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Chapter One

THE MONEY TRAP:

THE OLD ROAD MAP FOR MONEY

MONEY: THE TENDER TRAP?

    "Your money or your life."

    If someone thrust a gun in your ribs and said that sentence, what would you do? Most of us would turn over our wallets. The threat works because we value our lives more than we value our money. Or do we?

    Chris Northrup was a woman trying to make it in a male-dominated profession--medicine. Like so many other minorities cutting through centuries of custom and prejudice, she felt compelled to outdo her peers on every level. She kept long hours, served on boards, spoke at conferences and even tried to play Supermom and raise two children without skipping a beat. Her job, which in many ways she loved, was consuming her life to the tune of eighty hours a week.

    During Gordon Mitchell's first seven years out of college he'd been a national organizer with a militant black organization. He had no income, but his needs were taken care of by the organization. His compatriots were his family and his mission was his life. There were flaws, however, in this "perfect" marriage of work and wages. Gordon became disillusioned with the disparity between what the organization preached and what the leaders practiced, and he left. He joined the nine-to-five world and became a "successful" financial planner in Michigan. And, like many other people whose lives are consumed by their jobs, his marriage ended in divorce and he acquired debts of $120,000. He found himself dreaming of the old days when he had lived simply and had had an exciting mission. Would he ever get back to that?

    Penny Yunuba worked seventy hours a week as a successful saleswoman, but that wasn't It. She reports, "After reading books like The Poverty of Affluence [by Paul Wachtel] I realized that my feeling that 'something was missing' wasn't something only I experienced. I began to talk with others and found they often felt similarly let down. Having gotten the prize of a comfortable home with all the trimmings, there was a sense of 'Is this all?' Do I have to work and work and then retire--worn out--to be put out to pasture? To do nothing then but to try to spend money I saved up and to waste my time till my life is over?"

    Carl Merner's love was music, but his life was working in data processing for Snohomish County, Washington--and he'd all but given up the hope that love and life could go together. Unsure of what it meant to be a man, he'd assumed all the trappings of adulthood and waited for the day when they'd catapult him into manhood. He'd graduated from college and gotten a wife, a skill, a job, a car, a house, a mortgage and a lawn to mow. Instead of feeling like a man, however, he felt increasingly trapped.

    Diane Grosch just plain hated her job as a computer programmer. She did the bare minimum she had to do in order to keep her job--but did it so well that she couldn't be fired. She accumulated all the symbols of success--a Mazda RX-7, a house in the country--but they barely balanced the boredom of her job. She went on to travel and participate in a variety of workshops, but none of these pleasures countered the doldrums of the work week. She finally decided that this must be as good as it gets--with her job biting the center out of her life.

    Even though many of us like our jobs, very few of us can say with honesty that our work lives are perfect. The perfect work life would offer enough challenge to be interesting. Enough ease to be enjoyable. Enough camaraderie to be nourishing. Enough solitude to be productive. Enough hours at work to get the job done. Enough leisure to feel refreshed. Enough service to feel needed. Enough silliness to have fun. And enough money to pay the bills . . . and then some. Most of us have let that fantasy go along with Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Even the best of jobs have trade-offs. Midlife comes and we discover we've been living our parents' agenda. Or worse, we've been filling teeth for twenty years because some seventeen-year-old (was that really me?) decided that being a dentist would be the best of all possible worlds. We've joined the "real world," the world of compromise. For all the hype about "going for the gold," we're so weary at the end of the day that going for the sofa is as good as it gets.

    Yet most of us still cling to the notion that there is a way to live life that makes more sense, that brings more fulfillment and has more meaning. The people you'll be hearing about in this book have found that there is another way. There is a way to live an authentic, productive, meaningful life--and have all the material comforts you want or need. There is a way to balance your inner and outer lives, to have your job self be on good terms with your family self and your deeper self. There is a way to go about the task of making a living so that you end up more alive. There is a way to approach life so that when asked, "Your money or your life?" you say, "I'll take both, thank you."

We Aren't Making a Living, We're Making a Dying

    For so many working people, however, from people who love their work to those who barely tolerate their jobs, there seems to be no real choice between their money and their lives. What they do for money dominates their waking hours, and life is what can be fit into the scant remaining time.

    Consider the average American worker. The alarm rings at 6:45 and our working man or woman is up and running. Shower. Dress in the professional uniform--suits or dresses for some, coveralls for others, whites for the medical professionals, jeans and flannel shirts for construction workers. Breakfast, if there's time. Grab commuter mug and briefcase (or lunch box) and hop in the car for the daily punishment called rush hour. on the job from nine to five. Deal with the boss. Deal with the coworker sent by the devil to rub you the wrong way. Deal with suppliers. Deal with clients/customers/patients. Act busy. Hide mistakes. Smile when handed impossible deadlines. Give a sigh of relief when the ax known as "restructuring" or "downsizing"--or just plain getting laid off--falls on other heads. Shoulder the added workload. Watch the clock. Argue with your conscience but agree with the boss. Smile again. Five o'clock. Back in the car and onto the freeway for the evening commute. Home. Act human with mates, kids or roommates. Eat. Watch TV. Bed. Eight hours of blessed oblivion.

    And they call this making a living? Think about it. How many people have you seen who are more alive at the end of the work day than they were at the beginning? Do we come home from our "making a living" activity with more life? Do we bound through the door, refreshed and energized, ready for a great evening with the family? Where's all the life we supposedly made at work? For many of us, isn't the truth of it closer to "making a dying"? Aren't we killing ourselves--our health, our relationships, our sense of joy and wonder--for our jobs? We are sacrificing our lives for money--but it's happening so slowly that we barely notice. Graying temples and thickening middles along with dubious signs of progress like a comer office, a private secretary or tenure are the only landmarks of the passage of time. Eventually we may have all the comforts and even luxuries we could ever want, but inertia itself keeps us locked into the nine-to-five pattern. After all, if we didn't work, what would we do with our time? The dreams we had of finding meaning and fulfillment through our jobs have faded into the reality of professional politics, burnout, boredom and intense competition.

    Even those of us who like our jobs and feel we're making a contribution can recognize that there is a larger arena we could enjoy, one that is beyond the world of nine-to-five: the fulfillment that would come from doing work we love with no limitations or restraints--and no fear of getting fired and joining the ranks of the unemployed. How many times do we think or say, "I would do it this way, if I could, but the board members/Zilch Foundation want it done their way"? How much have we had to compromise our dreams in order to keep our funding or our job?

We Think We Are Our Jobs

    Even if we were financially able to turn our back on jobs that limit our joy and insult our values, however, we are all too often psychologically unable to free ourselves. We have come to take our identity and our self-worth from our jobs.

    Our jobs have replaced family, neighborhood, civic affairs, church and even mates as our primary allegiance, our primary source of love and site of self-expression. Reflect on that for yourself. Think about how you feel when you respond to that getting-to-know-you question, "What do you do?" with "I am a ______." Do you feel pride? Do you feel shame? Do you want to say, "I'm only a ______," if you aren't meeting your own expectations for yourself? Do you feel superior? Inferior? Defensive? Do you tell the truth? Do you give an exotic title to a mundane occupation to increase your status?

    Have we come to measure our worth as human beings by the size of our paychecks? Would teachers have more status than doctors if they made more money? How is it that an M.B.A. became the ticket to success with the opposite sex in the 1980s, while in earlier decades M.B.A.'s were considered boring--at best? When swapping tales at high-school reunions, how do we secretly assess the success of our peers? Do we ask whether our classmates are fulfilled, living true to their values, or do we ask them where they work, what their positions are, where they live, what they drive and where they are sending their kids to college? These are the recognized symbols of success.

    Along with racism and sexism, our society has a form of caste system based on what you do for money. We call that jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings and even at home. Why else would we consider housewives second-class citizens?

The High Cost of Making a Dying

    Psychotherapist Douglas LaBier documents this "social dis-ease" in his book Modern Madness. The steady stream of "successful" professionals who showed up in his office with exhausted bodies and empty souls alerted him to the mental and physical health hazards of our regard for materialism. LaBier found that focusing on money/position/ success at the expense of personal fulfillment and meaning had led 60 percent of his sample of several hundred to suffer from depression, anxiety--and other job-related disorders, including the ubiquitous "stress."

    Even though the official work week has been pegged at forty hours for nearly half a century, many professionals believe they must work overtime and weekends to keep up. A Harris Poll of 1,255 adults conducted in November 1990 showed that 54 percent of Americans believe they have less free time than five years ago. Opinion Research Corporation showed dramatic drops in job satisfaction among all age groups, in every occupation, in every social class, in every part of the country, despite the simultaneous increase of commitment to career in the mid-twenties to mid-forties; age range. We are working more, but enjoying life less (and possibly enjoying less life as well). We have developed a national dis-ease based on how we earn money.

What Do We Have to Show for It?

    Even if we aren't any happier, you'd think that we'd at least have the traditional symbol of success: money in the bank. Not so. Our savings rate has actually gone down. The savings rate (savings as a percent of disposable income) was 4.5 percent in 1990 (and was as low as 4.1 percent in 1988), whereas in 1973 Americans saved an average of 8.6 percent. The Japanese, by the way, save over 15 percent of their disposable income.

    Not only are we saving less, but our level of debt has gone up--way up. Consumer debt exceeded $735 billion in 1990 (that's 42 percent more than in 1985 and 146 percent more than in 1980). That's $3,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Every eight seconds a baby is welcomed into our society with a big "Howdy, you owe us $3,000"--and that figure doesn't even count the newcomer's share of the national debt. You'd cry too.

    Debt is one of our main shackles. Our levels of debt and our lack of savings make the nine-to-five routine mandatory. Between our mortgages, car financing and credit card debts, we can't afford to quit. More and more Americans are ending up living in their cars or on the streets. And we're not talking just about poor people or the mentally ill. White-collar workers are the fastest-growing category of the jobless. Layoffs are happening at an increasing rate in all sectors, from the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest to the financial industry on Wall Street.

We Make a Dying at Work so We Can Live It Up on the Weekend

    Consider now the average American consumer, spending his or her hard-earned money. Saturday. Take your clothes to the cleaners, your shoes to get reheeled and your car to the service station to have the tires rotated and the funny noise checked out. Go to the grocery store to buy a week's worth of food for the family and grumble at the check-out that you remember when four sacks of groceries used to cost $50 instead of $150. (Sure, you could cut costs by clipping coupons and shopping sales, but who has time?) Go to the mall to buy the book everyone in your support group is reading. Emerge with two books, a suit (half-price on sale) with shoes to match, and a new "personal manager" loose-leaf notebook with a zipper and calculator--all paid for with a credit card. Home. Yard work. Oops ... a trip to the nursery for pruning shears. Come home with two flats of primroses and a lawn ornament ... and, oh yes, the pruning shears. Fiddle with the toaster that's burning every slice, even on the lightest setting. Fail to get it apart to find the problem, and fail to find the warranty. Go to the local hardware store to buy a new one. Come out with shelves and brackets for the den, color samples for painting the kitchen ... and, oh yes, the toaster. Dinner out with your mate, leaving the kids with a sitter. Sunday morning. Pancakes for the whole family. Oops ... no flour. To the grocery store for flour. Come home with frozen strawberries and blueberries for the pancakes, maple syrup, Sumatra coffee ... and, oh yes, the flour. Take the family for a drive in the country. Buy gas. Drive for two hours. Stop at a cute restaurant, paying for dinner with the credit card. Spend the evening reading magazines, allowing the ads to float you on fantasies of the really good life available if you'd only buy a Porsche or a European vacation or a new computer or ...

    The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills--but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff to ...

What About Happiness?

    If the daily grind were making us happy, the irritations and inconveniences would be a small price to pay. If we could believe that our jobs were actually making the world a better place, we would sacrifice sleep and social lives without feeling deprived. If the extra toys we buy with our toil were providing anything more than momentary pleasure and a chance to one-up others, we'd spend those hours on the job gladly. But it is becoming increasingly dear that, beyond a certain minimum of comfort, money is not buying us the happiness we seek.

    Participants in our seminars, whatever the size of their incomes, always said they needed "more" to be happy. We included this exercise in our seminars: We asked people to rate themselve on a happiness scale of I (miserable) to 5 (joyous), with 3 being "can't complain," and we correlated their figures with their incomes. In a sample of over 1,000 people, from both the United States and Canada, the average happiness score was consistently between 2.6 and 2.8 (not even a 3!), whether the person's income was under $1,000 a month or over $4,000 a month. (See Figure 1-1.)

    The results astounded us. They told us that not only are most people habitually unhappy, but they can be unhappy no matter how much money they make. Even people who are doing well financially are not necessarily fulfilled. On those same worksheets we asked our seminar participants, "How much money would it take to make you happy?" Can you guess the results? It was always "more than I have now" by 50 to 100 percent.

    These findings are confirmed by numerous other studies on happiness. In one classic study, Roy Kaplan of the Florida Institute of Technology tracked 1,000 lottery winners over a span of ten years. Very few felt any greater happiness--or had any idea of what to do with the money. A surprising number were less happy six months later, having left jobs that had been a source of self-esteem and gained money they felt they didn't deserve. Many turned to drugs and suffered feelings of isolation.

    So here we are, the most affluent society that has had the privilege to walk the face of the earth, and we're stuck with our noses to the grindstone, our lives in a perpetual loop between home and job and our hearts yearning for something that's just over the horizon.

PROSPERITY AND THE PLANET

    If this were just a private hell it would be tragedy enough. But it's not. our affluent life-styles are having an increasingly devastating effect on our planet.

    We are depleting the earth's resources, clogging its arteries (rivers and roads), and polluting the air, water and soil. Distinguished members of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, after three years of study and public hearings around the world, agreed: one of the primary engines driving global environmental problems is North American patterns of excess consumption. Couple this consumption with the understandable envy and yearning growing in the "have-nots" to acquire the same luxuries that we enjoy, and you have a scenario for disaster. And this disaster isn't in the future. It has already begun.

    We can all recite the tragic indicators of this looming disaster--from the greenhouse effect to the hole in the ozone layer. They are front-page news, making reluctant and frightened ecologists of us all. And these conditions are made worse by an advertising industry that creates demand for products we don't need that are using up raw materials we may soon run out of.

    As economic commentator Lester Thurow, speaking on National Public Radio, put it, it's as if we borrowed up to our eyeballs for the greatest New Year's Eve party ever. During the party everyone was happy. But come January 2, there was no more fun and only bills to pay. The 1980s have been our blow-off bash, and it looks like "January 2" will be the reality for the next generation. This is particularly serious because in the last decade the United States has gone from being the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation. U.S. businesses, houses, land and government bonds are increasingly owned by foreign investors. We've mortgaged the farm, and the rent collector may come knocking any decade now.

    Concurrently, the last decade has seen an increasing gulf between the rich and poor, both within the United States and around the world. Millions are homeless for want of affordable housing, while others have many thousands to spend on luxury homes. Historically such disequilibrium is the forerunner of dramatic and even violent change.

    Financially, socially, politically and spiritually we've rung up some serious debts in our post-World War II spending spree. One way or another, we will pay up--with interest.

Copyright © 1992 Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. All rights reserved.