Among the victories in our Better Capitalism work is finding, connecting, and collaborating with others working to improve America’s current form of capitalism. One such victory is a new friend, Douglas Tsoi, the attorney turned spiritual director and personal finance teacher, and the founder of School of Financial Freedom. Douglas has graciously granted us permission to publish selected excerpts of his Money and Meaning newsletter. We trust this excerpt resonates with you as it did us.
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. Heller responds: “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”
More recently, I read a NYTimes article titled, “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.
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? Yes!
© D-Keine from Getty Images Signature via Canva.com
Dosage is the key. I have a lot of FF [Financial Freedom] 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.
My hero Lynne Twist calls it the Three Toxic Myths. They are:
There's not enough (and I am not enough). We have a cultural belief that there is not enough to go around and so someone is going to be left out. Get yours first so you don't get left out. It is at the root of Otherness.
More is better. A mindset that comes from scarcity. It is endless.
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!
Lynne Twist argues 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.
Back to our baseball friend at the beginning of this 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 as much opens you up to a new life energy; time for an endless fascination and curiosity with the world. It’s the victory Joseph Heller had over his hedge fund billionaire host. Knowing enoughness opens the world to you. Actually, the world is already open, all we have to do is offer it our attention. When it comes down to it, capitalism without a sense of enoughness steals 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?
Tired of "profit is evil" vs "maximize my profit by exploiting others," as if those are the only two options?
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