To me, the two things are inextricably related.
The absolute worst thing about Being A Real Adult Who Cares About Their Future is that I’m nowhere near as kind as I used to be. I used to be so spontaneously, recklessly kind and give my money, effort and time freely to someone who needed it. I wasn’t rich. I just only cared if I could pay my expenses for the month and wasn’t mature enough to think further ahead.
Now that I work full time and think about buying a house and being able to retire one day, I’ve lost that. I don’t have the extra energy for volunteer projects because work leaves me exhausted. Letting go of money for any reason feels painful because it could be getting me closer to being able to retire. If I do give money, it’s often because I feel miserable in the face of others’ suffering, and it doesn’t give me any satisfaction any more, even when I think of it bringing happiness, or at least relief to others. It’s just depressingly little in the face of so much.
And I’m so, so suspicious that any display of kindness will be exploited, like whether a charity will sell my data to others, or whether being seen helping a vulnerable person will lead to me being pestered by people for more and more favours. And I hate how defensive and cynical it has made me.
When you’re young, you feel like you’ll be able to go on like that forever, confident that if you run out of money, you can just go make some more, rinse and repeat forever. Now I live with the knowledge that one day my body or mind could just crap out on me and leave me unable to just go make more. It’s a reality that feels more and more real every day. It’s happened to plenty of friends and colleagues, and some were younger than me.
I’ll never be the naive and spontaneous person I used to be. But if I magically became a millionaire overnight, I could stick my million in a high interest CD to bring in a steady income and not have to worry about my own future ever again. And because I wouldn’t have to worry about myself, there would be more room in my head and more time in my schedule and more energy in my entire body for being kind and generous without the attached anxiety of ‘but what if I suddenly have to live off my savings.’
The flipside is, if I became a millionaire through more realistic methods, the process of getting there by scrimping and saving every cent for decades and probably making a few ethically questionable investments, would make me even more stingy, cynical and miserly than I am already. I don’t think I could even enjoy my own wealth if I’d conditioned myself to obsess over money to that extent, much less want to give it away to make others happy. Get your own million, bah humbug!
There are many people who are doing it tough right now, so I can’t really complain about my own situation. But just… fuck what capitalism and money stress and burnout and the cost of living have done to me. Because I think it’s happening to all of us, on some level. It’s just harder to act on the inherently good parts of our nature, express our actual humanity, when uncertainty has left us in pre-emptive survival mode, like some scared little animal tucking supplies away for a winter that may never end.
