Making Sense of Money
“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”
A decade ago, I got a call from the Rolex shop.
The DEEPSEA Sea-dweller watch I’d been eyeing had arrived, and I was to pay the balance and collect. I already owned four watches; this was my fifth purchase within the past two years.
However, over the weeks before the call, I began having doubts. It all started innocently enough. I questioned whether I needed another costly watch. This then snowballed into an existential money crisis.
I put the watch on my wrist. It was rather heavy and looked too big for my hand. I felt a gnawing inside me, a heaviness in my chest and a mental nausea. It was similar to the feeling after a gluttonous bout of eating chocolate or Big Macs.
I didn’t feel good about owning another Rolex, even though I could afford it. I decided there and then to sell it back to the store, which readily accepted it. There were many customers for such an exclusive watch.
I then proceeded to get rid of my other four watches systematically.
I haven’t worn a watch since that day. I see the watch as a symbol of ostentatiousness—a way to tell others how much money we have.
I’ve always felt conflicted about money; I have a love-hate relationship with it. One day, I love the comforts it affords me. On another day, I loathe it for how people (and myself) act around it.
My ongoing dual relationship with money stems from the fact that, as much as I know it is a powerful tool with lots of benefits, I’m also wary of its hold on me and how easily it can suck me into the hedonistic, materialistic, empty kind of life I fear living.
Since giving away my watches, I started to examine what I could do to use money more meaningfully. The line between using money as a tool and being enslaved by it is thin and dangerous.
These are the five principles that have helped me clarify and define that thin line:
Negative connotations and fear surround money.
We project many negative beliefs onto money. The religious ones fill us with guilt the second we start enjoying our hard-earned cash. The socialist ideologies plaster our eyes with images of hunger and starvation across the globe, urging us to feel guilty about our spending rather than guiding us to be proactive in donating. The ‘nouveau riche’ show us an ugly, irresponsible culture that makes us cringe and declare ourselves socialists forever.
Money becomes stigmatised; as such, much fear surrounds it.
Those who have money are afraid of losing it. They can’t imagine a life where they don’t live at an important address, go to the best restaurants and show off in the sexiest cars.
Those who don’t have it fear they will never have it. They see themselves as not worthy enough to have money and what it brings. It affects their self-esteem, and soon, they start to adopt a scarcity mindset.
Money is a necessary tool, like food and water.
We need enough money to meet our basic needs (or to satisfy Maslow’s hierarchical level one security needs—food on the table, rent, kids’ schooling and welfare, insurance and medical).
Money is simply a means to an end. Many people are rich and miserable, while others who earn a dollar a day are happy. Conversely, some rich people are happy, and many needy individuals suffer incredible pain.
A study in 2010 suggested an annual income of $75,000 is enough to make most Americans satisfied and happy on a day-to-day basis. The point here is not the amount—as what could cost $75,000 in the US could be $5,000 in Africa or $150,000 in Norway—but the idea of a set amount that can care for our basic needs.
How (and not how much) we spend determines our well-being.
We are all different, and if we are true to our likes and dislikes and spend accordingly, that can determine our happiness. In these heady consumerist days, deciding how we want to spend our money is often difficult.
A new study by Cambridge University confirms that when we match our spending habits with our personalities, we are happiest.
For example, “conscientious” people spend more on health and fitness, while “agreeable” characters would like to donate to charities. Both types of personalities are happier when they spend time in these characteristic ways.
Money doesn’t necessarily buy freedom—and could be its obstacle.
Most of us believe that money will give us freedom and independence. It could, but most of the time, the only barrier to freedom is in our minds. It’s not money, but rather our limiting beliefs with which we grew up, that stop us from breaking out of our comfortable and dependent lives.
Having more money usually means buying more “chains,” as James Altucher put it. The bigger house needs more maintenance and work. The third car means we have more cars than drivers. The many shoes to choose from drive our cortisol levels up because we stress out with too many choices. Even when we do choose, we always feel like shit when we see the new “thing” on another person, which makes ours appear so out of season.
Money can never substitute love.
Lovers often buy gifts for each other when they have argued or messed up. A gift arrives after a frenzied argument. Smiles. Hugs. Kisses.
True, gifts can smooth things over and create a receptive atmosphere for dialogue, but they can never compensate for love and compassion.
Money can never replace love. Money can never buy love.
Only when we experience true love and go through all its intricacies do we understand that fact. People who say money can replace love don’t have issues with money; they have a problem with love.
We often complicate the meaning we give to money because of the importance the world has attached to it.
Money is a universal tool to do what we want in life.
It is not as evil as many would lead us to believe.
It is also not the saviour many think.
Once we know what we want in life—and what we want to do with money—it can become easier to navigate that thin line between being its master or its servant.