Bittersweet Symphony

 
On the way home from work yesterday, The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” blasted out over my car speakers. I forgot I had added it to my playlist.

In case you’re not familiar, the song has a very melancholy feel. It’s quite catchy, but the lyrics and vocal delivery are both melancholy…wistful…basically, it’s like it was written and sung by somebody who’s weary with the drudgery of everyday life.

The first line begins, “Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, this life / Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die.”

Like I said, melancholy.

But relevant, given that this is a personal finance blog.

It’s a poignant way to open a song. Very poetic, but not in a sunshine-and-flowers-and-rainbows way. More akin to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

Just the day before, I talked to an old friend who’s suffering under the tremendous burden of student loan debt, car payments, and various other financial pits. Though I sometimes get angry about glib solutions like assuming it’s the government’s job to look after my retirement, I’m still sympathetic to the many, many people in that situation where they feel hopeless.

Throughout your whole childhood, you’re told that you have to go to college to ‘make something of yourself.’ You hear this from parents, grandparents, teachers, neighbors, random acquaintances…just about everyone. And they’re adults who seem to have it together; surely they know what they’re talking about.

But they never explained what the ‘something’ is.

If you’re like me, as you get older and learn more, you may end up discovering that the emperor has no clothes.

The well-meaning adults were dispensing advice that may have been true when they were growing up. Or even when they were fully-grown adults 30 or 40 years ago.

But today is not 30 or 40 years ago. Things aren’t the same. And that feel-good advice may not have been forward-looking enough.

What was true in 1970 may not be true fifty years later. But nobody warned you about that possibility. So you listened to the well-meaning adults.

I’ve found that people often tend to dispense advice without first ensuring that they understand what they’re talking about. If you spend enough time studying human decision-making, it’s sort of an occupational hazard.

And eventually, you start seeing the naked emperor everywhere.

As you’re working your $40,000/year job, you look back and wonder whether it was really worthwhile to take on $120,000 in debt to fund the education that got you this crummy job. But hey, you’re making something of yourself! Right?

Your family and friends and acquaintances all seem to have these expectations of you. And you adopt them yourself, without really thinking them through. I’ve certainly done it. And so have most people, I’d wager.

At certain times, life—and its many demands—can often seem an insurmountable peak. Nobody can possibly live up to all of society’s expectations, yet it seems that we’re expected to live up to them anyway:

• Go to college to get a Good Job^TM

• Find a Good Job^TM

  • This generally entails submitting about 10 gazillion applications, getting 3 callbacks, and getting your hopes up as you go to these interviews for which they might already have an internal candidate lined up. And you discover that your interview is just a formality so they can check off a box on an internal form.

• Advance in that Good Job^TM, by being not only a Good Worker^TM but also a Good Leader^TM and Strategic Thinker^TM

• Buy a nice vehicle to demonstrate your status

• Adequately insure that nice vehicle

• Buy a house

• Adequately insure that house

• Watch the same TV shows that everyone’s talking about

• Buy the stuff that’s advertised during commercials

• Have kids

• Be a Super-Parent^TM, one who encourages their children and exposes them to a variety of enriching activities, BUT without helicoptering or pushing them too hard

• Upgrade to a nicer house

• Continue to advance in that Good Job^TM. Yay, Company! Yay, Department! Go, Team, Go!

• Continue to be a supportive-but-not-smothering Super-Parent^TM

• Keep it all up until you’re 65, or these days, 67+

• Move to Florida

• Live it up in your golden years, maintaining existing family/social connections while forging new ones

Whew! Sounds exhausting! And expensive.

Society’s messaging is that this is how you’re supposed to live your life. It’s a good life^TM, filled with meaning and fulfillment. And this is so because everybody says it’s so. How could all of them be wrong? The problem must be with you.

I’ve never really liked accusations like “society’s messaging.” What does that even mean, anyway? Who’s responsible for “society” and its “messaging?” And how does that message get distributed so universally, anyway? The accusation is too…wishy-washy, too lacking in definitive substance.

If you don’t like something, you can just blame it on society, and therefore escape responsibility. And it’s not like “society” can argue back. Why are people hooked on drugs? It’s society’s fault, man…

But to some extent, this societal messaging is real, even if it’s difficult to pin down a source. I’ve identified a couple major culprits—by no means an exhaustive list, but a couple of the most obvious.

Advertisements, the evening news, music videos, and lifestyle websites/magazines—all of them try to commoditize your attention. They all try to grab your time and attention, and turn it into money for themselves.

Ads try to sell a product, and oftentimes they do that by trying to sell a lifestyle. You’re not just buying a Range Rover, you’re buying class. You’re buying a product that elevates your status above the ordinary hoi-polloi.

You know, that kind of thing.

Same deal with lifestyle magazines: they give you a high-maintenance lifestyle to dream about, so they can sell space on their glossy pages for those Range Rover ads.

Or the actual content itself being something like “Build Your Dream Living Room!” complete with the brand/name/cost of the artisan lamp, pastel-colored painting, oak table, leather recliner with matching footstool, etc.

You get the gist. Basically, a whole article that’s an ad. Or, as they call it in the biz, ‘content marketing.’

Hey, I do content marketing myself sometimes, like the article about the best value headphones or the 5 best money books. I think I can provide solid guidance to those who are looking for that kind of stuff. But you’ll also notice that I don’t recommend expensive options.

But when people sell those luxury fantasies—whether it’s a magazine, or a music video, or a ‘reality’ TV show like the Kardashians, where people spend money like water without ever actually doing anything productive, it spreads the idea that this is the way it’s supposed to be.

And this fantasy life affects some people more easily than others. But guess what? Those people who buy in—they have lives. They go work. They go to church. They volunteer at their kids’ schools. They go shopping.

And when they do, they strike up conversations with people.

Including you.

When you’re constantly bombarded with this message, it starts to become normal. You think everybody does it. They go, go, go at work so that they can consume, consume, consume to numb the pain of having to go, go, go at work.

Why stop to think about anything? Just keep going! Just keep getting more stuff.

After a while, you start to think everybody sends their kids to private schools. You start to think everybody drives new cars all the time. Everybody has a house that looks like it’s straight out of a magazine. Everybody else’s kids have so many wonderful opportunities.

And, inevitably, you wonder why you’re falling short.

And then we wonder why mental health issues are so pervasive, in a place and time where people are generally safer and healthier than they’ve ever been at any time in human history.

The majority of people may refuse to believe it, but a variety of measures show: compared to a time as recent as the 1990s, violent crime is down, gun-related deaths are down, the rate of rape is down.

Don’t believe everything you hear on the evening news.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these social systems. And honestly, it’s kinda depressing. Because, once you see these all these various structures for what they are—attempts to profit by manipulating everybody—it makes you lose faith in…well, in everything.

People tend to give up once they realize this. ‘Capitalism is evil,’ they say. Or ‘the rich and powerful are really in control of the country.’ Or ‘it doesn’t matter what I do, I’m condemned to work for the next 40 years.’ Or whatever.

How easy it is to fall prey to the programming! How seductive are the shackles!

It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life. Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money, then you die.

‘I can have a nice life, an easy life, a comfortable life. All I have to do is be just…like…everybody…else.’

But that image in your head of everyone else’s picture-perfect life is a lie. The grass isn’t greener on the other side. Those people projecting an enviable image of their life are almost certainly suffering in secret.

Because that lifestyle is seldom attainable. That picture-perfect family is drowning in debt, or getting by with large transfusions of cash from Grandma and Grandpa¹. Or somebody is doing drugs. Or selling drugs. Or both.

The people most likely to be actual millionaires drive pickup trucks or Buicks, not BMWs or Lexuses. They usually live in nice-but-not-too-fancy houses. They wear inexpensive clothes. They own small businesses. They're roofing contractors, or plumbers, or welders¹.

They don’t impress anybody with their appearance. And they’ll certainly never be featured on TV or in lifestyle magazines.

But they live life on their own terms. They’ve used their money to buy freedom instead of stuff. Because of that, they’re likely to be happier than that seemingly have-it-all family.

It seems to me that the Buddhists figured all of this out millennia ago. They teach, among other things, that attachment to material possessions brings suffering². The more I spend, the more I have to work in order to pay for the spending.

Work of some sort or other is unavoidable. But what I do with the earnings—now I do have some say in that! Not complete say, of course—I have to make sure my debts are paid, and I have to also budget for necessities.

I could just throw my hands up, resigning myself to decades of meaningless, soul-sucking work. If I do that, I’ll probably be apt to blow my money, as a balm to ease the sense of hopelessness.

After all, if I’m trapped in a job I don’t like, I can at least get some joy by treating myself to a shopping spree, right?

But if I look at it the other way around, I find that I don’t necessarily have to work for 40 years to support my spending.

Money hasn’t gone out of its way to ensnare me. Rather, I’m suffering because I’ve attached myself to it. Or because I’ve allowed other people to talk me into attaching myself to it.

The calculus is astoundingly simple. The more I spend, the more I need to earn. The more I need to earn, the more I need my job. And that brings stress. And that constant stress makes me irritable, which erodes my relationships, which sucks the joy out of life.

Attachment to material possessions brings suffering.

If I want the fancy car and house and magazine-worthy living room set—if I want the shopping trips to dull the pain—if I want to impress people with my stylish clothes—if I want to have the things everyone else has—then I’ve developed an attachment to material possessions.

And in order to pay for the material possessions, I need employment. High-paying employment. And those high-paying jobs tend to be stressful—and stress saps your happiness.

Attachment to material possessions brings suffering.

It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life. Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money, then you die.

You can take control. It’s not going to happen quickly, and sooner or later, you will face setbacks.

But don’t give up. In the end, it comes down to three options:

1. Earn more.

2. Spend less.

3. Earn more and spend less.

Once you pick one of these courses of action and commit to it, you can build an emergency fund.

You can make extra payments on your debt, which reduces the amount you owe. And that means there’s less money generating interest, which means smaller payments in the future.

As you pay down the debt and build your emergency fund, you will gradually begin to experience less stress. You will become less dependent on your job.

And, like the prairie dog who sticks its head out of a hole in the ground, you will see the light: you alone control your habits.

In the long run, your financial situation is in your control.

There are extreme circumstances where this isn’t true—if, for example, you’ve suffered a catastrophic medical situation and medical insurance refuses to pay any more money, putting you millions of dollars in the hole.

Except for such extreme circumstances, however, your future is in your hands. Stick with the program. Build your FU fund.

There IS plenty of bitterness in the symphony of life. You can’t control or avoid all of it.

But your own decisions can add more bad stuff. OR, you can instead put yourself in a position to better handle the bad stuff when it does, inevitably, come around!

You have the power to establish good financial habits. But nobody will do it for you. Will you step up?

Don’t just try to make ends meet, be a slave to money, then die.

Instead, take your finances into your own hands, so you can spend more time appreciating the sweeter parts of the symphony instead.

 

¹ See The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko. They spend most of the first half of the book marveling at their research-based conclusion that millionaires tend to appear rather ordinary.

Early in the first chapter—almost immediately after the introduction—they relate the story of a millionaire Texan who, at age 35, owned a business that rebuilt diesel engines. Upon visiting the headquarters, his British investors mistook him for a truck driver. They instead looked at every other person in the room before realizing that the actual owner was the unassuming guy with the buckskin shirt and well-worn jeans.

As the Texan millionaire put it: Big Hat, No Cattle. “I don’t play the part,” he told the authors. “I don’t own big hats, but I have a lot of cattle.”

² See the classic Buddhist text, the Bhagavad Gita.