How can I save when I fear there might not be a future?

The necessity of acting "as if"

I had someone in my class tell me this weekend how it’s difficult to think about personal finance when the future feels so uncertain and bleak. We’re teetering on the edge of a major world war, the stock market is tanking, and there’s a major, slow-moving climate crisis happening. They were asking, how can I save when I fear there might not be a future?

The question resonated with me because I’ve been hearing strains of this lately:

• I have a 25 year old soccer friend who spends everything he earns. He told me, literally, “My financial plan is to die quickly in the climate change riots of 2060.”

• The NYTimes had an article this weekend about how people under the age of 35 are throwing financial caution to the wind, spending more, and pursuing their passions.

• One of my students had never saved, she realized, because her mother died at age 50. She realized that emotionally, to think about life after 50 would mean facing the grief of losing her mother so young.

I heard a story about a famous older environmental activist couple, who at a conference, were asked by a younger woman whether she should have kids. She was suffering, thinking about bringing children into the world where future generations faced climate change, war, and environmental destruction. This famous couple said:

“You know we faced the same issue in the 1970s and we decided not to bring children into this world. Now, 50 years later, the world still has the same problems. The only difference is, we don’t have kids. And we wish we did.”

I always tell my students that personal finance is about your relationship to the future. And in this uncertain world, people, especially younger ones, are finding their relationship to the future hard. There’s a sense of anticipatory grief, dread, about how our world is going to look in twenty, or forty years.¹

I’m 49 years old now and I’ve experienced it too.

• If you lived the same years as me, you remember living in the Cold War. In the Cold War there was a term mutually assured destruction (MAD), which meant that the only way to protect your country from annihilation was to threaten annihilation to the Other. By 1985, when I was 13 years old, the USSR had about 40,000 nuclear weapons and the US around 22,000. To give you a sense of scale, scientists estimated it would take about 100 nuclear warheads to destroy life on earth.² Put another way, in the 1980s, a very small collection of humans had the ability to destroy humanity 600 times over. Growing up in California, whenever the ground shook I wondered if it was an earthquake or the beginning of the end of the world.

• I was 28 years old on September 11th, 2001. Those of us alive then remember the fear and confusion of the next months and years. I spent my late 20s and early 30s wondering if we were entering a “war on terror” or a “clash of civilizations with Islamic fundamentalism.”

• I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about climate change.

So yes, I’m familiar with dread. I know how easy it can be give in to despair.

Speaking of despair, last night I was reading a book by Anne Lamott with this story³:

“Thirty years ago I suggested to a famously atheistic San Francisco artist, who was dying of alcoholism, that as an experiment he act as if he had a higher power in his life. He loved this, and got six weeks of great happiness at the end of his days, having conversations with what he called his great HP—and later his great Hewlett-Packard. I saw him every other day: he was radiant. Friends visited frequently, and took him for drives in the country, on ferryboat rides, and to lunch at Enrico’s.

She continues:

Then he started to drink again, became mean and ugly and fiercely atheistic, and died after driving all of us away, true to his beliefs till the end.”

I think personal finance, like deciding to have children, is about hope. It’s accepting the despair and embracing it with field of love. It’s about humility. It’s understanding that the future is unknowable, even while our brains/egos are wired for pessimism. As Mark Twain said: “I have had a lot of troubles in life, and some of them even happened.”

Like the artist did with his higher power, we can choose to act as if the world might turn out OK. Given the statistical improbability of life on this planet, it’s incomprehensibly miraculous to be granted any time at all in this world⁴. Maybe the world is actually conspiring to work in our favor in a billion small unseen ways,⁵ and maybe we should help it out.

Personal finance is acting as if the world just might be around in 20, 40 years and you just might enjoy living in it.⁶ And here’s the thing: if you act as if, you just might be right.

1. There’s a strong argument (unpopular in liberal circles) that the world is getting better: https://www.gapminder.org/ and this video

2. Thanks to the many people who have worked their entire lives to decommission nuclear weapons, both politically and practically. However, Russia still has 6,000 nuclear missiles. The U.S. the same.

3. Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

4. HT Oliver Burkemann in the wonderful book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

5. Learn about pronoia, the opposite of paranoia, the feeling that the world around you conspires to do you good. In religious terms, grace.

6. That’s not to say you shouldn’t prepare for as many contingencies as possible. If you think capitalism is going to end, prepare for it. I’ve gotten nerdily interested in Mormon food storage. The idea is to save enough food for one year. Homesteading too!