This excerpt is from the Substack newsletter Money and Meaning, a post called "The Tragedy of Always Getting More." (June 21, 2023). We gratefully use it with permission of the author, Douglas Tsoi, founder of the School for Financial Freedom.
Did you know we Americans have twice as much stuff as we did in 1998, twenty-five years ago? And in 1998, we had twice as much stuff as we did in 1972? It’s true. We have four times as much as we did 50 years ago, when I was born. After a certain amount, getting more doesn’t really help you get what you really want. It’s like food. You need it. In fact, you need it everyday for the rest of your life. But after you get enough, more is not going to do you any good. In fact, too much and you might be doing yourself harm. The dose is the poison.
Our continual focus on getting and spending more money means we lose time, freedom, and health. Put another way, if our economy doubled in the last 25 years, we could now be working half as much instead of having twice as much. We could have had more hours in our day, more freedom from work, and healthier lifestyles. It was a game of Would You Rather, and we chose money. It’s tragic.
In the next 25 years, we will be faced with the same decision. Any bets on what we’ll choose now?
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The oldest and most grievous misfortune
The great economist John Kenneth Galbraith believed in the 1930s that industrialization had already met all humanity’s needs and in the future, his grandchildren would only work 15 hours a week (mostly to stay engaged with life). He wrote eloquently about the problem of “more is better”:
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.
What would Galbraith think now, with our online shopping, our 2,500 square foot homes, garages, and storage units, and our ubiquitous marketing and advertising? We continue to crowd our lives with more things and activities far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined in 1930. And to please whom? At the cost of what?
We’ve chosen our individual material wealth at the cost of something much greater. When asked about the future of American culture in 1982, Christopher Reeve feared a world of “rich people with no soul, comfortable, and efficient but with no real life.”
I believe what we truly seek in life is not comfort, but a profound and whole-hearted participation in life. That requires an uncomfortable entanglement with the truth about yourself and the world. And then after that, opening yourself to love. James Baldwin said:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
The universal quest is to enter the dark cave you fear to enter, face the inner dragon shadow, and retrieve the treasure of wholeness. That’s what Galbraith warned us would be tragic: once we had fulfilled our material needs, we would avoid the cave, we would choose to coast through life in the passenger seat, absent real intentionality or awareness of the growth that awaited us.
Do you see that in our society? In yourself?
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These are deep questions, but ones that must be asked if we are ever to attain self-actualization, or the best version of ourselves. According to Abraham Maslow, we are able to concentrate on that lofty goal once our other needs are met, in this order:
Physiological
Safety
Love and belongingness
Esteem
Self-actualization
Money can usually purchase the things that answer our physiological as well as some of our safety needs. When we make it our primary goal to buy more things after those needs are met, however, our energy is diverted from focusing on the higher levels of need. If done to an extreme, those need areas are not just neglected but can, in fact, be damaged.
This situation can occur both in one's personal and professional life. If, for instance, you habitually put in extra, unnecessary hours at work, you may end up harming your personal relationships. If you reap unneeded profits by exploiting your employees, your business relationships suffer.
There are so many verses, particularly in the Old Testament, about taking enough but not too much, such as Leviticus 19:9-10 and 23:22, as well as the blessings of sharing abundance with those less fortunate. If we are focused continually on just acquiring more for ourselves, we can both miss the need around us and have less to give when we actually do notice.
The foundation of economic mutuality is understanding what is truly important and as a result, knowing when to say when. In our next blog, we explore what brings true satisfaction to the human experience. We'll see you there!
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