Count your many blessings

Of money, happiness and life goals

Quentin Metsys, The Money Changer and His Wife

It probably says too much about me that I read the Financial Times (it’s a work subscription, I promise!), but there was an article this last Monday that made me stop and think. In “The absurdity of bankers’ retirement fund targets,” journalist Craig Coben talked about how some of the world’s most professionally successful people feel too insecure even to consider retirement before they’ve saved tens of millions of dollars. The comments section was perhaps more revealing than the article, as FT’s stable of well-heeled finance professionals variously praised and critiqued the ethos Coben was describing. I don’t usually write about money (and I certainly don’t intend to start commenting on the news), but the article triggered a visceral response. What does it say about our society that even the highest-income among us don’t feel like they have enough? Should we (can we?) collectively aspire to something better?

As strange as it might seem, the vagaries of bankers’ retirement plans speak to some of the core concerns of this blog. In the last few weeks we’ve increasingly spent time with general questions about how to be happy (for instance, here or here). For those of us who are Latter-day Saints, questions about happiness fundamentally are theological questions. No one who seriously believes “men are that they might have joy” can shy away from a frank discussion of the social and cultural technologies that enable (or discourage) human flourishing.¹

Money in the age of precarious affluence

Banking is well-known as something of a sweatshop: junior bankers spend long, stressful hours catering to the whims of capricious managers while managers do the same for equally demanding clients. It’s not uncommon for finance professionals to spend sixty to ninety hours a week at the office. While many genuinely enjoy their work, many others suffer from burnout, chronic stress and even substance abuse as they compete for eye-popping bonuses and wait impatiently for the opportunity to spend their time doing something else. All the while, lifestyle creep and the omnipresent threat of being let go combine to tether them ever more tightly to their (extremely high) salaries.

One of the more unsettling aspects of the Financial Times piece was how little security this kind of money actually buys. One would assume (as economic theory does) that a high salary might translate to a life of unbothered leisure, but much of the money high-income people make simply goes to covering their proportionally higher expenses. People working ninety hours a week naturally don’t have time to cook for themselves, clean their houses or tend their children: all of these services can be purchased, for a price. Maintaining friends of similar social standing often requires still further expense for club memberships and recreation. Like the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, a life whose primary activity is making money often involves running faster and faster to stay in the same place.

It may be hard to see how this sort of life would be particularly desirable, but I’ve left out a crucial ingredient: the fear of having it taken away. I heard a story once that a 19^th-Century French nobleman was asked why the third-class cars on the railroad were so poorly furnished. He replied that it was not so much to inconvenience the third-class passengers as to scare the first-class ones into buying more expensive tickets. The vast disparities we experience in the modern world have a broadly similar effect. Rich people live longer, have better health, and can afford to raise their families in healthier neighborhoods; poor people have to make do with whatever resources are left, and the disproportionate burdens they face compound to their children and grandchildren. While perhaps very few high-income people fear being poor per se, the dog-eat-dog nature of modern life adds a desperate tinge to economic competition at even fairly high social strata.

How I became Nibley-pilled, and why you should too

Hopefully this somewhat explains how we as a society produce bankers who need fifteen million dollars to retire, but my bigger question is how we can stop. What would we need to do to create a more communal, inclusive and expansive vision of the human project? Before I attempt to answer, I should be clear that I’m not arguing for an end to wealth so much as a less abusive relationship with it.

My sophomore summer I started my first really “corporate” internship, complete with a cubicle and a long commute. Although the work was interesting, I found the first few weeks unfamiliar and somewhat alienating. My mission had drilled into me the value of seeing people deeply, and it felt that there were very few opportunities to do that in my new professional setting. When I expressed these feelings to my high school seminary teacher, she told me I had to read Hugh Nibley’s book Approaching Zion. She kindly lent me her copy and a new, strange chapter of my life began.

Hugh Nibley’s known in LDS circles for his dexterous, sometimes-combative writings in defense of Mormon doctrine and practice, but Approaching Zion is a very different kind of book. Written for the most part during the 1980s, its concerns are less scholarly than cultural. Nibley argued that the acquisitiveness, hypocrisy and environmental degradation of his time were not just at odds with scriptural teachings but actively offensive to God. He deplored the mere existence of a BYU business school; for him commercial pursuits were an unnecessary distraction from more worthwhile human concerns. For Nibley, the whole point of a Christian life was to devote time, talents and interests to the love of neighbors and the forging of eternal relationships.

Coming as it did at the start of my first summer internship, Approaching Zion hit me like a brick. While it spoke to some of my philosophical concerns, I struggled to see how Nibley’s wholesale denunciation of American corporate culture could translate into a practical program. His insistence that there could be no accommodation between the total devotion required by most high-status jobs and that required by God only deepened my quandary. In the back of my mind was the nagging question: even if it were possible to adopt a less commercial and more communal mindset about life and career, how could I attain financial security? Wouldn’t I just starve? Nibley’s central theme was that there was no need to worry about this – if I really believed God was the source of my material and spiritual blessings then it would be as easy to build a Christ-centered career as to request the forgiveness of my sins.

Although I didn’t initially realize it, I’d stumbled on a crucial epistemological problem at the core of having faith. Our belief in and commitment to God aren’t always as global as we proclaim them to be. It is much easier to believe we’re going to heaven (some far-off, hazy condition we can’t fully understand) then to interact with the world in ways that reflect that belief. Jesus obliquely addressed this concern when he forgave the sins of the man stricken with palsy: when the Pharisees criticized his pretension to divine authority, he asked them whether it was easier to forgive sins or heal the man of his affliction. He then instructed the man: “Arise, take up thy bed, and walk.” For Jesus and his early disciples, spiritual realities were intimately connected to temporal concerns. In some ways the whole point of faith is to bring heaven to earth, embodying the goodness of God in miracles humbly requested and gratefully received.

Despite being lent it for free, Approaching Zion has become the most expensive book I’ve ever read. I did ask God how to build a more Christ-centered career, and I did receive (and continue to receive) astonishingly specific divine guidance about how to manage the resources he has given me. In the process I’ve discovered that consecration isn’t so much about starvation as it is about stewardship: can I get my desires and goals to align with the responsibilities God would like me to take on? My attempts to do so have broken down the barrier between spiritual and temporal, confirmed my faith in a God who governs both and opened my life to professional and personal opportunities I never could’ve dreamed of on my own. All the while, it’s diminished the profound sense of insecurity that so often accompanies questions of money and career. Every day I wake up with a roof over my head and food for my table, I can pray with genuine gratitude for the power that sustains me.

Money, relationships and the end of uncertainty

A month or so ago we defined idolatry as the act of rejecting a real, loving and cognitively intractable God in favor of a lesser, scrutable substitute one. While I was mostly arguing against worshiping a God without mercy, the same argument applies all the more to people who put their trust in the false promise of material security. Human nature is remarkably consistent: accumulation and happiness are fundamentally uncorrelated. Time spent chasing goods of second intent trades off against meaningful learning and growth. The worst of it is that no personal or professional accomplishment can buy us the certainty we crave. No matter how hard we try, we remain captive to the Preacher’s sour observation: “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong…but time and chance happen to them all.”²

So what can we do? How do we navigate a world in which no one can give us the certainty and security we fundamentally seek? For one thing, there’s immense power simply in acknowledging this fact. Accepting the fundamental uncertainty of life frees us from our tendency to pursue other people’s ends in return for elusive promises of unending material comfort.

Another benefit of accepting uncertainty is that it enables us to see things more clearly. The worship of money obscures the fact that every economic relationship is first and foremost a relationship. Money is simply a vote about how society should spend its time. The cash in my wallet represents no more or less than someone else’s concrete commitment to devote some of their time and know-how to fulfilling my desires. The fundamental logic of most human cooperation is that I give up a share of my time to do something someone else wants (in my case, writing a bunch of emails and playing with Microsoft Excel); in exchange I get a proportional claim I can spend on someone else’s time and resources – whether to grow my food, fix my plumbing or make TV shows for me to watch. I give these people the same meaningless paper products (or entries in a spreadsheet at their depository financial institution) that they can use to direct further social cooperation.

Finally, accepting uncertainty allows us to see God at work in the details of our lives. I am frequently astonished at how much practical leeway God gives us to set the terms of our relationship with him. He doesn’t force us to pray or to acknowledge his goodness. As the scripture says, he makes the sun to shine on both the evil and the good. He gives good gifts because he loves us unconditionally and hopes we might come to feel the same way about him. Acknowledging a mortal experience rife with unexpected challenges gives us room to appreciate the unexpected blessings. Life is about so much more than rational saving and consumption-smoothing: it is full of urgent and potentially singular opportunities to bless our friends and neighbors. Harnessing the delight that comes from a life structured around giving and receiving good gifts makes pain and grief easier to bear.

To conclude, money can buy neither happiness nor certainty. Seeking certainty or happiness in excessive accumulation impoverishes everyone, and failing to appropriately steward God’s bounty results not only in foregone spiritual benefits but also divine condemnation. Despite the enormous technological and social progress we’ve made over the last century, there are still too many impoverished and miserable people in the world. While the problem is far too big to admit of a simple solution, our willingness as Latter-day Saints to live up to our theology can certainly align our efforts in the right direction. We should use every ounce of ingenuity and creativity we have to harmonize the things we believe with the things we hope for; in the process we’ll recover the things we like most about ourselves and live the sorts of abundant lives Jesus died to make possible.

1. By “social technology,” I mean those habits or practices that are encoded in people’s lived experiences of doing or being. This broader definition harks back to its ancient Greek root, technē, which denotes practical know-how.

2. Ecclesiastes 9:11