are living in what writer and cultural critic daniel quinn calls the Great Forgetting. many of us have forgotten that we’re a part of an ecosystem, a watershed. we’ve forgotten that we’re kin to all the other animals. we’ve forgotten that we need each other. we have forgotten what i call the “commons of the soul.”

for thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, receiving adequate levels of touch, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. i call these activities “primary satisfactions.” we are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. in their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status—or, on the shadow side, addictions. the problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. we always want more. but once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else.

though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. we can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions. we can find them through our friendships, by spending time in nature, by risking being vulnerable with someone we trust.

weller might define “enough” as being able to fulfill our primary satisfactions. the question then becomes, in a capitalist system, what amount of money do you need to do that? 

some of you may be thinking sure primary satisfactions sound nice but also incomplete. what about things like freedom? the ability to walk away from a dangerous or dead end job, the ability to determine what i do with my time. isn’t that a primary satisfaction too?

i agree that freedom is important and something that’s implied in weller’s definition of primary satisfaction. if you asked people what they would do if they didn’t have to worry about money, many of their answers would probably match weller’s list.

beyond the specifics of what falls under which definition, weller invites us to pay attention to the things that actually bring us joy and meaning, the things we pursue and hold up as important, and the overlap (or lack thereof) between the two.

3/ inputs and outputs

an unexpected benefit of working for myself has been the clarity it’s given me on what i put into my job, what i get out of it, and which of those outcomes i truly value. 

a common gripe you’ll hear among coaches is that 1:1 coaching doesn’t scale. which is true. and yet, maybe this is just the newbie speaking, but i find the simplicity and determinism of this business model refreshing. 

by that i mean there’s a clearer relationship between inputs (aka what i invest of myself) and outputs (aka the outcomes): i offer people my energy and skills over a period of time each month, and in return i receive money, meaning, and learning. it’s also obvious to me that at a certain point i wouldn’t take on another client just for the money, because i would rather spend that time and energy with loved ones or on other passions like writing. 

in larger organizations, the relationship between inputs and outputs is muddier because the “reward” for your work is not just money but things like title, the number of people you manage, etc. (these “ego rewards” can also come up when you work for yourself, but they tend not to be so influential because of self-selection and because they’re something you opt in to vs. opt out of.) sometimes we don’t even stop to ask if we actually want these other rewards, we just see there’s a ladder in front of us and start climbing. additionally, it’s not clear how much more you need to work to get that next promotion or raise. so we default to working more at the expense of important-but-not-urgent priorities. 

there’s a quote by psychoanalyst eric fromm: “we think we lose something—time—when we do not do things quickly; yet we do not know what to do with the time we gain except kill it.” i’ve found this to be especially true when i was working in fast-paced, high pressure jobs. there’s a cycle i would fall into of trying to be more productive and efficient at work so i could save time, which i would then plow right back into...more work. i rarely paused to consider what am i expecting to get out of this extra time working? do i actually care about those things? would i feel more fulfilled if i did _____ instead? as a coach, it’s been easier for me to disconnect to focus on things outside of my job. 

am i saying you should quit your job and go work for yourself? no. (unless you want to and feel good about taking that step, then by all means!) but it’s worth asking 1) what outcomes do you truly care about at work, and 2) how can you simplify the relationship between your inputs and those outcomes? 

4/ some math

ok, we’re finally getting to numbers for those of you who are more analytically minded :) 

here’s a bottoms up approach to estimating your target annual income:

1. track your monthly expenses for some period (ideally a year to account for seasonal variation in spending)

2. add any anticipated expenses for the year ahead that aren’t included in your historical spending

3. categorize each expense as a necessity, comfort, or luxury

4. decide where on that spectrum you want to be in terms of your expenses as a whole

5. add your monthly debt repayment and/or savings goal

6. take an average of the months and multiply by 12 (or just add up each month if you have a year of tracked expenses)

7. add a buffer for unexpected costs

steps 3 and 4 are the hard parts, where you define what Enough means to you. 

if the idea of committing to numbers makes you nervous, remember that you’re writing them down in sand, not stone. none of the above will stay fixed forever. your expenses, savings goal, what you consider to be a necessity vs. comfort vs. luxury, and where you want to be on that spectrum, will all change over time. if you try this approach you’ll want to revisit your numbers at least before any big life transition and ideally every year. 

5/ what the research says

psychologists define happiness as both how you feel on a daily basis (emotional well-being), and how satisfied you are with your life overall (life satisfaction).

a well-known finding from a 2010 study shows that while life satisfaction is positively correlated with income, emotional well-being levels off after $75,000 a year.

a 2018 study using a much wider data set found that between $60,000 to $75,000 is the ideal income for emotional well-being and $95,000 for life satisfaction. when people earned more than $105,000, their happiness levels actually decreased.

sharing my money stories with others

my friend james observed that because many of the messages we absorb about money come from the culture and the collective water we’re swimming in, it can be particularly healing to process our money stories with others in a communal space. by breaking the taboo of talking about money, we lessen the power it holds over us. 

i’ve entered these conversations a few different ways: taking a course on the emotional consequences of capitalism, getting involved with organizations like resource generation, and writing to you through this newsletter. 

a powerful ritual i encountered at a resource generation meeting is sharing your income history, net assets, and giving practices out loud with others. i’ve never even told the people i’m closest to all of these things, let alone people i don’t know well. i was scared of people’s judgment, projecting my own embarrassment and guilt that i have so much while still being afraid i have too little. seeing that i could share this information and no one rolled their eyes or refused to talk to me afterwards, as silly as that sounds, was affirming. like hearing “you’re not weird for feeling this way. we get it and we feel it too.” 

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i’d love to hear from you! what’s your relationship to money like? how do you define what “enough” means? what have you found helpful in your own money journey?

i’m thinking about hosting a room on clubhouse to talk more about this topic, since there’s so much here. would you be interested in this kind of thing? (i have a handful of invites if you want one.) 

and tbh i’m just looking for an excuse to hang out on clubhouse so send me your topic suggestions! (i had an amazing discussion about kevin kreider and the rest of the bling empire cast the other day 😄) i’m biased but i think ya’ll are a lovely group of people and would enjoy getting to know and hear from each other, too.