I just had a conversation about the difference between conceptualizing your own life as something like a balance sheet, versus something like a profit & loss statement, and I’m finding this a surprisingly fruitful analogy.
Balance sheet: You are tracking assets and liabilities – a snapshot overview of your position in the world. Assets might be literal money and stuff, intangibles like skills, youth, attractiveness, family ties, or even more nebulous, like memories of good experiences. If you’re looking at your life from a balance sheet perspective, you are a collector, trying to gather and hold onto as much of the good as possible. Surveying your life and noting that you’re holding a good-sized pool of equity (of all types) will feel safe and successful. Giving up possessions, forgetting childhood memories, or drifting away from friends and family, might feel like losing a part of yourself. I associate this model with a diachronic sense of self.
(There is probably some possible analogy here re depreciation on assets, that I’m too tired to unpack right now).
Profit & loss: You are tracking revenue and expenditures – the rate of change over time, and whether your trajectory is positive on net. Recent good experiences, learning and personal growth and skills gained, and literal money-earning potential feel like success and safety, as does having more than enough energy and motivation to fuel your ongoing day-to-day life; putting in unsustainable amounts of effort, spending yourself to stay afloat, feels like the worst kind of failure. Your absolute position, and where you were five years ago, both matter less. Noticing that you’ve left something behind (friends, family, an old sense of self) in your race for forward momentum, probably doesn’t hurt as much. I associate this viewpoint with being more episodic.
I tend toward the profit & loss (which makes sense, I’m more episodic than many people I know), and I think I’ve moved even further in that direction in recent years, an adaptation to the life I’ve chosen – it doesn’t feel like I have the luxury to sit around accumulating assets and stability and a comfortable position to survey my life. The categories of revenue I’m currently pulling in are totally different from what I was tracking five years ago, when I was a nurse in Canada, and that seems fine. I’m not the same person as I was then.
I think this does make me more vulnerable towards vicious spirals in bad times, and over-updating on how things have gone recently.
I was unfamiliar with the terms “diachronic” and “episodic” sense of self, so I looked them up and found this [link].
The post mentions diachronics often “pitying” episodics, but I find my main emotion is not *pity* but *defensiveness*. The web of associations I’m getting is mostly people (they usually call themselves Buddhists; I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know how central an example they are) who think that [lacking a sense of a cohesive, continuous self] is both the objectively more true and subjectively superior way to live, and that the highest goal in life is to obtain it. IME, the one being pitied is usually *me*. I wonder what kind of circles 2012!RONBC travelled in.
Interestingly, given your examples, for much of my life “how much money do I currently have saved up” has been a *much* larger factor in the strength of my financial position than “how much income am I likely to make in the near future”. I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the years living primarily off of savings, and these days I do sometimes tend to view income, not as directly going to expenses, but as a way of acquiring savings that one then *actually* uses.
And come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time that someone has connected that with me having a stronger continuity of self [link], though not in quite the same sense that you’re talking about.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting stuff.
Fascinating! I haven’t experienced much pity or judgment from either direction on the episodic-vs-diachronic spectrum, and I don’t think I’ve interacted with the Buddhist type much. I’m also not all that extreme on the episodic end, and both styles make a lot of sense to me.
Reading your post, I’m reminded that 10 years ago, I was a *lot* further on the “income is a way to acquire savings that you then live off” end of the spectrum. At some point in the last 5 years or so, I passed a threshold from most of my resources being in literal savings, to most of my resources being in my ability to keep obtaining resources in future. (I guess, in this handwavy model, a nursing degree is sort of an intangible asset? On some level I would be *delighted* if I had to fall back on this; I miss nursing.) I think most of my personal resources are in the form of “reputation in my community as a skilled ops person”. That’s also a sort of intangible asset, if you squint at it sideways… (I am starting to stretch the accounting metaphors pretty far here).
In any case, at one point I considered it mandatory to have 1-2 years of runway in savings (back in Canada, when a year’s living costs were like $30K). Then, later on, I spent down those savings in order to get married, move to Australia, later move to the Bay Area, and generally have my life go in completely unexpected directions. I spent a while being *terrified* by the instability and chaos of it, and I’ve become ok with it by reminding myself that my security and ability to survive the future rests, not on my current pile of resources, but on my accumulated skills, social capital, and resilience/ability to land on my feet.
Some of my current sense of security comes from other fall-back assets, like having family who will let me live rent-free in their spare room for three months on a week’s notice. Knowing I have that luxury gives me a lot more willingness to take risks and optimize less for security. But I’m definitely not optimizing for financial security right now – it would be madness to live in the Bay Area on a nonprofit salary if I was. And there are unlikely-but-not-that-unlikely scenarios, like getting seriously ill and being unable to work for a while, that I’m not really protecting against.
Hmm. I can imagine someone looking at this exact situation more from a balance sheet perspective, and focusing on the overall status of “intangible assets” like job skills and social networks, rather than mostly looking at their impact on the profit & loss statement and the delta over recent time periods to judge how well things are going. This spectrum reminds me a bit of Spencer Greenberg’s post on Stability vs Acceleration as different life strategies: https://www.facebook.com/spencer.greenberg/posts/10104091893110202
Tags:
#(December 2018) #conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw? #(I just now read that Stability vs Acceleration post and yes it does remind me a lot of diachronic vs episodic) #(in that I am so accustomed to being pressured towards an acceleration I don’t want that #merely *mentioning* the existence of a continuum immediately makes me feel defensive) #(since I know what people who bring it up tend to say next) #((in a PM a while back I described myself as #”tending to measure my life’s progress in terms of the number of potential disasters I’ve mitigated #and the extent to which I’ve mitigated them”)) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
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