Money is just a “thing” – a man-made construct created simply to help us trade goods and services and help describe the value of other “things”.
But it’s not really just a thing, is it? It’s so much more. As we grow up, our family’s financial status gets linked to our identity and is used as a way for us to create ingroups (people like “us”) and outgroups (people not like “us”).
Financial status is a way we subconsciously judge intelligence, trustworthiness, beauty, success and meaningfulness.
Money is not only used to judge the value of things; we also use it to judge the value of people and ourselves.
This value judgement creates all sorts of social and psychological curiosities. The closer someone is to our financial status, the more we like them, the more we trust them, the more they understand us.
If we want to be liked and respected by someone else, we learn to project the same affluence and financial status as the person we are trying to associate with.
However, losing money can mean losing status, friends, respect, our place in society and even our identity.
Our brains are hardwired to avoid the pain of loss, so often we create a version of ourselves that matches our desired financial status, rather than our actual financial situation.
We buy cars we cannot afford, eat and stay in overpriced establishments, purchase clothes and jewellery that often put us into debt.
Above all, we never, ever talk about our actual finances with anyone. Even our tax accountants get a curated version of the truth.
We think if people knew the truth, we may lose things that are vital to our identity.
The more we are attached to our identity, the more we have to lose. This is, in the very literal sense of the word, insane.
Our very own financial psychosis that has become a social epidemic.
We are scared to talk about our finances with people we care about but this is exactly what we should be doing. All the time. This is tough love.
So how do we cure ourselves of our own financial psychosis? We need to talk about it. Not about our presentational financial selves but about our real financial selves.
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Credits: Phil Slade