Dissatisfaction is a feature, not a bug (part 2)

Primary and secondary satisfactions, addiction

One of my favorite blogs is the Collaborative Fund, written by a man much smarter and wiser than me, Morgan Housel. It’s less about personal finance and more about investing but whenever I read it, I think I should just give up writing and refer you to him instead. For example, I wrote this long post about Buddhism and the discontents of capitalism in Dissatisfaction is a feature, not a bug. And then Housel simply writes::

Past a certain level of income, what you need depends only on your ego. - Morgan Housel

Much better and more succinct, right? Sigh.

Needs, Wants, and Bullshit

But that line got me thinking about budgeting. I tell people in FF1 that most budgeting frameworks are unnecessarily complex and burdensome. I tell people to divide their spending into 3 buckets:

1. Needs: This is your minimum amount you need to survive every month. Housing, transportation, healthcare, childcare. You should know this number and have a year’s reserve for unexpected life events. Pro tip: create a savings account that you automate sending this number monthly, and automate paying all these bills monthly, so you never have to think about it. The account should accumulate ahead for annual or bi-annual items, like car or house insurance, and fund them ahead of time.

2. Wants: This is how much you decide to spend on desires monthly. You can spend it on fifteen $10 meals or two $75 meals is the same thing. You can buy gifts for a child’s birthday or new camping gear. If you want to take a more expensive trip or buy a big ticket item (a kitchen remodel!), you have to save for it in this account. It doesn’t really matter how you spend it, but you have to choose. Pro-tip here: do this in cash or fund a debit card, so you can’t cheat.

3. Bullshit: Having to choose how you spend your Wants budget gets you to this naturally: there is some money you spend that doesn’t give you any joy. You’re just spending money unconsciously. Your job is to eliminate bullshit. FF students look at their subscriptions and cancel them. A surprising number realize that they don’t really like drinking. And then quit(!). This is where personal finance becomes mindfulness. Can I become more simple, more clear in who I am, and focus on what gives me actual pleasure?

Ideas on how to think through Needs, Wants, and Bullshit:

• Things that people Need aren’t advertised. Anything that is advertised is probably a Want, not a Need.

• Anything that a person living in the year 1800 doesn’t recognize is probably a Want, not a Need.

• Everything outside of your Needs budget is just your ego. (Morgan Housel)

• Your ego is never satisfied. Thus, your Wants can never be satisfied. That’s why you create a budget, aka a limit, for it.

• “The urgency of wants does not diminish appreciably as more of them are satisfied.” - John Kenneth Galbraith. The more Wants you have, the more you will have later.

Primary and secondary satisfactions

Speaking of anything that a person living in the year 1800 doesn’t recognize is probably a Want, not a Need: in my Franciscan spiritual director training, we’re reading “soul activist” Francis Weller’s book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

One of the things we talk about in the work that I do is that we need to restore what I call primary satisfaction. The things that we evolved with over hundreds of thousands of years that satisfy the soul at the most basic level; adequate levels of touch, you know, comfort in times of sorrow and loss, celebration and gratitude, gathering food together, eating together under the stars, telling stories around the camp fire, you know, laughing and playfulness together, sensuous erotic connection to the wider world. These are what made us human. But for the most part these things have disappeared. Now, we are left with secondary satisfactions— material goods, seeking power, rank, prestige, addictions— and these things never satisfy the soul.

The easiest way to think about this is that secondary satisfactions - the things we buy, the status and prestige and acclaim we seek, the drugs we consume - are substitutes for the primary satisfactions that we actually want. But capitalism tells us the substitutes are the real thing. The only way the wheels of capitalism continues to churn is if we believe it.

Capitalism tells us substitutes are the real thing. The only way the wheels of capitalism continue to churn is if we believe it.

The thing with substitutes: they can never really replace the real thing: a sense of being together and feeling seen and safe in the world with the ones we love. This chronic sense of dissatisfaction means that we constantly want more of what chronically dissatisfies us. Another word for that: addiction.

In the end, what we’re really talking about is the difference between ego and soul. In front of my house, I have the Gratitude Tree and the Grief Tree. There’s a sign that asks “What are you grateful for?” and another sign “What are you grieving?” On each tree, hundreds of people have written what they are grateful for and grieving. And here’s the secret: when we talk about what’s really important to us, it’s all primary satisfactions. The people in their lives. The people they’ve lost in their lives. The love they found. The childhood they never had. People never write about their cars, their positions at their companies, the vacation they took.

These are the things that really matter. These are the things that capitalism can never produce or replace.

Bonus: watch 1:08-2:00. Eeek!