Photograph courtesy of New York Public Library
Here are some more thoughts after a couple more weeks of conversations with clients with colleagues, messages, and emails from friends and strangers, observing the outside world from both big media platforms and personal social media accounts, a lot of reading, and a lot of doing nothing.
Trauma needs to be worked through because it's messing with our finances.
The further I go in my journey to understand people's financial behavior, the more I am learning about the link between trauma and bad financial decisions. While "retail therapy" is a phrase that has been in our lexicon for some time now, it doesn't quite capture the spectrum of how trauma impacts our financial behaviors. In addition to over-spenders, there are excess savers, chronic under earners, over workers, and people who are perpetually in debt. And now, in a time of crisis, unhealed trauma is revealing itself as the stress and the threat of future financial uncertainty act as triggers.
Trauma is not a free pass to continue with bad financial decisions. Instead, it's a sign that if you have chronically had financial issues, you might have to go back and work on healing your past trauma to make real progress. Unfortunately, you have a lot more work to do than someone with less trauma because subconscious behaviors are embedded into who we believe we are. They are stronger than our motivation; they sabotage our attempts at being self-disciplined, and they need to be brought into your consciousness and healed before a mindset shift can happen. If you have trauma, like being part of a marginalized group, you might have to work twice as hard for half of the result.
There's no doubt that a lot of people are experiencing a traumatic event right now. For some, it's something new, so they might not be as equipped to deal with it. For others, they know how to work through the stress; it's familiar. Just realize the potential for trauma is there right now and that you may need to work on healing it, so it doesn't drive your future financial (and life) decisions.
The actual healing part is beyond what I'm able to help with, but therapy is a great place to start. Virtual options are popping up, and there are organizations available that offer it on a sliding scale.
We're all hypocrites its just a matter of where we draw the line.
Conservatives are protesting. Republicans are supporting social programs. Liberals are embracing the ideological values of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. I used to think shopping at Costco was grotesque and wasteful, but now I see, given the right circumstances, it's smart and economical - even in a two-person household.
We are all confronting where the line of our belief ends, and our hypocrisy begins. I'm not throwing shade, just illuminating this idea that we don't have to be so attached to what we believe. Beliefs can change, and there is hope in that.
Inaction is sometimes the best action to take
It's easy to conflate being productive with constantly taking action. Being productive is not only about action, but it's also about effectiveness. When something is effective, it might require less action. That's also what efficiency is; results, but with less energy.
In the current context, the most effective thing to do is to halt productivity; to do more nothing. The nothingness is valuable. Even outside of a crisis, doing nothing can be useful. Solving problems, especially big ones, require space for nothing. Long walks, staring off into space, thinking about your ideas, resting and letting everything you've mentally tinkered with settle, it's all nothing, and it's all valuable.
Not selling when the market is down, is doing nothing and can prove to be super valuable. Not spending your cash (by doing nothing) might be a smart move for folks who are unsure about future cash flow. Doing nothing by avoiding taking more risk than you need is super prudent. And if you are in a state of trauma, arguably collectively we are, any actions you take are responses in survival and not by cognitive choice. So perhaps, the best move, for now, is not making a move.
Freedom is not free
Freedom in any society has a cost. The individuals within the society are the ones that pay it. America is easy to criticize, but there is a lot of freedom here. Case in point: the fact that we can criticize it. The U.S. also has a lot of freedom when it comes to enterprise and starting a business. That's a huge opportunity for its citizens, but the cost is that everyone can make a buck off of anyone.
Soon we're going to have to weigh the tradeoffs and costs of freedom. While we're free to leave our homes for the essentials, it's a warped version of freedom. Ultimately, reintegration will come in waves and phases, and we'll need to reckon with trading our privacy for our privilege to be outside of our homes. We might all agree that contract tracing and tracking is overall prudent, but to what varying degrees will paying that cost now be a forever cost in our future?
Financial freedom also comes at a cost. If you are working towards that, you know that the price is discipline, maybe working your ass off or at least being very clever. If you have had it given to you, I'm sure there are strings attached, and you pay for financial freedom in other ways. And if you feel free from pursuing that freedom, you are paying in different ways and in other risks you take.
How much of our identities are wrapped up in our work and how we consume? And how much longer can we afford to do this?
Am I naive to think we can go back to a time where our work and what we consumed didn't play a role in defining who we are and how we see ourselves? Because we're starting to see the limits of using these things to define who we are in the world.
It's excellent for our employers if we identify with our jobs so much that we're willing to sacrifice free time and brain space and energy on creating value for them and their company. It serves the company, the economy, and capitalism when we think this way. The self-employed and business owners have an even blurrier line. For many of us, what we do for work is a huge slice of our identity. Work is vital for the well being of humans, but using it as an identity is different than realizing that we are who we are regardless of the work we do. All of our work should show us that we are connected. No matter what job we do, we're collectively working together.
When we use how we spend money to shape our identity and therefore, the idea of ourself it reinforces this gospel of consumption. Changing trends, more data-driven, sophisticated marketing, and the growing trend of assigning meaning to consumption will continue to strengthen our collective behavior that we are what we consume.
But these ways of identifying ourselves are fleeting. You will retire one day, which means you'll need to shed the identity of "who you wanted to be when you grew up." And if we try to make consumption more meaningful instead of more meaningless, won't that make consuming that much more important? How will we ever be able to consume less? Because let's face it, if our consumption habits do not change, Earth is toast. Is it worth that? Is free delivery for stuff you don't need worth sacrificing Earth?
I'm watching existential crises happen in real-time.
I think the hardest part of this crisis is the reckoning of our identities. People who are losing their jobs are wondering who they are if they aren't their work? Many of us who are consuming less are seeing just how much we let what we consume make up the idea of who we are. Those of us who identify ourselves by the actions we take are wondering what doing nothing says about them. Who are they without the doing? And if your beliefs are being rewritten, then you were also never the sum of your beliefs. And your trauma; if you can work through it and heal it, then that was never who you were as well. Maybe nobody is expressing it just like this, or perhaps I'm losing my fucking mind (not mutually exclusive), but it seems to me that crisis has set off a collective existential crisis. And I'm not bummed about it.