Show Transcripts

SW10: Your Money or Your Life

Hello, I’m Irwin Kula and welcome to “Simple Wisdom.”  We live in a time in which there is so much change that it’s hard to know exactly where we stand and what kind of decisions to make.  “Simple Wisdom” brings the insight of an ancient tradition to the challenges of daily life, in the hope that it will make more our lives more creative and meaningful.   

Today, we’re going to talk about a subject that evokes more emotions than probably any subject besides sex.  It’s the subject of money, the meaning of money in our lives and the role money plays in our lives. We’re going to explore some of the attitudes — the wide-ranging attitudes that we bring to money.  Then we’re going to talk about what money really can buy and what it can’t buy so that we can produce a little bit more of a realistic attitude towards money.  We’re also going to talk about the challenge of affluence because all of us, in one way or another, have it better than just about anybody that ever existed in the world and affluence creates entirely different challenges than the kind of challenges money presented to our grandparents or even our parents.  

When we think about money for a second, we already begin to get a little uneasy—watch.  We gave out some lottery tickets before the show—everybody have their lottery tickets?  I want you to imagine for a second, with the lottery ticket in your hand and I hope it’s a big one, imagine what you would do if you won.  How would your life change -- just think about it for a second—how would your life change if you won this right now? 

Speaker: A lot more freedom, to take better care of my family and myself—freedom to travel, to create whatever vision I have in my life creatively or professionally.

IK: Look at all the fantasies already.  Everyone else has fantasies, too, I can imagine.  For some people it’s maybe buy a new house, for some it’s change jobs, move across the country somewhere and travel. It’s a kind of freedom that would change your life dramatically.  Now here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to take the lottery ticket that you have in your hand and I want you to pass it to the person to the left.  Now tell me how you would feel if you just gave away the winning lottery ticket to the person next to you.  How would you feel? 

Speaker: I’d be happy for the person, but I’d be feeling I missed an opportunity. 

IK: A little scarcity—a little envy probably.  Now look how crazy this is.  No one has seen if they have won or not.  It’s just a dream—it doesn’t exist—it’s pure fantasy—and of course that’s what money does: it evokes for us a full range of emotions, fantasies of wealth and nightmares of poverty.  There are so many attitudes that we bring to the table when we talk about money.  Think of the cliches we all know that are in our cultural DNA: money makes the world go round — does it?  Money can buy happiness or it can’t buy happiness — can’t buy me love — can it?   Money is dirty — money is the root of all evil — actually, the saying isn’t that money is the root of all evil, it’s that  the love of money is the root of all evil — money is taboo — money is dirty — the rich are greedy — poor people are pious — don’t make more money than your parents — you have to make more money than your parents — save, save, save.  Make and spend—work and spend.  All of these cliches which are in our minds and our voices in our minds—all affect our attitudes towards money.  So do our earliest memories.  

My earliest memory regarding money is when I was about nine years old and I was rummaging through my father’s desk on one of those days that he wasn’t around.  I opened the middle drawer and there in the desk was a  notebook with a hard cover.  I opened it up and on each page was a different month and each page was graphed out—food, clothing, entertainment.  It was the first budget I had ever seen and what struck me -- I’ll never forget  -- was that the numbers were entered: $1.31, $2.63, and then at the bottom on the right part of the page was +3.50 -6.20.  I realized that this book was a budget in which my father was tallying every single expense and, at the end of the month, whether he was plus or minus.  I got petrified.  +$3.50!  What was crazy was that before I looked in that book I never lacked anything.  I looked in that book and all of a sudden I felt the fear that so often is associated with money. Actually, the same thing has happened in the recent part of my life.  When I got married 20 years ago, I had $300 to my name and I had $20,000 in student loans and I didn’t lack anything.  Now I am 44 years old and I have a lot more than $300 in the bank, and I have no debt, and I always feel that I don’t have enough.  Money is a very strange thing.  Now my wife’s first memory of money is completely different.  She grew up with a little more money than my family.  She remembers somewhere at the age of  nine or ten that she got a whole bunch of new clothes and she was invited to a birthday party across the street.  She went to the birthday party—she got dressed in the new dress—and her mother said to her: “No, Dana, come back.  Don’t wear that dress today.”  You see, the people across the street had seven or eight children and they didn’t buy a lot of new clothes and my mother-in-law was embarrassed.  Think of those two different attitudes.  I grow up and by nine or ten am fearful of not having enough.  Dana by nine or ten actually feels the beginning of embarrassment and guilt about  having too much and, of course, it’s a completely subjective accounting. 

These are the kinds of emotions that run with money—envy, desire, fear.  They’re real—and they affect all parts of our lives.  Think about how many of our friendships are affected by money.  You go out with a friend, you go to a restaurant and it’s time to leave a tip—and there is always one person either who wants to give too much or too little and it doesn’t make a difference because either way your attitude towards the person shifts.  Or have you ever lent someone money and if they don’t pay you back, what do you say?  It shakes your whole attitude, even though you have no idea what the context is—it’s very possible they simply forgot.  I’m in the non-profit world.  I run an organization.  In the non-profit world you deal with a lot of people who have more money than you.  It’s a game of judgments all the time. Did that person give me enough?   That person was my friend and didn’t give me enough.  You begin to think that you can judge everybody — their entire values -- by their checkbook without actually knowing who they are. So money is a really strange thing and we need to have a better handle on it.  

Let’s first ask what money can buy and what money can’t buy.  The first thing I want to say in this regard is that Jewish wisdom suggests that money is a good thing.  There’s no virtue in being poor.  In fact -- and you have to understand this the right way — the word for money in Hebrew is damim and the word for blood is dam because if you don’t have money, you can’t feed your family, you can’t clothe your family, you can’t buy housing, you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t do great things—so money is very central to a life with dignity.  There is no virtue in being poor.  I’m always suspect of those religions including Judaism when they preach that money is not so great and then they collect money to build their big buildings.  By the way, I’m similarly suspect of the new age – you know those simplicity magazines that fervently encourage us toward simplicity, but cost $15.95 and are incredibly glossy.  The fact is a lot of money is made off the search for meaning.  It often seems as if  money becomes a source of all meaning.  

So really what can money buy?  Money can buy material goods and material goods after all are goods, but the question is what kind of goods are they?  Money can indeed buy love, but again the question is what kind of love can it buy?  Money can buy happiness, but what kind of happiness can money buy? Here’s how I learned about the relationship between money and dignity—the money that can buy material goods and dignity.  I grew up on Long Island which was a place known for conspicuous consumption and one of the things that we 12 and 13 year olds did, who were somewhat idealistic and probably a touch self-righteous, was make fun of the people who wore fur coats — this was before the animal rights stuff — this just had to do with consumption.  Well, we were once invited to dinner at this woman’s home and she actually came out to show my parents the new fur coat she got and she was very proud of it.  I was sitting there seething.  I wanted to light the fur coat up in my righteous indignation.  We sat down at the table and were having dinner and the conversation begins.  As a kid I’m kind of listening and kind of not and all of a sudden she begins to tell a story about where she came from.  She was a Holocaust survivor and she had been in Mauthausen.  She told her story.  When we asked her what was the worst thing about Mauthausen, she didn’t talk about beatings or the work or of not having enough food.  She talked about one thing—it was so unbelievably cold, and she said: “I promised myself that if I ever got out of there, I would never be cold again, not even for one day in my life.”  I swear to you I could never see the fur coat in the same way again—never again.  So material goods have a very important role in our dignity.  

The challenge is to understand that material goods by definition are temporary in duration. You know when you buy that new car, the worst thing is the first scratch.  That’s the thing about material goods. You have a houseful of stuff and it gets robbed.  It’s only stuff.  So as important as material goods are, what we have to remember is that they are temporary and that means that they can’t fulfill all of our satisfactions.  Actually, this is one of the central challenges right now.  Because we live in a moment in which there is an explosion of desires—there are more desires now that we have than probably any time in history.  Part of the cause is that the media provokes desire.  John Kenneth Galbraith, the important economist, says that actually what capitalism has now become -- and this is not a critique of capitalism, it is to understand it — what capitalism does at the moment is produce more and more products that have less and less connection to any natural needs that we have.  Again, I think it is a remarkable moment in history—a spiritually alive moment when you have as much choice as we have—but it creates a whole new level of responsibility and requires a whole new level of understanding.   

For us there is a specific aspect of this, and that is the challenge of asking these kinds of questions in the context of affluence.  Here’s the difference between affluence and poverty: the different kinds of questions you have to ask.  When you don’t have enough, the central question you ask is: How do I get what I need?  When you’re affluent it’s a very different question.  The question you have to ask is: How do I know what I really need?  Again, listen to the difference: How do I get what I need?  I have to feed my kids and I don’t have the money.  How do I know what I need?  I could get just about anything that I want. What’s the difference between a need and a want—between a need and a desire?  It’s interesting when the Israelites go out of Egypt they’re in the desert and one of the first lessons they learn is the lesson associated with manna. It’s a fascinating lesson. They’re told, “You’re going to finally have -- after 400 years of slavery -- exactly what you need. Manna is going to come down and you’re allowed to gather it—gather as much as you need, but if you gather any more than you need it’s going to spoil.” Now, of course, what happens?  The next morning the entire people gather more than they need and all the manna spoils.  This conflict, this tension between what we need and what we want is almost constitutional to the human being.  All of the stuff we have is our manna.  We need to constantly be asking: How much do we need?  What do we need?  What is a genuine need and what is a desire?  

The second question that’s very different when you have affluence relative to poverty is that when you don’t have enough to really take care of yourself, one of the most dangerous things is that you begin to associate not having enough with being less of a person.  Your dignity actually gets undermined by not having enough.  Another way of putting it—you confuse your net worth with your self-worth.  And it’s very common.  In fact, one of the things that many religions do and that Judaism does, because so much of it was formed in the context of poverty, was to create moments on a calendar in which you can feel like a king, like a rich person, even though you have nothing.  You may have had nothing all week, but on the Jewish Sabbath, traditionally, you put out a white tablecloth, you light lights when you may not have had lights during the week, you put out three meals when you were lucky probably to have one meal, you put out two loaves of bread instead of one loaf of bread or instead of a slice of bread, so that one day a week you can feel like a king or queen even though all week you were a peasant.  The challenge or problem when you have affluence is entirely different.  It’s not that you will confuse your self-worth and your net worth low—you’ll confuse them high.  You’ll actually think that you’re entitled to everything—you’ll actually think that you have good character because you have a large bank account.  This is completely normal. We want to believe that we have earned what we have, that we have been  rewarded.  That’s why when the Israelites get into the land of Israel and they have everything—the land of milk and honey—they have everything—one of the first things that is said to them is don’t think that by your own power and by your own hands you got all of this.  The notion that we’re completely self-sufficient is a very dangerous notion—and it’s only possible when you actually have a lot.   

The third challenge of affluence -- and this is the one in some ways that is dear to my heart and most complicated to me -- is when you don’t have money and it’s amazing how grateful you are for small pleasures.  The Talmud, the classic Jewish wisdom text, asks a question: What’s the minimum amount you have to eat in order to say grace?  And the answer is: If you eat an olive size piece of food, you have to say grace.  That’s like eating a quarter of one chip.  It’s one piece of popcorn.  I take a whole handful.  So when you’re affluent as we all are in our own ways, we have a new question.  It’s not: How do I feel grateful for a little?  It’s: How do I feel grateful for anything because of how much I can have and how quickly I can have pleasure.  It is easy to take everything we have for granted.  I learned this a few years ago.  I have two daughters.  My younger daughter loved Beanie babies—those little stuffed animals.  Well, feeling guilty about not spending enough time at home, I figured I could buy some love and I bought five or six Beanie babies and I brought them home.  Of course, for about a minute, Talia was incredibly excited, and then I saw that she wasn’t playing with them and she was uncomfortable.  I said, “What’s the matter?”  She said, “Abba, I can’t love that many.”  It’s out of the mouths of babes.  I can’t love that many.  And we all have that.  I get a new sound system or a new computer and I can’t even enjoy it because the next model is already out.  I get new clothing and I enjoy it for a minute.  That’s the issue of being able to feel our pleasure and if you can’t feel the pleasure, all you can do is continue to consume to feed the desire for pleasure and that’s a treadmill, that’s a rat race.  Material goods and all of our “stuff” actually do satisfy needs, but they don’t satisfy the need for transcendence, they don’t satisfy that infinite need we have for the stuff that can’t be measured -- stuff like love, like learning, like taking care of others.  And if you translate that infinite need into a material good, you’ll never be satisfied because you can never have enough of what you don’t really need.  You could never have enough of what you don’t need.  

So here are practices.  If you practice these things, then you will be more aware of some of these issues. They will be in your consciousness.  Practice means you have to do it, and if you don’t do it, it doesn’t work -- that’s why they’re practices.  But don’t confuse the practice for what is supposed to happen. You do these practices for one month and I promise you, your attitudes about money will begin to shift. Feel free to tailor make the practices.  The practices aren’t holy—it’s the awareness that’s holy. 

Here’s practice #1. I call it: “buy something or bring something in and take something out.”  Whenever you buy something, you have to remove something from your home. I live in New York City in a small apartment. This is a wonderful practice for a variety of reasons.  But if you live in a big house, it’s even  more important.  When you live in a big house, sometimes you look in the closet you don’t even know all the things you have.  I buy a CD, a CD goes out.  The kids buy a toy, a toy goes out.  It’s wonderful because, first of all, it gets you to understand the difference between need and desire.  “Okay, I really need this toy.”  “Oh, do you need this toy?”  “Well, I really want this toy.”  “Well, let’s get rid of another want.”  Moreover, because generally you give something away to someone who actually needs something, you tie your desire and your want to someone else’s need—that’s a very healthy expansion of desire.  

Practice #2: this is the gratefulness or pleasure practice.  When I was growing up, we used to get new clothes twice a year – in the fall before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and before Passover in the spring.  And as we put things on, there was a blessing we recited.  A blessing is just a fancy way of saying, “Wow, thank God I’m at this moment and I’ve lived to enjoy this.”  When you put the new clothes on, or when you eat something for the first time in a season, or when you use something for the first time and take a moment to feel the blessing, you actually can taste the pleasure more deeply.  And if you taste the pleasure more deeply, you have a kind of satisfaction that is filling so that you do not immediately need something else 15 minutes later. You can use any affirmation or any blessing you want, but before you get something new and use it—step back and enjoy and examine the pleasure that you really feel.  

Practice #3 also comes from the Jewish tradition. There is an amazing Jewish practice that is carried out before every holiday or is associated with every holiday -- and we have a lot of holidays.  It is a form of charity or philanthropy which means when you celebrate a holiday, you tend to take care of yourself: you have a big meal, you buy new stuff for yourself, you celebrate with your family and your friends and, precisely at that moment, we widen the experience to be inclusive of those people who need something.  Now imagine if we did that.  Imagine that instead of a sales day, in which we get something on a celebration day — Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday -- imagine instead that we actually give something to someone else as our way of celebration.  This again would begin to get at the awareness that there is a difference between need and desire.  It would begin to form new ways of associating money with who we are instead of money only being about our means to consume.  Money would actually be able to go out—to transform the world—so that in the end what affluence means is you have new and higher and wider responsibilities not only to be able to celebrate and enjoy the material world which we should as it is an absolutely spiritual thing to be able to take care of ourselves at the highest levels, but also to ratchet up our responsibility to transform the world.  

If you do these practices, and keep some of these ideas in mind, you’ll know the truth of a very ancient  statement by the rabbis: Who is the person who is really wealthy, the person who is happy with his/her lot, and the person who really is strong?  It’s the person who understands and can control his/her desires.  That’s “Simple Wisdom.”  Thank you very much. I’m Irwin Kula and I hope to see you again.