[Nyerges is the author of several books including “How to
Survive Anywhere,” “Extreme Simplicity,” and “Self-Sufficient Home.” He has lectured, taught, and led field trips
since 1974. He can be reached at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com
or Box 41834, Eagle Rock,CA 90041]
During the early 1980s, I participated in the monthly WTI
Plenary sessions which were held in Highland Park. These were all-day events where
participants shared accounts of specific research they had been doing. I had
been giving presentations on money-related topics, such as “What is money?,”
“What is the Federal Reserve?,” “What is the IMF,” etc.
The money-related lecture that stirred up the greatest
emotional response was “The Four Illusions of Money.” I loosely based by presentation on an article by the same name
that appeared in the winter 1979-80 issue of Co-Evolution Quarterly. The presentation and discussion lasted about
two hours, covering many facets and dealing with the comments and objections
from the audience. Here is a
condensation of that presentation.
When people are queried, almost everyone says that they do
not have enough money, and would like to have more. Furthermore, one of the
most commonly-cited reasons given by people who continue to work at a job they
dislike is to “make a lot of money.”
The reasons that this is such a ubiquitous goal – to make a lot of money
– can be summed up in the four following rationales:
- A lot of money will let me be free to do what I want to do.
- People with a lot of money command more respect from others.
- I need more money for my family.
- Money is necessary for my security in old age.
Yes, there are many more such “illusions” that dance around
money, but these four seemed to fairly concisely address all the secondary and
corollary illusions.
These four statements are illusions about money. That means,
these represent false perceptions of the world. That is to say, when we embrace any or all of these four
illusions, we are prevented from seeing the NON-monetary realities about our
life and the choices that we make.
So let’s explore these one by one.
A lot of money will let me be free to do what I want
to do.
One way to see through this illusion is to make a specific
list of all your carefully-considered goals. These can be short-term and
long-term goals. These can include travel, projects, achievements, possessions,
skills (learning a new language), etc., but the list cannot include money. Money cannot be a goal. Next, you should
examine the list you made and begin to delineate precisely how you can go about
achieving that goal.
Yes, of course, money can help accelerate the achievement of
the goal. Still, once your goals are clearly established in your own mind – and clearly differentiated
from “passing wants” – you can steadily move forward, step by step, toward the
achievement of that goal. Money is incidental
to this process, and must not be allowed to determine the choices you make and
the steps that you take.
A large part of achieving a goal – perhaps the most
important part – is to learn valuable life-enhancing skills that you wouldn’t
have learned otherwise.
And many of the essential steps toward a goal involve
working with other people. Working with other people develops strong
friendships and relationships, and this requires that you must be – or become –
reliable and trustworthy yourself. This
manner of pursuing and achieving goals should represent a true freedom from our
enslavement to money, and should open you up to some truly life-enhancing
experiences.
Remember, this perspective is offered as an alternative to
“going out to make enough money so I can be free to do what I want to do.”
One of the amazing insights that I gained while sharing this
at our seminar was how many people actually had no clearly-defined goals at
all.
People with a lot of money command more respect from
others.
This is demonstrably and abundantly false. There is no reason to believe that people
with “a lot” of money automatically command genuine respect (in fact, they
don’t), or that people with “a lot” of money command respect because of
the money.
People who invite respect do so because of their personal
qualities, talents, character, experience.
It may be the case that these very qualities are the reason a person has
been able to earn “a lot” of money. But
money itself is not the basis for real respect.
How do I know this?
Look at what happens to those who claim respect for someone when the
money is gone.
And also just try the following experiment for
yourself. Make a list of 25 people whom
you respect. These must be people that you know personally and you interact
with in some way, not just people that you know about from the TV or
newspapers. Do your best to attempt to
“score” how much you respect them, using a system for example of listing each
from 1 to 100, 100 being the highest level of respect. Next, do your best to list the income (or
net worth) or each of the individuals on your list. In cases of genuine respect, yo will rarely find a correspondence between how much you
respect that person and how much money they make.
I need more money for my family.
All too often, people use this fallacy as an excuse for
doing something they would rather not do.
This rationale is especially typical of “bread-winners” who work extra
hours and on weekends so they can pay for possessions and vacations that they
believe their family needs and deserves.
If you are getting more and more out of touch with your own
family members because you are spending more and more time away from them
supposedly so you can provide something more for them, then you are falling for
this illusion.
It would be far more valuable for everyone if these
bread-winners instead spent valuable time with their family members, and
finding a way to re-orient the job and financial choices.
Sometimes the most valuable time spent with one’s children
is the time spent to teach and work
with them to develop their own businesses.
As for the myth of “quality time” over “quantity of time,”
don’t believe it! Your notion of
“quality time” means very little to young people. The best way to have quality time is to assure that you have
sufficient time together.
Money is necessary for my security in old age.
I had barely spoken these words in my seminar presentation
when the groans and loud objections were voiced. Two men got into an argument over this point before I’d barely
gotten started, and I had to tactfully break it up. Yes, we have a lot of baggage about money, and getting older
doesn’t make this any better.
Money is needed in many ways, of course, but personal
security, inner and outer, cannot be purchased.
The real security that is most needed by elderly can be
enhanced by money, but it can never be built solely upon money. Inner security arises with the development
of deep friendships, and with learning to be flexible and adaptable, for
example, and these are not things that are in any way dependant upon
money.
In fact, one of the best ways to “prepare for old age” is to
become the type of person – inwardly and outwardly – that other people will
want to be around and work with.
This means being competent, helpful, flexible, honest,
moral, curious, always willing to learn and to share, generous, and so on. And note that none of these virtues are
either the intrinsic or exclusive virtues of the wealthy.
Developing one’s character is clearly one of the best ways
to prepare for the calamities that might strike any of us at any age, such as
wars, depressions, social chaos, as well as a whole host of personal
difficulties.
[A continuation of this discussion of money can be found
in Christopher Nyerges’ “Extreme Simplicity,” book available at bookstores,
Amazon, and www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com.]
2 comments:
I really enjoyed that. It was actually well thought out. Typically columns on topics like this are of the useless "think positive" variety.
liquid premium -- I agree with you. Although "thinking positive" probably does have some value, it is not a strategy, no more than "hope" is a meaningful strategy....
Post a Comment