Mind-Manual

The “I Deserve It” Way to Poverty!

It’s absolutely infuriating to try to get someone to make the decision that’s better for them in the long run but they just won’t do it, especially when it comes to money. Don’t get me wrong, I screw up a lot. But if someone comes along and bonks me over the head and says, “this is the right way to do it” I listen. I was reading this Money Diary over at I Will Teach You To Be Rich and saw the dreaded phrase, “I deserve it”. I commented on it:

I don’t see this is as a financial problem, I see it as a lifestyle/spiritual problem. It sounded a bit like the person in the diary (who I suppose you’re not anymore) has no sense of purpose, no sense of joy of their own in their life so must fill it with shopping. The “I deserve it” bit just set off red flags in my head. Get some goals that you feel really strongly about, get a job that really provides you stimulation and find people who challenge and inspire you to surround you. The existential vacuum, yada yada yada.

Check out http://www.stevepavlina.com sometime if you’re curious what a lifestyle on purpose would be like.

I would like to add: get your priorities straight. How you spend your time and your money reflects your REAL priorities, not what you say they are. If you say that you value spending time with family, friends or loved ones (they can all be mutually exclusive) but you work 100 hours a week (about 75% of your waking time) then your REAL priority is work. If you spend half your paycheque on work-related expenses, then, hey, your REAL priority is work again. It’s not easy but I’ve been gradually pulling my life more into alignment with what I want my priorities to be. An insidious trap is to state something generally enough that you don’t shoot for the best way to fill that value. For example, say you value having fun. Well, you can say that surfing the web or watching tv is fun, but is it really the most fun you could have? What if you had a hobby that made you jump out of bed in the morning and get out there? Be more specific than “having fun” and set the bar high.

I remembered reading a good article on that phrase somewhere so I googled it and found these two articles:

http://teacherfinance.blogspot.com/2009/05/but-i-deserve-it.html

http://frugaldad.com/2008/04/14/language-of-the-perpetual-poor/ (espeically the “I work hard so I deserve it” part a bit further down)

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The News Media That Cried Wolf

Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? It went a bit like this:

The protagonist of the fable is a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by calling out “Wolf!”. Nearby villagers who came to his rescue found that the alarms were false and that they had wasted their time. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and the wolf ate the flock (and in some versions the boy). The moral is stated at the end of the fable as:

Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed. The liar will lie once, twice, and then perish when he tells the truth.

Like any good story, it has many meanings. One is that it describes the process of habituation that the villagers happen to (the same stimulus, repeated causes a smaller, more focused reaction). Another is not to lie. Yet another is about the necessity of trust and maintaining trust within and with the group to ensure your own well-being as well as others.

The news media, however, is constantly trying to outdo each other with newer and scarier problems. Remember Bird Flu? or SARS? Millions were supposed to die? How about the rise of the oil prices would cause the world to end? How about the massive food shortage? And lately it’s been Swine Flu.

Problem is, how long before we stop trusting the news media, to our detriment? This problem is made worse by the fact that some of these issues are indeed important, but we have no ability to gauge the importance of these issues because all of them are highlighted with screaming text graphics yelling (in effect) “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!”

It’s hard for most people to judge the importance of something. We’re hardwired to find our survival important, but what about long-term issues that are hard to understand but effect our lives and the lives of millions more? Well, those just get buried unless there’s a big sensational way to capture the interests of the fickle public. Remember the hubbub over the growing trade deficit in the US? No? Well, do you remember when the debt reached an arbitrary number that human beings just can’t comprehend? Oh yea. “Big number rolling round, let’s fire up the news machine!”

At this point I do not see a solution to this problem. However, I do believe that this isn’t going to end well. If the news media keeps attaching arbitrarily high levels of importance to every single problem that crops up, before long we’ll stop trusting their judgment of what’s important. We’ll be the villagers. And we will be warned, but we won’t listen. After that, well, someone will come and eat our livelihood.

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