The dose is the poison

2.6 million second homes, 500,000 people without homes. Do you see the problem?

One of my favorite stories is a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at a party thrown by a Long Island hedge fund billionaire. Vonnegut informs his pal, Heller, that their host makes more money in a single day than Heller ever earned from his book Catch-22.¹ Heller responds:

“Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

Question: do you want to be Heller, or the billionaire?

I read a heartwarming story this week in the NYTimes called “No More Spring Training.” The blurb says it all: “John Jaso walked away from Major League Baseball at 34, potentially leaving millions of dollars on the table. The sea was calling.” Jaso said:

Baseball set me up for life. I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me. Even when I retired, people said: ‘You might be walking away from millions of dollars!’ But I’d already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?”

In other words, Jaso knew what was enough.

Too much pie

I wrote a post last year titled, “Work is a pie-eating contest” with the idea that doing well at work is a pie-eating contest, and the prize is more pie. But consumerism and overconsumption is a pie-eating contest too. The prize is more pie. The logic of more means enough is never enough. It’s an exhausting need for more.

The problem is no one ever thinks they are consuming too much. Everything thinks they are living modestly. But culture is the thing you do without knowing you’re doing it and you live in a culture of pathological consumption. We lack awareness, consciousness, on how much we’re consuming (i.e. destroying). Some queries: Do you consume more than you did 10 years ago (think airplane flights, size of your house, things in your house, countless knick-knacks)? Ever been to a different country and seen what others own? How much do you own or consume compared to your ancestors?

There’s a toxicology principle called “The dose is the poison.” It means that any substance, including air or water, is toxic in a high enough concentration.

Could we say the same about money?

Dosage is the key. I have a lot of FF students who are money avoidant. Money is bad, people with money are greedy/evil/selfish. But the real problem is not-enoughness. For some people, like the billionaire in the Kurt Vonnegut story, they have too much, which is its own poison. Working and accumulating more than you need is toxic to you. It’s a spiritual dis-ease of trying too hard to control life and not participating in the grace that surrounds all of us.

On the other end of the spectrum, not-enoughness is a more concrete problem; when you don’t earn enough to meet your needs and invest money to your Future Self. That’s the theft of money avoidance: not thinking intentionally about earning enough to create a savings rate. It’s the theft of money worship: constantly spending to project an ego mask to please others.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith puts it this way:

To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another. To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed thence to the next tasks, would be fully as tragic.

Why do we spend so much time worrying about growing our economy? Are the problems that ail our country stem from not having enough furniture? Or is the problem that we think we need bigger houses so we think we "need"more furniture?² Many of my middle class friends have so much stuff that their garages are full. Others rent storage space for the stuff they can’t fit in their homes.

There are 2.64 million second homes in America for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use.³ All my middle class friends dream of getting one. Meanwhile, there are over 500,000 people are homeless. Do the math. There are five times more second homes than people who are homeless.⁴ Do you see the problem here? When Mother Teresa came to America, she said she had never seen so much spiritual poverty.

There is enough for everyone.

I’ve brought up my hero Lynne Twist’s Three Toxic Myths before. They are foundational to me and this newsletter. The myths are:

1. There's not enough (and I am not enough). We have a cultural belief there is not enough to go around and someone is going to be left out. Get yours first so you don't get left out. It is at the root of Otherness.

2. More is better. A mindset that comes from scarcity. It is endless.

3. That's the way it is. There’s nothing we can do to change it.

Do you see yourself in these toxic myths? I do. The truth will set you free, but before that, it will shame you. The radical surprising truth is there is enough for everyone, everywhere, to have a happy and productive life. That’s grace.

Again, there are five times more second homes than homeless.

Reforming this requires is a "you and me" understanding of the world. I’m reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk and it’s kicking my ass. One of the book’s major ideas is that for many traumatized people, the presenting problem (alcoholism, obesity, domestic violence) is often only a marker for the underlying issue, a deeper trauma concealed by our lack of self-awareness of what is happening in our bodies. We can’t see the closest things to us.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

All trauma is disconnection, to God, to others, and to yourself. The presenting problems I write about in this newsletter, workism and consumerism, are only markers for the underlying issue: the constant, enduring stress from us collectively not believing that we belong to God, to each other, and to ourselves. If we understood that we belonged to each other and ourselves, we wouldn’t have 2.6 million second homes⁵ and 500,000 homeless. We wouldn’t keep laboring in capitalism far beyond our needs. We wouldn’t keep consuming the world far beyond our needs. Those two go hand in hand. They are the presenting problems

The problem underneath is our reinforcing and buttressing our own small selves. Our addiction to getting more than we need or that we could possibly use makes others suffer. It’s graceless. No amount of public policy or homeless advocacy will meet the deprivation and lack of empathy in our hearts.

Bessel Van Der Kolk continues with the solutions to trauma:

“The neural connections in brain and body are vitally important for understanding human suffering, but it is important not to ignore the foundations of our humanity: relationships and interactions that shape our minds and brains when we are young and that give substance and meaning to our entire lives… Everything about us—our brains, our minds, and our bodies—is geared toward collaboration in social systems. This is our most powerful survival strategy, the key to our success as a species, and it is precisely this that breaks down in most forms of mental suffering.”

It’s relationships that wounds us. And it’s relationships, to God, to others, to ourselves, that heal us.

In FF1, I usually use this Simpsons video to explain capitalism:

But scope it out larger and it’s culture that’s the issue. Culture, the cause of, and solution to, all of life problems! If we believed that we have enough and in our inherent enoughness, and that more is not better, that in fact more may be worse,⁶ we'd all live safer, more fulfilling, and satisfied lives. But as Van Der Kolk says, our brains, our minds, and our bodies are geared toward each other. It's you and me that are the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. We can change "That's the way it is."

The prize of sufficiency is wonder

Again, you have to have enough. In FF1, we talk about that in concrete terms: 25x. 25x is enough money to finance your life without having to accumulate more. Having less than 25x means you have to keep running on the hamster wheel of capitalism and workism. Having more than 25x is adding more furniture to a house that doesn’t need it. 25x is, in concrete material terms, sufficiency.

Lynne Twist believes that sufficiency is a state of being that is completely available to the human family.

Gratitude is the fastest path to wealth… If you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, it frees up oceans of energy to make a difference with what you already have. When you make a difference with what you already have, it expands. In other words, what you appreciate, appreciates.

For those of you who don’t save/invest enough: you have to get to the point of enoughness. Not only for you, for your Future Self too. For those of you who have more than enough: stop eating so much pie. The dose is the poison. Eating not-enoughness is toxic. But to quote my pal Richard Rohr, you have to get it wrong first before you get it right. You have to figure out none of this stuff satisfies you before you let go of the fantasies that constant acquisition and display of titles, possessions and status is the vision of the Good Life. And when you do, you will experience true financial freedom. That’s when you experience grace. The freedom of flight. The wonder of wings.

To finish off, I’ll go all the way back to our baseball friend at the beginning of the essay, Jason Jaso, who left millions on the table to go sailing:

“When you’re sailing, you’re going back to something primitive,” he said. “You’re removing yourself from the material world — this concrete, electronic world. And you’re returning to this sense of wonder. It’s the same sense you get when you’re holding a newborn baby, looking into their eyes, and feeling the world disappear around you.”

The prize of enoughness is wonder. Not working or spending becomes life energy: time for an endless fascination and curiosity with the world.⁷ It’s the victory Joseph Heller had over the hedge fund billionaire. Knowing enoughness allows the world to open up for you. Actually, the world is already open, all we have to do is offer our attention to it. When it comes down to it, capitalism is a theft of our attention. We've gotten to a point in human history where we can make that available to everyone, everywhere, all at once, if we want.

Grace and enoughness, for everyone, is waiting for us. Is there anything more important?

Financial Freedom 1, et al

• I’m teaching another Financial Freedom 1 cohort in March-April. I know most readers of this newsletter have taken FF1,⁸ but if you haven’t, consider it!⁹ We have six students now and I like to get to at least ten.

• I write elsewhere too! This week I had a guest post published on Modern Elder Academy’s blog called, “Don’t Wait for Anything: The Four Types of Spiritual Pain.”

• Know anyone in Santa Fe? I’m located here for two months to see if I like it. Introduce me to your friends?

1. Story found in The Psychology of Money. Morgan Housel is my favorite personal finance writer.

2. The average square footage of a house in America has gone up from 950 square in 1950 to 2500 square feet in 2021. This while average family size has declined. How could we not see this as expansion of our egoic selves?

3. Airbnb exacerbates this problem, because second homes can suddenly be income-producing.

4. Economists say we have a housing shortage in America. What we have is an empathy shortage.

5. Even writing “second homes” feels oxymoronic to me, can you be in two places at once?

6. Thought: have you ever seen a photo of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and thought: “That’s a happy guy?”

7. If you’re incurious, financial freedom will simply bore you.

8. Please share FF1 with those you think need it!

9. As someone told me this week: education is costly, ignorance more so.