Envy, Anxiety, Secrecy, Taboos: The Subject Must Be Money

ALINA TUGEND
New York Times, February 3, 2007

Many consumers are propping up their elaborate lifestyles with hidden debt. It’s something no one likes to talk about.

I’M as guilty as the next person. I’ve sat around with my pals wondering how a neighbor, a colleague, or, yes, a good friend, can possibly afford to put that huge addition on their house. Or take those many overseas vacations. Or pay for the private schools and the fancy summer camps and the second home.

Some people we just write off as trust fund babies or hedge fund zillionaires or lucky dogs who got into the stock market at the right time and cashed out.

But others are more perplexing. They look like us. They seem to come from roughly the same backgrounds as us. But they sure don’t act like us.

I don’t exactly envy them; I’m fairly satisfied with our lives. Oh, occasionally I wish we had that house on Martha’s Vineyard, or didn’t have to choose between remodeling the bathroom or taking a summer trip, but generally I know how fortunate we are.

But I do sometimes burn with curiosity about how they do it. And wish that talking about money was not so fraught in this society so I could just ask them to explain it.

For years, economists, academics and psychologists have written about how money is the last taboo. It has become a virtual cliché to say that people would rather talk about their sex lives or child abuse than their finances.

Elissa Schappell was a co-editor, with Jenny Offill, of an anthology called “Money Changes Everything” (Doubleday, 2007), a compilation by 22 writers, many fairly well known, discussing how money, whether it disappeared over generations or arrived in a sudden windfall, affected their lives. But the contributors had to write under their own names and some could not do it.

“We lost a good one,” Ms. Schappell said. “He had written about his drug addiction, about a nervous breakdown, but he would not write about money.”

That instinct, however, might be beginning to change. The inability to address issues of money — and the envy it causes — is creating more financial and psychological distress than we can imagine, psychologists and social scientists say. We overspend to keep up with neighbors and friends; take jobs we’re not happy at to keep up a lifestyle we think we should have; and compulsively watch television shows that flaunt multimillion-dollar homes and exotic vacations.

Although grappling with issues of money is certainly not solely an American experience, the paradoxical way we treat it is peculiarly our own and stems from our contradictory history, said Dalton Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University.

“One string is consumption, social status and competition,” Professor Conley said. “That’s a strong part of the social fabric in America. Another is the Puritan string in American capitalism: to save, to lead an inconspicuous life.”

The saving and the discreet lifestyle, however, Professor Conley noted, have been somewhat lost in recent times. Instead, no home seems to be big enough and increasingly fancy cars idle in front of us on the school run.

Sometimes it seems as if we must be doing something wrong because we can’t possibly afford what they can — even if we don’t want it.

The truth is, however, that we don’t know the truth, said Shira Boss, author of “Green With Envy: Why Keeping Up With the Joneses Is Keeping Us in Debt,” (Warner Books, 2006).

“The accessibility and availability of debt has created a fiction that wasn’t there 20 years ago,” Ms. Boss said. “We don’t have a grip on who can afford what. Your external lifestyle is a lot lower when you’re living within your means — you can see extravagance, but not financial security.”

Ms. Schappell said that editing her book made her realize that “all the ready credit gives of the illusion of living the American dream.”

In the introduction to their book, Ms. Schappell and Ms. Offill note that “economists report that middle-class families are now carrying record levels of credit card debt, going without health insurance and filing for bankruptcy at several times the rate of the early 1980s.”

“Turns out those McMansions and shiny S.U.V.’s have us mortgaged up to our eyeballs, but until the wolf is truly at the door, you won’t find many of us admitting it.”

Ms. Schappell said she now believed, however, that the old-fashioned ideal of working hard, saving and gradually making it is a bankrupt one. Instead, the way people envision growing rich, she said, is through a windfall: “a malpractice lawsuit, the lottery or going on a reality show — it’s the new American dream.”

But envying people is part of human nature, right? It is one of the seven deadly sins, one of the Ten Commandments. We’re always going to want what we don’t have. There are studies and surveys that show people never feel they have enough; for example, in 2005, PNC Advisors — now PNC Wealth Management — asked 792 of its rich private-banking clients what they would need to feel financially secure; virtually all said they needed to double their wealth.

Twenty-nine percent of those with more than $10 million to invest also said having more money generated more problems than it solved.

“For Americans, it’s all about the pursuit,” Ms. Boss said. “It’s a question of degree. Envy is so evil-sounding — there is a release in just saying it. I try to say right away, ‘I’m so envious.’ We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over it.”

Others say the problem is more one of society and less one of individuals. That the drumbeat to consume more all the time is so deafening that few can resist.

“I strongly disagree that it’s human nature,” said Allen D. Kanner, a psychologist and co-editor of “Psychology and Consumer Culture” (American Psychological Association, 2004). “Our nature is being molded pretty powerfully by the media. If we started a trend to extract marketing from our lives, it would go a long way to reducing money anxieties.” Mr. Kanner is also a co-founder of the nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (www.commercialfreechildhood.org).

Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., said the answer was to want less.

There is a small movement, he said, heir to many such groups in the past, called voluntary simplifiers who have chosen to make do with less. This doesn’t mean they live puritanical lives without modern conveniences, but rather they have consciously chosen to make less money and work fewer hours to spend more time with families and friends.

A study in 2005 of 200 “voluntary simplifiers” in 48 states compared with 200 similar people in the same geographical areas who lived regular lives found that the simplifiers were happier according to a variety of criteria, said Professor Kasser, author of “The High Price of Materialism” (MIT Press 2002). (Details about the movement can be found at www.simpleliving.net.)

Even though we do tend to compare ourselves with those who have more, not less, it does help to remember that there is truth in clichés: money does not buy happiness.

“I’d like to have a lot more money,” Ms. Schappell said. “I’d like to use a credit card and not cross my fingers. I don’t want to be a waitress again and I don’t want to deliver balloons again. But money doesn’t make you feel smarter or more attractive.

“You have to look at what money is standing in for in your life. Is it safety? Does it make you socially acceptable? Does it make you important?”

Attitudes about money may also change as the baby boom generation moves toward retirement, Professor Conley said.

“The biggest birth core of the 20th century is now at its peak earning years and about to retire,” he said. “As this group leave their earning years, will they set a leisure and consumption culture for the rest of us or will they move into a more frugal mode of life and the whole dynamic will change?”

Talking about our finances may also become slightly less loaded, Mr. Conley predicted, as there is less and less stability; most people no longer work for the same company for years, nor have standardized contracts or receive defined pension benefits.

“With the increased volatility, people feel more desperate,” he said. “They may not say, ‘How much do you make? How much did you pay for your house,’ but, in a more subtle way, I think people feel the need to find that out more than they did 15 years ago.”

I can see becoming more open about our finances with friends and family. It is not that we have a lot to hide, but occasionally I’ve wondered about certain issues like how our income stacks up next to my sisters’ families’. Maybe I’ll bring that up at the next family reunion. And I’ll suggest that they go first.
 

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