How to Lose Our Addiction to Money, and Give More Freely
How to Lose Our Addiction to Money, and Give More Freely
A while back I met a Mormon from Utah who told me that it was quite customary for Mormons to give 10% of their annual income to charities, and so did he.
I admired this greatly and decided to do likewise. But I greatly underestimated my own addiction to money. It is not that I decided against donating, but rather I began arguing that first I had to find the "right" charity to give to, that this was money I desperately needed for leisure, savings, travel, retirement funds, etc. After complicating the topic and having failed to find the "perfect" charity, thinking of misappropriated funds and my own needs, this topic had "successfully" drifted out of my awareness.
"The things you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden, Fightclub
So what is this addiction to money? Why are we addicted to earning, winning, saving, having, keeping money?
The allure of money
The main allure of money is its universality. Any physical objects we buy with money are in a way tainted by reality. We may get bored of them, accustomed to them, they get scratched or dented, or we may become aware of downsides that we never considered in our fantasies. They become part of a new baseline, while our feeling of lack, of "this isn't it" remains just as strong, as does our impulse to change ourselves or our environment to fill this lack.
That awesome super-car you've always dreamt of: It also only gets you from A to B. You still get stuck in traffic, you still don't find a parking space, it will need to go to the garage just as often and won't magically prevent you from having a fight with your girlfriend in it. And on top of it all you now worry about leaving parked at a curb unguarded.
So, in a way money is the "stuff of dreams". It let's us dream what we might do with it, of the perfect life or moment or object it could buy us. But as soon as we actually spend it, all claims to its universality are lost. Often enough we end up with some object or service that cannot be resold and that falls short of our idealized dreams of it.
Worshiping at the altar of affluence
For many people today money is their religion. Many sacrifice much to gain it, they fight over money, are willing to abandon themselves over money. Arcane incantations are spoken by the priests of the stock market, it sometimes seems as if money were a panacea, the cure to heal everything, the god if worshiped that heals all sorrow.
As an exercise, take a bank note in your hand and imagine putting it on fire. If you are like me you will have a strong recoil from this thought! It is in a way the worst blasphemy to destroy currency, even though we gladly spend money for firewood, to buy things that we may never use, or even things that are quite bad for our health and well-being like cigarettes.
This strong attachment to money scared me! My mind was racing to find arguments not to "blaspheme". Think of all the good it could do for kids in Africa, or all the great things I could buy for myself and others with it. But then again, I was thinking of all the things I was much more likely to spend it on. What if I would spend 10, 20, 50 Euros less on sweets, on fast food, on DVDs and then burnt that money as a sacrifice to my body, my health, my letting go of this powerful addiction, attachment, as a statement of liberation?
Adapting to wealth
Interestingly, the more money we have, the more we spend. And this is not a conscious process of prosperity, but rather an unconscious process of adaptation to the status quo. If starting from today you had twice as much money, chances are that in 6 months from now you'd feel similarly as prosperous as you do right now. You might have a larger apartment, a better car, a nice stereo, new clothes, in all more financial commitments. And you would still have a similar level of perceived problems. In the most severe case, people have been known to become anxious of their wealth, of its risk exposure, its interest rate, completely enslaved to what they perceived as their liberation.
The way out
Let us become aware of our addiction to money, our implicit assumptions that it will bring us happiness, and of the strong adaptation effect that makes our well-being almost invariant of our wealth. If we spend 10% of our income on charities, this adaptation can be used for good, because we will just as well adapt quickly to 10% less available funds, but have the great certainty of significantly helping others each and every month.
Now, all I need to do is actually start with it and overcome all the arguments why holding on to that money for a little longer is a good idea;)
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