Finances: The Choose-Your-Poison Horror

It’s weird that money embraces the extremes in your life – it’s what decides if you live in a Malibu home or a straight-up hovel. With that ability to leave you without means it’s no wonder why people try to avoid thinking about it.

It’s no wonder, that is, until you start to understand how badly you’re hurting yourself by not giving yourself choice with this.

And you do have choice.

Boiled down, your choices are just two:

            1. Save up now, feel the pain from saving up, and suck up the discomfort on your increasingly-stable platform

            2. YOLO-ing and living life on that shaky precipice of financial ruin, assuming you don’t up and fall over it

Choice is yours. Do you choose discomfort from temporary sacrifice? OR discomfort from a lifetime of risk and easy downfall? Put another way, would you pick the poison that gives you a stomachache and no death? Or the poison that makes you feel a little bad with a nonzero chance of killing you?

Set out like this, the choice seems pretty obvious, at least to me. Fears around money have a way of gripping you so hard that you can’t think straight about it; all you can think about is how tight that grip on you is, and how hard it is to breathe, and that maybe it’ll all be okay if you disassociate and make it loosen its grip that way.

For Some, it Really Is That Hard

There’s lots of people who face serious obstacles to financial well-being, let alone independence. Things like debilitating disability, generational poverty, discrimination, poor educational resources, abuse, criminal activity, and sudden tragedy can really knock someone off the path.

These points aren’t really discussed in-depth in the financial world, either, as that world likes to think it’s more meritocratic than it really is. When top news sites discuss obstacles to wealth, it’s about things like materialism, lacking discipline, or procrastination. Any acknowledgment of systemic obstacles are either buried or forgotten entirely in the narrative of superior individualism, where silly concepts like wealth inequality and Jim Crow don’t really hold the power you might think it does.

Where #2 Fails Everyone

HOWEVER. There are TOO MANY people out there who don’t get their financial shit together through no one’s fault but their own. There are soooooo many people who whine and bitch and moan about how they can never get ahead and have nothing but excuses (i.e. not legitimate reasons) for their failing.

What, because it takes time to accomplish a little bit you WON’T DO IT??? The time’s going to go by anyway, and you can either end up better off or not. What, because it’s hard it’s not worth doing? Because it makes you feel bad now it’s not worth feeling good later?! I’m clamping down on my violent rage at these defeatist opinions. Anything worth doing has some kind of sacrifice built into it. We’ve established that.

“Duh, Darcy,” comes the sneerer. “You’re repeating yourself there. Can you give examples?”

I sure as hell can. Giving birth to your incredible children required extreme bodily horrors to accomplish via pregnancy and labor, and that’s just the start of the sacrifices. All of your friendships required hours upon hours of time spent dedicated to building said relationships and maintaining them; you sacrificed those prime hours to them instead of generating income or doing something else productive. Your hobbies, your favorite stories, and your health all meant some kind of sacrifice to continue enjoying them.

You can’t choose to live on the precipice and expect sympathy if you fall off it. Don’t come to me crying about a mortgage you can’t afford or car payments or whatever the hell else sucks in your life through your own failure to plan ahead. You will not get a shred of sympathy from me.

Also, what’s with this mindset for failure? Why in the actual hell would you build up your entire identity around being a victim? I’d much rather have a person’s respect than their pity. I’d much rather someone genuinely enjoying my presence instead of tolerating it. Come on, you’re better than this.

If you continue to live your life without establishing good money principles, you’re actively choosing that second option. You’ve chosen your poison, and you’ve chosen wrong. You’re choosing to sacrifice your future riches, future well-being, and present peace of mind for, what? Sympathy? Something to feed your anxiety? Fear stepping back from that ledge is even worse?

If it’s the last one, take it from me – it’s never as bad as you think it will be. You should always choose the former; it’s the only way to a path of monetary peace. If this involves walking away from your neighbors on that precipice, so be it. You’ve found a better poison. You don’t need that other stuff anymore.