Worries about money tend to fall into four big groups:
1. Without it my life is going to have lots of pains and hassles. I’ll be humiliated because I do not have enough money to protect myself. I will have low status.
2. Money will force me to spend a lot of my life just making enough to get by. This is not a complete waste; it’s just that there will be a lot less fulfilment, self-realization and worthwhile endeavour than I’d like. I’ll pass a lot of my life thinking about debt payments and credit cards – rather than dealing with ultimately more important matters. What’s more, money is extremely unreliable. I’ll save, and then it will all disappear away because of some gyration of the market.
3. I’ll miss out on the good things that I long for. I’ll never live in a lovely house, drive an elegant car, go on a fabulous holiday, feel the snug warmth and ease that I assume derives from deep financial security. And this makes me angry with myself and with the world. I worry that I will fail in life and this will be connected to my inability to deal better with money.
4. Money is like a virus. For the sake of money people do terrible things. Money seems to operate with a logic that is indifferent to merit or suffering or justice. There is a kind of fate that, for no good reason, determines that this person will scrape and beg while that person will gaze at statements from stockbrokers filled with huge numbers. The system feels too big – there is nothing I, or anyone, can do about it.
If we are to do something about our worries we need to understand them before trying to immediately respond to them. Where do our worries come from? What lies behind them? What are we really worried about? We make progress in our lives when we turn anxieties into specific questions. Providing, that is, we turn them into the right questions.
Money worries occur because we cannot give accurate enough answers to the underlying questions:
1. What do I need money for? That is, what is important to me?
2. How much money do I need to do that?
3. What is the best way for me to get that money?
4. What are my economic responsibilities to other people?
These questions engage directly with the worries with which we started. The questions are serious but they have real answers.
Our natural tendency is to spin from one worry to another; we change topic, as it were, but do not really get anywhere:
A more desirable habit of thinking is one in which worries are held in the mind, so that they can be turned into genuine enquiries:
It might sound a touch pedantic to emphasize this. But it is a crucial principle. We will never make progress in addressing our money worries if we do not recognize that they stem from a set of underlying questions. And those questions are about our own values, mode of living and view of life. Our worries – when it comes to money – are about psychology as much as economics, the soul as much as the bank balance.
So the first task is to know our worries and to trace them back to an underlying question. It’s quite possible that, on a first examination, the worries are a bit vague. I often don’t really know what I am really worried about. That’s not to say that my distress has no cause. It’s just that I don’t know very accurately what the cause is.
For instance, I quite often feel anxious about money when I look at my car. I’ve had it for ten years and it has accumulated quite a number of scratches and minor ailments. It creaks in a curious way; the wipers shudder across the windscreen; the bits of plastic that protected the underside of the wheel arches fell off some time back. The interior never feels entirely clean. There’s a dent on one side caused by some ill-judged reversing in an underground car park. But it goes and is reliable. And I can’t afford to replace it.
But some part of my brain tells me that it is not the car I am supposed to have. I imagine something more interesting, or more beautiful – or just more up-market. When I park at the tennis club I feel relieved if there are other modest cars around and (I’m ashamed to say, but it is true) annoyed by the sight of more elegant vehicles. What causes my anxiety is the thought that I am stuck with this thing, that I’ll never get anything better: I’ll never be able to afford to be happy about my car.
This worry, it turns out, is not really to do with the car itself. Rather, it is to do with imagination and social relations. So, what exactly am I worrying about? On reflection, it emerges that I’m worried about not taking care of things properly. If I’d looked after the car properly, it could still be in fine condition. Then I wouldn’t worry about it being ten years old and an average make. When I look at the car, I’m seeing (I now understand) the consequence of a kind of laziness – always putting off getting little things fixed, never cleaning the back seats, etc. My worry is about my character. And buying a new car – which would be a real burden – would not make me better at looking after it. In fact, I think the appeal of a new car is really to do with starting over: next time, I secretly tell myself, I’ll take good care of my vehicle. But that’s delusional. I didn’t in the past. Why would that change now?
It’s really quite significant that the ‘object’ of the worry may be far from clear. It means, as I have said, that the primary task is to think, rather than rush to a solution.
To take another example: anxiety arises, for me, in connection with a specific grand hotel in Venice. When I think about it – it’s extremely elegant and charming and wildly expensive – I feel frustrated and despondent. I contemplate my meagre bank account with disgust. I’ll never be able to stay there. Of course, there are millions of things I can’t begin to afford, millions of high-price hotels. Why the worry about this specific hotel?
Thinking it through, I realize – for the first time – that I associate that hotel with historical figures I admire. I think John Ruskin stayed there. I’m pretty sure the writer Cyril Connolly did, and the historian Kenneth Clark. To me the hotel means: you can be like them. Although, the thought looks silly once it is presented to daylight. Staying there would do nothing at all to make me similar to them in any important way. But this suggests that the worry is not ultimately about money. It is, ultimately, a worry that, in comparison with these men I admire, I am unfocused and short on courage. These are concerns worth addressing; but a luxury hotel isn’t the answer.
Another money worry is that when my children grow up they will not make enough money. I try to devise ways of saving now so that they will be secure. If I put a small amount aside every week, what will compound interest make of it in fifty years time? (Admittedly rather too far off to be much help.) But the real worries, I now think, are of their inner independence and of the radically indefinite character of the future. Maybe they won’t care about what seems important to me. I’m confronting the fact that I can’t imagine them grown up. How could the little girl playing in the sandpit earn a middle-class income? The worry, then, is existential: my children will grow up, they will become their own judges of life; they will separate from me.
We often don’t quite know what the problem is that we need a solution to. My worries, here, are clearly only in part about money. They are also worries about being liked, about the well-being of my children, about my relationship with my secret hopes of fulfilment and achievement, and about the coherence of my life. But of course these are quite vague starting points. The temptation is to say that because they are vague they can be dismissed. In fact, it is because they are vague that they require extra attention and clarification.
