Your Relationship With Money Is Emotional. Knowing How Much You Spend Is Useless
We are unstable.
If a person leaves a store angry, saying that spending $200 on a pair of pants is absurd, and then walks into a restaurant and spends $100 on a plate, I would say that this person is not smart.
The same person might buy $300 worth of pants and then eat a $14.99 plate without dessert to save money.
Our financial instability also arises in the way we treat our resources.
The way we use different parameters to measure what is expensive and what is cheap, what is worth spending money on, and what is not is absurd.
Knowing the cost of living is a waste of time.
We are driven by impulse.
It is up to us to take it on, trim a corner or two, and learn to live with it.
The curious thing is that usually, the process is conscious. We identify the impulse, but we don’t have the power or the will to stop it. And we follow.
There is a killing, lying posture that distorts all these traits, that puts itself above all this, adding layers of confusion to the whole story.
That’s when you fill your mouth and say:
“I don’t care about money.”
Not relating is a relationship. Not trading is trading
It is a delusion to think that we have the option of not relating to something.
We can choose a distant, detached relationship, one that neither analyzes nor contests, but it is always a relationship.
Dating, marriage, friendship, fashion, and body, whether we ignore it or not, we are relating to them.
Our image says a lot about who we are.
If I walk down the street with a dirty breakfast shirt and unkempt hair, thinking that I am being subversive and going against the system, I am fooling myself.
I am not contradicting the previous statement. My image is still screaming. And it is screaming bad words.
Denying a relationship with one’s own image is already a way of relating to it.
The same happens with money.
Only in a much more intense way, since it is a relationship that is always very present, affecting all the others.
Our emotional immaturity hits hard when the subject is money.
But with me it is true, I really don’t care
I hear many people saying this but rarely do I perceive any sincerity.
In general, saying that we don’t care about money is a very elaborate mechanism of self-sabotage.
In a way, we mask our feeling of laziness or complete lack of control in the form of charming disdain. It’s as if behind the “I don’t care about money” there is an “I have no idea how to deal with the ramifications of this, so I prefer to say I don’t care”.
It is a total inability, not an option.
If I don’t have the emotional structure to control myself in front of a bombardment of offers, I will say that I don’t care about money and automatically exempt myself from the guilt of having given in and bought more than I could afford.
With this, the most I will hear is “oh, he doesn’t care about money”, much more comfortable than “he doesn’t have the maturity to manage his own resources, he is a child”.
If I live daily with a feeling of rejection and have no idea how to get rid of it, I say I don’t care about the money and pay the whole bill.
Afterward, I just swallow the lump in my throat and pretend that I don’t know that I actually paid the bill because I need to feel part of that movement, to include myself, like a teenager in a rebellious period.
The problem with this positioning is that it is not sustainable.
If we go through most of our lives and situations with the speech I don’t care, we lose the chance to create the things that matter most.
Every now and then the lack of emotional and financial preparedness takes its toll, and it is usually very expensive.
Stop worrying about the cost of living. Stop worrying about how much you spend. Worry about living well.
Start a location-independent income. Make more money.