Money Wants to Grow Up
Grow Up pt. 1
I used to teach high school, for a couple years. It jogged my memory quite a bit, especially in remembering just how frustrating it is to be a teenager. The energy of growth, change, and transformation is absolutely pouring through your body, mind, and heart, you’re full of force and yearning for a new life, a new world, meaning, purpose, experience. And in the middle of all this, the world mostly makes you sit in a seat for 8 hours a day and memorize disconnected facts about history and literature and math. You know it’s useless, they know it’s useless, and everyone just shrugs and goes “that’s the game.” In your off time, you’re mostly stuck in loops of whichever draining addictions have caught you — social media, video games, status games, porn, tv, movies, junk food… — while feeling a lot of pressure and dissatisfaction, a knowing that there’s something else life is supposed to be, and a feeling that you’re being corralled further and further away from it.
Many developmental psychologists have noted that the majority of people get stuck at the developmental stage they achieved in adolescence. We live in an adolescent society — it doesn’t really help anyone move into real adulthood, and often discourages or punishes those who try.
The thing is: this isn’t only true for the humans in our world. It’s true for any complex system/process that’s as complex as a human.
I notice I’m shying away from using animistic language here, which is silly — anyone who knows me knows I have a right brained, animistic, processes-are-people-too! streak a mile wide. I can assert the validity of that elsewhere, but for now I’ll just say it plain:
Money, sex, power, politics, technology, religion — everything that operates in and emerges within our society — can fruitfully be thought of as a teenager who is desperately frustrated with the way things are, but can’t quite see how to change it.
Today, I’m going to narrow the field to talk about money. Because he’s angry and bored and wants something to change.
Role Models
The teen boys I taught were absolutely starved for male role models. As far as I can tell, that wasn’t specific to the school I was teaching at. They cast around for basically anyone who’d give them a model of being a man that felt workable, and they mostly seemed to realize the models on offer were very bad. Either they’d have to sign up for an agreement where their first and most important job as a man was to feel bad about existing and being born a man — or they’d fall into some kind of counterpoint to that and start talking too much about Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate and end up getting their laptop confiscated for cyberbullying the girls in their class. There were of course some other options not on that spectrum, but nothing that seemed to connect or resonate in a way that provided a real answer to the urge.
It was tragic to see. There was such a pure impulse underneath that search: at core, each one of these boys was hungry to be A Good Man — and there was no clear path they could find towards that. No image they could hold up and see what that could look like. So that drive got hijacked and redirected into games that went nowhere, certainly not towards maturity or manhood.
When I listen to the voice of Money, watch how it moves through the world, listen to the people who hold and move it, the people who don’t — when I watch the ways it’s used, the values that emerge around it — I’m reminded over and over again of those confused high school boys. The sense of frustration is palpable. The sense of being stuck in games that don’t actually feel good or meaningful, but… what else is there?
Hall of Mirrors
Money has been, for a very long time, basically a solipsistic teenager. Developmentally, teenagers can’t really see beyond themselves, and they become their own core value. Money has been operating the same way. Just look at how we talk about money and resources:
Cash is king
Everyone has a price
It’s not personal, it’s business
Time is money
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
Everything in the world starts and ends with money. The ultimate arbiter of adolescent value is “what’s this like for me?”
Look at the global financial system — a vast system of instruments making money about money about money. A vast hall of mirrors that runs on our tacit agreement to treat the multiplied mirror images as real. (Who else tends to spend all their time obsessed with the mirror? hmm.)
Sorry for the crudity, but when I look at the global financial system, it looks like Money is locked in his room jerking off. Money is using human finance workers to touch himself over and over again, always chasing the next peak, the next climax of the stock chart.
This might feel like a bleak way to look at the world, but I only mention it to contrast something I’ve been seeing more of: when I talk and listen to people who hold money or who spend a lot of time in its flow — I’m increasingly noticing a sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are. In their voices, I hear Money’s voice ghosting through — it wants to grow up. It wants to find deeper values to live by. It wants to be better at contributing to the world it lives in. It wants role models in this — and is having trouble finding them.
Adulthood
We could point towards a number of attributes of an adult, in contrast to an adolescent — but one through-line of these contrasts is: an adolescent is primarily concerned with what things mean for them — an adult is primarily concerned with what things mean for the people and world they are embedded in.
An adolescent might think, feel, and act in ways that are aimed at being of benefit to the world and the people around them, but their center of gravity always comes back to some version of “what am I getting out of this?”
That’s why, in an adolescent society, getting the systemic incentives right is so crucial — and getting them wrong is so devastating. An adult can act against the existing incentives, if they feel that it’s good, right, and in integrity to do so. For an adolescent such a thing is almost unthinkable. Again, we can return to these proverbs like “it’s not personal, it’s business,” which is another way of saying “you can’t expect me to act against the financial incentives.”
This is reflected in a lot of the ways money currently attempts to find purpose, meaning, and growth (and seems to be chafing at their limitations). I wrote about some of this in In Praise of the Unsustainable. Many charitable efforts are navigating a situation where people want to be of service, want to step into adulthood (which is the only way Money can step into adulthood, is through the people and institutions who move him), but are limited by that adolescent ceiling: is this still good for me personally?
The incentives have to be well-aligned, or it doesn’t work — and everyone will nod sagely at one another and all agree, “of course of course, you can’t expect me to act against incentives, no one can be expected to give up more value than they’re getting back.” So all these tangled situations are set up to incentivize the maturation, but they end up sustaining the ceiling on maturity by sticking to the adolescent values instead of standing firmly for adult ones. A lot of this looks familiar, trying to increase the value of giving away money via:
Various tax situations
Bragging rights for what you’re supporting
Getting things named after you
Special access to efforts/organizations/people
Assurances that God/The Universe likes people who give more and treats them better in the long run
Clever marketing to make the case that the cause you’re supporting is ultimately good not just in general, but good for you specifically — or else why would you care?
etc
If I’m hearing the voice of Money correctly, as it moves through people, this whole situation is starting to feel more and more unsatisfying, to the extent where something is really begging to change, and soon.
I’ve heard the word “masturbatory” around this part of the money game more than once in conversations the past few months, from people who are close enough to those parts of the economy to feel it deeply. Money is trying to move through people in different ways, more adult ways. When it tries, it runs into blocks quite quickly — but it seems to really want to move through those blocks. These people seem to really want to move through those blocks.
This isn’t just with respect to charity and foundations and endowments and all that — those are just some of the easier areas to point at. This also involves how money moves within families and relationships; the ways that it might come with implicit or explicit strings; the ways it can create restrictions in relationships; the way the human aspects of business can get clouded when money is the final arbiter of value. On and on, everywhere that money touches wants to be transformed into adulthood.
You may nod along and say yes, sounds good — but I’ll give an example, and you can notice how it feels in your body: what would it be like for you to raise capital and start a business — and for that business to genuinely, primarily run by values? To the point where if you had to take a pay cut to sustain the business, you wouldn’t blink? To the point where if the business looked like it was either going to go under in a few months, or have to compromise its values to survive, it wouldn’t even be a question; you’d decide, obviously, to go under with values intact?
Does that feel calm and peaceful? Challenging and constricting? Obviously insane and immaturely idealistic? Something else?
What about living in a world where this choice felt obvious to everyone else as well, and where you could count on other areas of society to also run in a way where money is in service to values, and not the other way around? Can you imagine how the decision would feel in that world?
Money seems to want to imagine it. My sense is he’s looking for role models in this direction — a direction where purpose, meaning, and the well-being of the ecosystem as a whole can be more important than standing in an endless hall of mirrors, checking his own infinite reflection.
In the change to adulthood, there comes a point where you become increasingly viscerally dissatisfied with having yourself and your own advantage being the yardstick the world is measured by. It starts to feel cramped, inward-twisting, and a little nauseating.
It seems like Money is reaching just such a point — as are certain other key aspects of the world we inhabit. (I’m drafting articles with the working titles Power Wants to Grow Up and Sex Wants to Grow Up; we’ll see if I manage to finish those in a way where they want to be posted.)
There’s a way that the processes and systems of our society form us, shape us into the people we are. But there’s also a way that we form the processes and systems around us, shape them into the presences they are. And of course, both we and those processes shape the world that contains us — as it shapes us.
When the various pieces of this world become just that — pieces, disconnected and separate from one another — the world as a whole loses a lot of richness and possibility. Only when each of us as people, and each of the processes we inhabit, take a lived interest in the larger world, the larger ecosystem we all share, and the other members of that larger ecosystem, only then can that world actually come alive. Only then can it become a living thing, rather than a mechanism.
In order for that to happen, some growth has to happen. And it’s not enough for us to approach that growth as isolated individuals; we have to grow up enough that we’re willing to prioritize the growth of the people around us and the systems, processes, and presences that we share this world with.
For now, it feels like the first step is to deeply listen to the world around us, and see what/who wants to grow up — and to do what we can to help.
I’ve been on a bit of a money arc, you can find more of it in these articles:
If you and your money feel called, you can also send some of it to the Renga fund, to me and my work, to my teacher Rosa Lewis, or to a cause/person you deeply admire and wish to flourish.
The best piece of writing I have read on money in a great while
👍🏼 yes.