Money has been in the news this week. Higher interest rates, stagnant house prices, inflation still climbing.
But then money is in the news EVERY week.
Every day, in fact.
If sex and death are our primary fascinations as human primates, then money comes a close third. We shuffle the figures endlessly in our minds. How will I get through the week without another visit to the food bank? Or, is my investment in my Mayfair house producing sufficient returns to fund the private school fees for my children, given the property slump? Or, how can I avoid those pesky inheritance taxes? Or, why has the cost of a tomato doubled? And why does my husband keep spending money on scratch cards? And so on.
Thinking about money too much is a kind of mental illness ( at least if you are relatively well off. If you are poor, it’s simply a necessity.) And it’s a mental illness that a very large number of people seem to suffer if all the Money pages in the newspapers and the endless stories about investments, returns and stock markets are anything to go by.
Money is not only a pratical necessity. It is a way we try and quantify our life - which is in fact, unquantifiable. But money, in a sense, doesn’t exist. It is simply a symbol. You should never confuse money with wealth. Wealth is everything you can touch, can eat, can live within. It is the material world. You may have a lot or a little, but it is real enough. Money on the other hand, is a kind of mental construct, an agreed fiction that we all sign up to.
I am always fascinated when a recession hits. What happened to all the money? In 1929 the Wall Street crash resulted in people becoming bankrupt overnight. But there was the same amount of machinery, of labour, of resources, of will power. Where did it all go? It was as if people all at once stopped believing in a magic charm. In 2008 when the financial crisis hit, I was genuinely terrified because I thought we were about to stop believing in money, which really would have been the end of civilisation, as surely as a nuclear strike.
Money once was rooted in some kind of material reality - the Gold Standard, which was linked, obviously, to the precious metal ( although even the value of gold seems to me, like precious stones, highly arbitrary). Now it is linked to nothing I can understand. It is just digits floating in cyberspace. If the digits misbehave, we have a recession. If the digits do what they are meant to, whatever that is, we have rising living standards.
I know these are naive and simplistic definitions of money, but I have asked economists, even a former chancellor of the exchequer, the question ‘what is money’. None of them had a satisfactory answer.
Whatever the case, it remains that money has remarkable power, even if a lot of it is symbolic ( and human beings are, after all, and above all, symbolic beings). Everyone brings their own set of meanings to it, which are deeply entangled with their emotions. It is a sort of taboo subject in this country at least ( or the part of the country I live in). Nobody around here ever asks how much another person earns. It is seen as vulgar. Certainly, rich people find the subject of money, casually discussed, very uncomfortable. Perhaps because they know that a cursory glance at their wealth might raise some interesting moral questions about where it came from and what they are doing to help others by dint of their immense good fortune.
Or at least I suppose it’s good fortune. Certainly, it’s better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable. However, I have known enough badly messed up rich people to know that money brings problems of its own - usually through inheritance in one form or another, which produces huge rifts within families. But there are other elements of the downside - rich kids for instance often suffer from a severe lack of purpose and drive. It may sound lovely to have a house bought for you by mater and pater and a nice trust fund, and I’m sure it is, but at the same time, I imagine it’s also a bit hollow and a drain on motivation.
I have spent a reasonable amount of time amongst the rich, for one reason or another, and I am sorry to report, all the same, that they, on the whole, do live very nice lives and seem remarkably content. As well they might be. One of the most interesting and conservative things about such people is that they seem to happily embrace gender stereotypes. The man earns shit loads of money and the wife who is invariably beautiful and younger, looks after the children, garden, house and social life. As an arrangement, it seems to work pretty well , in a way I imagine it wouldn’t for the more stressed out - and socially progressive - middle classes.
I personally was faced with the problem - if it can be deemed such - of money at quite a young age. Although I wasn’t dirt poor growing up - my father worked in greengrocers but we owned our own house, albeit in a crummy suburb of London - money was always tight.
I really hated not having enough money. I couldn’t buy anything but the cheapest knockoff fashions ( fashion being very important to a young man). If my ancient Morris Minor broke down, which it always did, I had a real problem, as I could rarely afford to fix it. I didn’t eat out until I was 18 ( for my eighteenth birthday, paid for by my father) and didn’t go abroad till I was 19. Was I happy and poor? Definitely not. I wanted enough money to not have to worry all the time - about money.
I got lucky, and found a way to start my own publishing company and buy some property before I was 27. At that age, I was very far from wealthy - although I drove a brand new jeep and ate in nice restaurants. But I had a problem. Money did not interest me.
I gave a reasonable amount away to family members, but I could still live, at a very humble level, without having to go to work. At that point, I could have devoted my energies to becoming properly rich. Property development, at that point in time, was a no-brainer for those who wanted to be wealthy, with cheap and easily available loans.
But it held no appeal for me. Instead, I woke up every morning thinking ‘what the hell am I meant to do?’. Because I lacked what most people have in spades in their life. Necessity. Which is to say, purpose.
In the end, I decided to go to university and pursue the life of the mind. It was a very painful experience, but it got me to a place where I was intellectually developed enough to become, after some years of trying and a certain amount of luck, a fully-fledged writer. Again, I made good money - but the money didn’t interest me, only the writing interested me.
Now, years later, I am twice divorced and have effectively donated both of my ex-wives a house, while I live in rental accommodation ( although I do own a tiny house far from London). And I think about money even less. Because I do not measure my life in money. I measure my life in time. And if I am spending my time ( note how we use money analogies to refer to time - we ‘spend’ it and ‘save’ it) chasing money for its own sake, well that’s seems a waste of a life. Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
I have no idea how this ( rather rambling) essay will be received by my subscribers, but one thing I do know is that is likely to produce emotional responses one way or the other ( ‘how can you can you complain about the problems of having enough money you rich bastard’). When I was a Guardian columnist I once wrote a column about domestic finances and how the proceeds of the family income might be divided up between husband and wife. It is the one and only time I found myself at the centre not only of a Twitterstorm, but a fierce argument with my wife, who, although having approved publication of the article ( I always submitted family articles to her before publication) then became angry at the content after it was published. So as I say - emotional, and not always rational.
My conclusion is a simple, if not banal, one. Money - whatever it is - is a great servant but a terrible master. And that if you worry too much about money, and become too emotionally invested in it, you are not only likely to waste a lot of your life. You are also, paradoxically, likely to provide a negative attraction to money. As I said, I have never cared about money, but it has always somehow come my way. And I know people who worry ( usually unnecessarily) about every penny and one thing I know is that they will never be wealthy - not in the full sense of being both materially and psychologically satisfied.
A very close member of my family was a total slave to money. Throughout his life, he squirrelled it away whilst living like a pauper. It was almost an obsession. The older he got, the worse he got until eventually, locked away in his cold, dark, isolated house, he died in a fire. It was a desperate and ugly irony. So trapped in the love of money, he refused even to use electricity and one night a candle caught alight. Money, in effect, killed him.
Thought provoking essay. Thank you.
I guess you are probably correct in at least a good few of your points - you will polarise some of your readers. I have said elsewhere that I am an old man who eats well, so I should be up front about that too. It’s nice not to have to care about the pennies. It’s also good to stop trying to make more when you have enough - somewhere there’s a calculus which shows that for me or you to have lots means others must suffer - and that seems unfair and unjustifiable. What to do? Start with oneself, change and set and example, teach others how if they ask, hope that this proliferates outwards.
I believe that this is the only way that societies change without bloodshed. I may be wrong.