Living in the Gift part 2

Creating the relationships filled with the greatest gratitude

By request, here’s a follow-up to my post last month about “living in the gift.” Here I go a little deeper why I decided not to create a paid subscriber level for this newsletter.

1. I don’t want to make money in the “spiritual marketplace”

I don’t want to sell spiritual ideas for money. “My” spiritual thoughts come mixing and matching from our common human spiritual and intellectual inheritance. As my favorite personal finance writer Morgan Housel points out, crediting a solitary genius for an idea doesn’t make sense:

• Thomas Edison took a lot of ideas from Michael Faraday.

• Bill Gates took ideas from a computer inventor named Henry Edwards Roberts.

• Warren Buffett learned from Ben Graham

Housel cites science writer Matt Ridley with the concept that most ideas happen when several different ideas “have sex.” Housel writes:

“Most new ideas and inventions are pretty bland on their own. But when you mix several of them together, you can get magic. Plastic is great. Electronics are neat. Metal is special. But mix them together in the right way and you get an iPhone, which is pure magic. It’s ideas combining, joining, and merging, that create the modern world.”

That’s how I see this newsletter. I don’t have original thoughts. If you look closely, I’m combining ideas from other people.¹ It’s personal finance and spirituality having sex, and hopefully making magic.

I get why other people have to, but because I don’t need to, I don’t want to make money off ideas I learned from others. Every idea anyone has an intellectual and spiritual lineage. The very idea of “intellectual property” is a symptom of our inability to see that we come from, and belong to, something much greater than ourselves.²

Even moreso, our spiritual heritage is a gift, held in common. I can’t sell to you what is already belongs to you.

How many times have you bought something that already belonged to you? That only happens in capitalism.

2. Selling things makes you do things you wouldn’t otherwise

There are a number of Substack writers that I enjoy and respect that have subscriptions, Bridging Towards Belonging, What Works, Rob Breszny’s Astrology Newsletter. The strategy is to write free posts, and write other, more valuable posts and hide those behind a paywall so that people who really like you have to pay to read them. And that’s how you make a living, from subscriptions. Example here:

But selling subscriptions creates two unpalatable options:

• Continue writing regular posts for everyone, which already take a lot of time, and then add a whole second tier of subscriber posts. This is a non-starter.

• Continue writing the same number of posts, but ration them into free posts and subscribers posts.

Now I follow and deeply respect Brian, Tara, and Rob. I want them to be successful and make a living off of their writing. But I’m almost positive they would not choose to limit their readership, if not for having to make a living.

All writers want to be read. It’s so fundamentally true that it’s almost stupid to say it. I have never known a writer who was writing because they wanted to make money. Here’s the secret: if we were all able to “live in the gift,” writers would want to pour forth their gifts freely to everyone, because reading is a gift that readers give to writers. Put more concretely, other than capitalism, why would anyone want fewer readers? The true reciprocal relationship, the one filled with the greatest gratitude on both sides, is writing and reading. Comparatively, a relationship between writing and paying is weak sauce. All capitalism is doing here is contriving scarcity at the cost of the greatest gratitude. And because of this fake scarcity, both writers and readers are getting less of the gift.

Because I have FF, I don’t have to make money. In the book that started it all, Your Money or Your Life, my friend Vicki Robin writes that being able to work without needing the pay as a huge set of freedoms:

• The freedom to do the kind of work you choose whether or not you have the credentials and whether or not you get paid for it.

• The freedom to speak the truth and never bend your principles for the sake of job security.

• The freedom to structure your time in a way that best works for you.

• The freedom to continue using the skills you already have and are comfortable with or to push yourself to learn new ones.

Not being paid for this newsletter means I don’t have to pay attention to engagement levels. I write what I think is the truth without varnishment or need to censor. I don’t have to consistently post. My dear friend Hannah Poston, who runs a Youtube channel about makeup and makes a living from it(!) has to come up with catchy titles (“Three reasons why you should _______”), make a certain number of posts a week, and pay attention to which post are the most popular (i.e. bring in the most revenue). Again, I want Hannah to be successful in the ways that The Algorithm demands. The biggest freedom is that, because people are not paying me, i.e. we are not in a market-economy relationship. That my writing is given freely is a great gift to myself, the gift of freedom. Whatever people want to send me back, whether it is money or a reply, is a gift, freely given as well.

But what applies to Substack writers applies to almost everyone working in capitalism writ large. Have you ever wanted to do work but couldn’t because you couldn’t be paid for it? Has something ever happened at your job that ethically troubled you, but you didn’t say anything? Have you ever compelled yourself to work when you didn’t feel emotionally or physically good or prioritized work over other, more important, commitments in your life? Ever felt stuck in a job where you weren’t learning?

Who could say honestly say no?

And it goes way beyond the scope of “work.” It’s your life that has had to accommodate the demands of the work/spend cycle. The true cost is the time you haven’t spent doing the thing you really wanted, whether it’s being out in nature laughing, taking care of loved ones, or simply having an embodied experience of your own life. Or more tragic, living always following someone else’s agenda without ever knowing what Father Richard Rohr describes as “the deep and loving yes inherent within yourself.”

Your money or your life indeed.

May Allah steal from you All that steals you from Him. — Rabia Basri

3. Writing and reading is belonging together

We’ve created a world where giving, generosity, and genuine caring do not come naturally. Our cultural conditioning is that we have to earn it, be “self-sufficient”and “self interested:”

The modern story says our default nature is selfishness all the way down to the genetic level. More for you is less for me; more for me is less for you, that’s baked into the cake of the separate individual in a world of other. Not only giving, but in the “Story of Separation” trust does not come naturally either. The world is our adversary, full of other competing separate individuals, human and otherwise, whom we must overcome to have a good life… From the perspective of the separate self, giving is profoundly irrational. It’s a loss with no guarantee of corresponding gain. Why would you do that? — Charles Eisenstein

But is what we were made for? Every year we keep getting more and more and yet we never feel satisfied. How could this not be addiction? You can never feel satisfied getting more and more of what you don’t really want. What we’re really facing is a deficit of belonging and no amount of money can make us feel like we belong to the greater web of life. In fact, most people unconsciously use money, achievement, and display to separate themselves, furthering the gap between themselves and the rest of life.

In traditional communities, there's a deep sense of belonging with your neighbor and to the world. We’ve lost that sense of identity that comes from connectedness to people, place, and nature. Instead we use our jobs, or consumptive choices to tell us who we are. We’re adding extra layers to our ego, when really, the only way to belonging is shedding them.

Once you know you inherently belong, you are free. — Richard Rohr

Participating in grace is acting as if we belong together. A deep recognition of kinship. I’ve spent the last few years asking myself what does it mean to live into it? Is spending money on my own personal growth/healing participating in grace? Is my holding onto my nest egg refusing grace? Or is it a form of kinship with my future self? Could I let it all go and trust?

We live in social poverty because we keep the gap between us and not-us as wide as possible. Me writing this newsletter, and you reading it is a form of kinship between us. Why would I charge people and limit that? Why would I want less kinship with my readers?

According to 16th-century Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the idea of "enlightenment" was not some individual personal goal to escape mortal limitations and gain knowledge, but a group process by humans to assist the Divine in bringing creation into alignment with the original plan—i.e., “on earth as it is in heaven.”

—Martha Jablonski Jones

4. Dana is a spiritual practice

Giving from the heart is spiritual practice. Receiving from the heart is spiritual practice. Dana, a reciprocal relationship, the one filled with the greatest gratitude on both sides. A willingness to trust that leads to surrender. A recognition of grace and leads to gratefulness. As the anti-Nazi German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

"In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude."

My friend and fellow spiritual director Kirsten Marsh told me last week:

“I picked my first tomatoes this week. I had to remind myself all I did was water it.”

What if we all realized that what we received was not in proportion to our effort? That what we received was not related to our goodness, or cleverness, or even effort, but a gift that we got, all of us, in different ways? Would we find our richness in gratitude? Would we stop clawing for our worthiness? Would we rejoice in our collective sufficiency?

If we lived in the Gift, we would embody the love that is our true nature, and express it.

Two weeks ago I took a sketch comedy writing course course, which was fun and interesting. One of the things we learned: Traits don't make characters, actions do. Obstacle plus action equals solution.

Traits don’t make characters, actions do. If money were not an issue, we would all act and care for each other differently. If we were all living in the gift, no one would charge for offering their gifts. This includes you. You would live so much more freely in all the ways Vicki Robin mentions above. You would stop hiding and know who you were really meant to be. When we truly practice dana, we discover that we're full of love, and when you realize that, you want to move from that place, and offer that to everyone we meet.

I know most people who read this won’t do anything different after. But I plead with you: working towards financial independence, or whatever other action is takes to live into the Indwelling Presence that is closer to you than you are to yourself, do it. Obstacle plus action equals solution.

Where can you practice dana this week? What action can you do to live into your own belonging? Thou Art That.

Once you conquer your selfish self, all your darkness will change to light. — Rumi

Postscript

Morgan Housel asked a few questions in a post recently and I couldn’t help but asking this about capitalism. And then on a deeper level, the “individual self:”

• What do I think is a universal truth but is actually just a norm unique to my own culture?

• What is partially true but I believe in it so absolutely, and take it so seriously, that I’ve turned it into a dangerous belief?

• Are there things going well in my life today that I will look back on and wish I had quit while I was ahead?

1. Which is why I try to cite as best I can. And once you think about it, they got their ideas from an intellectual lineage too.

2. The idea of spiritual “property” is a non-starter.