If there was ever a thing that causes pleasure and pain, it’s money-how we think about it and how we feel about it. The current crisis in private credit card debt in the US is some indication that this is a very loaded issue for most of us.
Here (following), someone tells us WHY we want to get rich, but what’s speaking the loudest is what’s not being said – it’s such an awful thing to even want to be rich, much less actually be rich, that we must spin-doctor it, i.e., “Here, I’ll tell you some politically correct reasons to want to be rich.”
Mr. Wallace D. Wattles, “The Science of Getting Rich”:
“You want to get rich in order that you may surround yourself with beautiful things, see distant lands, feed your mind, and develop your intellect; in order that you may love others and do kind things, and be able to play a good part in helping the world to find truth.”
This is rationalization. I want to be rich because, all things being equal, having money is more fun than not having money. It may be shallow, but it is also true, that for me, money can buy happiness. Not the enduring, meaningful, authentic kind of happiness, but the kind that gets me through, say, a bad hair week, a boring Sunday, getting laid off, or a relationship bustup. “A momentary stay,” as the poet wrote.
It also provides relief from things I hate. Poverty is doing math endlessly, and details, like clipping and saving coupons and having them with you when you need them, and extra labor, like having to wash your only blouse every night so you have something to wear the next day. It’s figuring out how much stuff costs by the ounce, and having to walk to the convenience store and buy the tiny detergent, knowing it’s a ripoff, both because you are on foot, and because you can’t ever save up enough at one time to buy the giant economy size. The giant ECONOMY size is for the RICH. The tiny EXPENSIVE size is for the POOR.
It further has provided me relief from cleaning my house, mowing my lawn, washing my car, expressing the, um, glands of my Chocolate lab, climbing on the roof, driving an hour through rush hour in the rain to deliver a contract, sitting in the last row of the last balcony with my head against a wall, and other chores I would prefer not to do.
And it’s kept me from having to make excruciating decisions — Do I feed the baby this month, or take photos of him? Do I buy gas for the car, or buy Granny’s heart medicine? Do I go without shoes, or does my husband? Who gets the one hot dog for dinner? Which child goes to a foster home, eeny, meeny, miney, mo.
And also because, like everyone else, I was born on my knees with my hands clasped in prayer and my eyes toward heaven, begging for more of anything that’s fun, pleasurable, and not illegal, immoral, unethical, lethal, or UNAFFORDABLE. Despite my 10 years training to be a lama, if I see a beautiful sunset, eat a Krispy Kreme, kiss Doug, or get to go on a River cruise to Russia, I want more, more, more! Don’t you?
But let it be known I want to be rich at the expense of not a single other living soul. Those with a zero-sum attitude toward life seem to think that if Tom is rich, Harry cannot be rich. “I want everyone to have plenty of everything, and me, too,” says Teresa, my hairdresser. Now that’s a nice thought. Let it rain gold on all of us.!
Nor would I suggest wanting to be rich in such a way as the unenlightened and inexperienced want things. There’s more than one horror tale about that. Be careful what you ask for. You may get it and not like it; or worse, get that, and lose everything else.
I talk to couples all the time who say they’ve tried every way they can think of to work it out and nothing works; they fight about money.
And I have clients who are conflicted about making money, so unhappy both with and without it. Why this conflict and guilt about money? Why is it so symbolic?
Well money is power. With money, you can have lots of toys and candy-even a 4 year old knows that. And with money you can do what you please more, and do more of what you please. There’s a great passage from Robert Penn Warren’s, “All the King’s Men,” where one of the characters talks about what life is like once you’ve got both front feet in the trough and a dollar’s not a reason to get out of bed any more.
Put me right there with my front feet in the trough, and, hey, you come too!
Wanting money, lusting for money is good, someone wrote. It’s passion. Oops, are we talking about money or sex here? More on this later.
I think it safe to say none of us longs to be poor, just scraping by, barely making it, heavily in debt, destitute, or bankrupt. Though I sat at a Board meeting for the homeless once where a highly insensitive car dealer told us all how nice it would be to sleep under a bridge, that it would be peaceful and that he “kind of envied ‘them’.” No t.v., no cell phones, he said. Armchair liberal. No air-conditioning, no food, no medicine, no education… But I knew what his life was like — 70 hours a week was probably the least he ever put in at the office, so he had no time to spend his money and he hated his wife. Now that, I would agree, is “evil” – to have money and no time to enjoy what it can buy or anyone special to enjoy it with.
However, having gotten out of the armchair and into the trenches myself, there’s nothing even neutral I can say about grinding poverty. It isn’t enlightening, it doesn’t make you a better person, and it doesn’t build character. It’s more likely to make you angry, broken, crazy, sick, or even dead, and if you survive what it does to you, you won’t survive what it does to your children. Spirituality and poverty do not go together any more than spirituality and wealth go together. Who got the two connected in the first place?
“They’re so happy,” the cruise passengers always tell me, when we’re in the Caribbean. I speak on cruises. “People in the US are miserable, and look at how happy the people in Barbados are.” I didn’t think the prostitute walking down Main Street with her baby and toddlers in tow looked particularly happy. Call me unobservant?
Does wealth make you ungiving? It didn’t Anson Greene Phelps, founder of Phelps Dodge Mining Co. He vowed if his business and family survived a financial crisis in 1832, he would pledge his life to philanthropy and when he died, he left to charities in New York the largest donation ever made at the time.
Nor did it stop Bill Cosby from donating $20,000,000 to Spellman College.
Nor John Sperling, multi-millionaire owner of the University of Phoenix, from giving $600,000 to Reed College.
And what can you say about Oseola McCarty, who was a washerwoman her entire life and donated her life savings to the University of Mississippi — $150,000?
It does happen to be true that people give to charities in reverse proportion to their income. “Shame on you, rich people” is all I have to say about that. If you haven’t donated a playground to a Children’s Shelter and watched the kids hit the AstroturfT running, you have not experienced the pleasure of money.
So why do we need this justification Wattles gives us? Because getting rich, or even wanting to, makes us feel guilty. Religion has been against it. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle .,” and “Love of money is the root of all evil.”
“Try me, Lord,” I say. “Test me. Curse me with millions and see if I can pass through the eye of that needle.” And, what, for heaven’s sake is this about not being able to have money AND be happy? Are we really that stupid? We know, yes we do, that if you aren’t happy without money, you won’t be happy with it, but that’s about YOU, and not about MONEY!
Money is referred to as “filthy lucre,” in the Bible. Paul says twice in the First Epistle to Timothy that a pious man must be “not greedy of filthy lucre,” for “they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition” (1 Tim. 3.3, 8; 6.9).
When my young friend Adam found a business need to fill that allowed him to leave his $40k a year job, start his own company, and leap way over the 6-figure bar, I asked his wife, “Are you happy? Are you having fun?” She said she was “worried sick” because her mother had told her that when men get rich, they leave their wives.
This has got to stop!
However, women apparently leave men who don’t have money . “You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille.”
In the 80’s here in Texas, in the oil bust, so many marriages were breaking up as the men went bankrupt I had to ask. I had to know how these women were justifying deserting their husbands under such circumstances. Using my intuition-an EQ competency-to help me select the right time and way, I asked Onetta. “ME Leave HIM?” she cried. “I did everything I could to stay, to make it work. Why would I leave him when he’s down? Why would I leave him when he needed me? It was HE. His ego. He wouldn’t get out of bed. He wouldn’t talk to me, or look me in the eye, or make love to me. He said if he couldn’t provide for me, he didn’t deserve me. HE equated himSELF with a paycheck, not ME. I begged him not to push me away. Then he went and found a 20-year-old, I guess for his ego.” The rest . was tears.
This has got to stop!
“The Victorian worship of money, rooted though it is in Protestant culture, is shot through with the dread and aversion that such passages enjoin upon all faithful believers,” says Christopher Herbert, Victorian Studies Volume 44, Number 2. “If money is a divinity, it is a ‘forbidden’ one.”
Herbert goes on to talk about one of our least favorite theories of Sigmund Freud’s; least favorite though not necessarily invalid – his famous doctrine of the symbolic equivalence of money and excrement. As in, “Wow! That’s a s***load of money you got there!”
Herbert writes: “Wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist, [Freud] declares, -in the ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, in unconscious thinking, in dreams and in neuroses-money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt” (9: 174). In all these different contexts of primitive thinking, says Freud more specifically, “gold is seen in the most unambiguous way to be a symbol of faeces” (12: 187).
Can you remember a fairytale like this? Freud’s evidence for such an *interesting* theory, is apparently neither plentiful nor compelling. Oddly, says Herbert, “Freud never seems to take note of what the psychoanalytic theory of money implies so powerfully, namely that money, given its symbolic proximity to the most repugnant of all things, will be bound to become an object of at least subconscious aversion and repression.”
But Mr. Herbert, there ARE people hung up like that. They sabotage themselves, and push money away, nasty thing that it is. They lose diamond bracelets, fritter away fortunes, snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in the stock market . we see it all the time. I coach people all the time who’s subconscious aversion to money is making a mockery of their lives.
But before we leave Freud, let’s remember that money is like the Rorschah test, the ink blots. What Freud says about money says a whole lot more about him than it does about money.
Well, we know this. 25 years ago there were three taboo subjects at any civilized dinner gathering: sex, religion and money. Now I think there is only one: money. “Anyone who tells you what they make,” says my young friend Matthew, “is lying.”
And anyone who wants it, must rationalize it . “[so] that you may love others and do kind things.”
I suggest some nice attracting-money affirmations instead: I love money. When I have money, everything and everyone in the world is better. Money loves me. Me ‘n’ Money, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G … And for heaven’s sake don’t feel guilty if you get some, like so many people with inherited money do, I noticed in my fundraising days. If you truly want to curse your children, have wealth they may or may not inherit, depending upon how well-controlled by you they agree to be, but do be sure and leave them gobs of it.
This has got to stop!
Well, it’s a loaded topic for sure that I’d like to raise consciousness about, because a lot of people waste a lot of time trying NOT to make money. It’s like the 150 IQ child who’s always exhausted because she has to work so hard to get Cs to prove her point. Give in and get those As, honey; and go ahead and make that money, sir. IT’S OKAY.
So I’d like to end with this thought: I’m 100% for these things Wattles praises, and also for money; and we know we can have them with money, so here are some ways to get them whether or NOT you have money. That should leave you free to both enjoy your life, and enjoy money. Now isn’t that the way it should be?
Surround yourself with beautiful things – shop at the Thrift Shop or Garage Sales, propagate plants for your garden, bring cut roses inside, look at and listen to the birds in your yard, dare to become aware of the profound beauty of your children. See distant lands — work as a gentleman host for the cruise lines, the ultimate working holiday. Drive out into the country at night, spread a quilt on the ground, hold your lover’s hand, and look at the stars – a “distant land” most of us haven’t looked at in years. Feed your mind and develop your intellect – there are so many free resources on the Internet, those of us selling educational products can hardly make a dime and to me it’s the single best non-personal thing about this decade. If you don’t own a computer, check with social services in your area. Check out books and tapes from the library. Sign up for Strengths course; it’s free (email me). Love others and do kind things – there is nothing, not a single thing, more kind than to sit and really listen to someone else, giving them your undivided attention, and it doesn’t cost a dime. And play a good part in helping the world to find truth . what on earth is he talking about? Oh, I know, how about this truth? That as long as it’s not ill-gotten, having money is almost always more fun than not having money, other things being equal, and does not necessarily imply the suffering of anyone else, and needs to be separated from guilt.
Filthy lucre? Wash it off and go have fun with it! Likely you earned it-one way or another. From what I’ve seen those who inherit it have worked the hardest for it. But if you truly don’t like it, and refuse to tolerate it in your life, pass it on over here. I love money!
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