Having and Being, or Economics in the 21st Century

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a tiny Snowy puppy hug to brighten your day (don’t tell anyone, but there’s a BONUS SNOWY PIC at the end.)

Sorry to have not been writing more. I’ve been busy with sessions (truly amazing, I’m humbled by all of you), helping institutions, and life got in the way a little bit. I’m (desperately!) catching up on the backlog of emails, so give me a couple of days, and if it’s really urgent, just drop me a line. 

Today we’re going to go a little deep. And talk about two different ways of existing in the world. That relate intimately to everything else we’ve been talking about. Money, finance, Donald Trump wiping out America’s life savings, everyone beginning to make exit plans. How to think about it all clearly,.

Over the last few months, I’ve introduced you to some big picture ideas. Not Sinking With the Ship. Being the Adult in the Room. Havens. This is along those lines. I think those ideas have helped many of you already make wiser choices (like not getting blown up in the stock market, or what have you :)

Ready? Let’s begin.

The Great American Wealth Wipeout

When I look at America, what do I see? It’s pretty clear by now that it’s a society in which things have gone badly wrong. Institutions are failing. It’s essentially a dictatorship at this point, if only a soft one. The world’s trust and confidence in it have been shattered, as it’s turned hostile, aggressive, and regressive.

And as a result, American financial markets are all plunging in tandem. Not a coincidence. The idea that a failed state could also somehow stay a rich one, attracting the world’s capital, from people to money—it was a terrible one, and Wall St’s going to make people pay that price for years to come, as their portfolios crash and burn.

But what really went wrong here? Beneath this surface of money?

You see, Americans are obsessed with money. Not you, perhaps, gentle reader. But by and large, and I don’t say that judgmentally—OK, maybe a little bit. But I understand why. The world isn’t because it doesn’t have to be.

America’s different. In America you have to be obsessed with money in a way that’s deeply weird in the rest of the world. You constantly have to check. Your portfolio, your stock market balance, your 401K, your IRA. Have to. Because these are the systems and institutions of American life.

And as a result, Americans are captives to money. I don’t mean that in the kind of contemptuous ideological way of the left. I mean it just in a pragmatic one. It isn’t until many of you tried to get your money out of America that you discovered just how hard it is. Not only will many of the systems literally not allow you do it, the guys running those systems won’t even press the button.

And that, funnily enough, doesn’t even depend on how much money you have. Some have a very great deal of it indeed, and even they’re held captive.

So Americans are obsessed with money as a kind of cultural value because in a very real sense they are prisoners of it.

In the simple sense above, but also in the deeper sense. Nobody much in Europe is checking their 401K, because nobody much has one. It’s an institution that doesn’t exist. Your pension’s taken care of by your union, or the state, or your region, or a combination of all of them plus more.

So you exist in a very different way of being.

Your relationship with money, but not just money, with acquisition, with dominance, with power, and with existence itself, is completely different, and I’m going to explain to you how and why.

In Europe, people sit at the cafes and have a very nice time. In Spain, the lights went out. And what happened next was a miracle of a kind, that the Spanish are very proud of. People sat in the squares and sang songs and played guitars. They directed traffic and took care of each other.

In America? My lovely wife joked that it’d be The Purge. Everyone laughed. But only because it wasn’t really a joke.

This is what having to be obsessed with money, being prisoner to it, does. It corrodes and supersedes all other values and systems and institutions in a society. It alienates us from one another, from community, from life itself. We don’t sit in the squares singing songs and laughing and making friends with one another. We’re jealous, afraid, anxious. We’re captives, prisoners, hostages. To money. To making it, true, but also to having it.

Two different ways of being.

And in your life, the question is: which will you choose.

Having and Being

Now let me make these two different ways of being much, much clearer.

I call them Having and Being.

Now, I am not saying that You Don’t Need Money! Ha-Ha! I’m not resurrecting Marx from his grave in Highgate. Not at all. Of course you do, and lots of money is a fine thing, perhaps, if you can handle it well, and that’s an art in itself. What I am saying, though, is that money isn’t something that anyone should be a prisoner of or captive to.

And in mature social democracies, people are liberated from it. Or they’re a lot more liberated, anyways, if not fully, to the point that they can enjoy their lives. More fully live them. That is why in Europe this cliche of people hugging and kissing and singing is true. It’s real because people there are far freer to live lives liberated from the mundane and grubby business of money, making it, keeping it, having it, by and large, they don’t have to worry about it too much, certainly not in the sense Americans do, who are prisoners of it and captives to it, and end up traumatized by it.

Does that make a little sense?

Now let me give you three axioms.

Having isn’t the point of being.

Being is the point of having.

Having without being deadens us into nonexistence.

What do I mean by that?

Americans, compared to Europeans, have a lot of money. To Europeans, an average American who feels relatively poor would be rich. If I told an average European that they were to have a million in the bank, they’d look at me and explode in joy. In America, that’s not enough. For what? To retire on, to take care of your aging parents, to educate your kids and have a home.

In Europe, all that stuff, by and large, is taken care of.

And so Europeans have a much higher level of being, with a much lower level of having.

I am not speaking here in abstract terms. In real ones. Their well-being is leaps and bounds higher than America. And America’s is falling, and will continue to fall, as Trump completes the transition to dictatorship.

Americans have very high levels of having—the highest in the world, actually—but they have incredibly low levels of being.

It’s not unusual for Americans to have big houses, with tons of stuff, and plenty of money in the bank. But, as we just discussed, it’s not enough. To have anywhere near a level of being that leads to happiness, fulfillment, purpose, strength, confidence, maturity, gratitude, just a sense of equanimity and peace.

Because in America, having does not translate into being.

In fact, this is the curious thing, and the lesson I want to teach you. In America, there is no level of having that will give you an adequate level of being.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that in Europe, for example, I can sit at my favorite cafe in Paris, and have a beautiful time. I watch the people go by. I have a delicious meal. The chairs face the streets. I am in conversation with the city, the world, history, life itself. I am thinking clearly. I am happy, fulfilled, at peace, restored.

I can’t have this experience anywhere in America.

No amount of money can buy it. Because it is not a individualistic good I am purchasing. Can I purchase the boulevard, the people, and the cafe, and somehow transport them? Even if I could, what about history, time, manners, values, and attitudes?

I can sit at a cafe in America, and sort of try to have the same experience, true. But it’s weird. And I can’t have the same experience. Just a kind of deadened one. It’s weird to stare. To look at the people and the street. Nobody will strike up a conversation with you, because that’s even weirder. The point of the cafe in America is coffee. Quick, to the point, to fuel a day at the office. It’s transactional, instrumental, and it’s alienated from that reason, from the deeper human experience and meaning in it all.

There are many, many examples like that. The singing and dancing in the squares in Spain. Walking around and taking in fashion, art, culture in many great cities. Doesn’t matter.

The point is this.

Money, and What It’s (Really) Worth

Money is only good in terms of what it can buy.

But there are certain things that can’t be bought in many societies at all, or even in the world. Mark Carney famously said: Canada’s one.

What are some of the things you can’t buy in America, no. matter how much money you have? I can’t buy the experience of sitting at the Parisian cafe. The Spanish square. The London neighborhood where I grew up, artistic and musical and literate. I can’t buy, say, an entire public healthcare system, sorry tech-dorks. 

I can’t really buy a decent old age, either. Someone who genuinely cares needs to take care of me.

I can’t really buy a good education, either, can I? Someone who really cares needs to teach me.

I can’t buy relationships or community. People must care for one another, as more than just transactions and instruments.

I can’t even buy a sense of stability and confidence and purpose, no matter how much the self-help industry tells you otherwise, and if you doubt that, ask yourself why super-rich tech dorks must pile up ever more and still aren’t satisfied.

There are lots of things that you can’t buy in a society, no matter how much money you have, it turns out.

Of course there are the cliches. I can’t buy love, friendship, meaning, purpose. But they aren’t cliches. It’s really true, you can’t. And yet that doesn’t stop Americans with too much money from trying, and of course, they don’t succeed. It is much, much easier to develop loving relationships in a functioning society.

What is the point? I want you to understand it well. Money is only good in terms of what it can buy. But there are many things that money can’t buy. America is by now an example of them. You can’t buy your kids safety from school shootings. And you can’t buy your way out of ending up a dictatorship, either.

That is why America has incredibly low levels of being, yet has very, very levels of having. Because it is “incomplete” in these ways economically. Because there are things you can’t buy, and those things are collective goods, they are social goods, and they are shared endeavors, meaning either we all have them, or none of us do.

Money alone can’t create them. It takes much, much more. Investment, concern, people, vision, just as a beginning.

And in that regard, how much money there is besides the point.

These are the things that liberate us from money. That’s the point of social democracy, by the way, to liberate people from capitalism’s worst excesses, at the very least.

And in this very real sense, the dollar is falling, and so are America’s other financial markets, for a very good reason. If you can’t buy this stuff with that stuff…what good is it in the end?

Economics in the 21st Century

Now. Why am I teaching you this?

I want you to take away three points.

—In America, having will fall from high levels, and being will from low levels to even lower levels. It won’t be pretty, and you should gird yourself for it, by protecting what you have, of course, but also focusing on higher levels of being, for yourself, your community, your networks.

—In Europe, levels of being will remain high, and levels of having will probably rise, because Europe is now investing in itself, and it will become the world’s new center of gravity for this reason.

—Being is the point of having. Even having all the stuff in a society is worth little if in that society you can’t attain high levels of being in the first place.

This is how I think of economics for the 21st century. I hope it helps. This is what stock portfolios and currencies and bonds and whatnot are really about. America’s markets will fall because in the end you can’t be much in America, anymore. But where you can be in the world, what’s worthwhile, whether it’s being peacefully, democratically, sanely, or happily—that is what will rise, and that is where investments should be oriented now.

If you need help, as always, just reach out. If it’s urgent, just email me, and I always try to make time as soon as possibly I can.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy!!)

*** BONUS SNOWY PIC ***