{{previous post in sequence}}

---

deductioneers:

 

thejochiang:

Goals: amass fuckyou money

Forever reblog the mother goddess

 

brin-bellway:

(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)

Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.

There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.

When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.

A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.

16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some ““extra””, and eventually that ““extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?

Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.

—

(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)

#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment   #which is coming up soon   #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it   #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental)   #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions)   #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of)   #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical   #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself])   #((that safety thing manifests here especially))   #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something))   #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages))   #((this I am much less sure I endorse))   #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too))   #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising)))   #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses)))   #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))

 

maryellencarter:

This is really interesting and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m still not sure I actually have the brain to word everything I’m thinking/feeling about it, but here’s one bit, at least:

“the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.”

I think… there are two things I’m thinking here. One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves. This is almost certainly trauma-based – having enough money to eat has been a recurring theme in my life from the time I was very young, always coupled with inability to actually earn any money myself to buy any food. I’ve almost always been, and was *meant* to always be, dependent on somebody else to provide for me, and that has done Things to my wiring, which I don’t think I’m articulate enough to parse out right now.

(I think, at least partly… I’m not sure this even comes out in words, but I think there’s a thing I need to think at when I have words, which is that I – I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live. Like there’s a… you see posts about “you have rights as a worker, the company needs you, you have some control here”, etc etc, and I… can’t parse that? It fritzes me out. I can’t process the idea of me having any power in that equation. I’m supposed to only take what I get and be thankful they allow me to serve them. I think I see it as even more dysfunctional and abusive than how most workers in late-stage capitalism see it, and that makes it harder for me to deal with long-term. But that probably needs to be a post when I have slept recently.)

Where was I? Right. Tied into the same traumas is the – well, the brainwashing, that I eat Too Much. That no matter how little I eat, I have to eat less, because I am the Fat. (I’ve said this before, but my skeleton alone is probably hefty enough to play high school football. I’m never gonna be acceptably skinny, even if I literally starve to death.) So the… concept of feeding all my future selves, ties into that irrational belief – the idea that not only is it impossible to amass that much money under late-stage capitalism because the elder gods will not give it to me, but it’s impossible for there to *exist* enough money to feed all my future selves, because I’m like one of those entities in the one Norse myth. You know, the one where the cat was Jormungandr. Words aren’t wording and I can’t identify *which* entity; I feel like the logical one would be fire, the one that eats everything faster than anyone, but I keep thinking of the cup tied to the sea. But, I mean – am I making any sense? This irrational belief that no matter how much money I ever have, I will eat it all. (And that there will be other disasters, that I’ll always have to fix my car or buy new shoes or whatever, but fundamentally: that my needs are too much, that I’m too greedy, that no matter how much money there is, I will use it all up, because I am Bad and demanding and selfish and I take and take and take and never give. But also specifically that if I could eat, and I wasn’t forced to pinch pennies or count calories or be *controlled* somehow by people or circumstances, that I would literally never stop eating and I would eat and eat and eat all the food and all the money and use up all the resources and devour the world. Maybe *I’m* Jormungandr. ;P)

Uh. That… that turned into a thing. I really hope Tumblr doesn’t eat this. It hasn’t eaten any reblog posts I tried to make on my laptop *yet*, but I’m gonna copy it first anyway.

Anyway. All of that was approximately the first of the two things that I was trying to say here. The other one is, of course, that I also don’t actually believe in my future self existing. Any of my future selves. Again, it’s a trauma thing (obviously), but it doesn’t make it any less… convincing. It’s hard to feel like saving up to support my future self has any validity when I’m quite certain – not at all rationally, but still quite certain – that I’m gonna either keel over or kill myself sometime in the next few years. Or that somebody else will kill me. Something along those lines. “Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.

*sigh* I don’t even know if any of that made any sense. Basically I think it’s just a lot of irrational beliefs that I know are irrational but I can’t seem to uninstall them. But maybe writing them down will… help, at some point? Possibly?

>>One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves.<<

Sometimes I try running some calculations regarding how much money my household would need in order to live off the interest, and depending on what assumptions I feed into the model I tend to get results in the 1 – 2 million USD range.

And on the one hand that’s a lot of money, but at the same time it’s not nearly as much money as I might have guessed off the top of my head. *And* that’s assuming the goal is to not–in an average year–have to touch the money originally invested at all, rather than merely having funds that aren’t due to run out until after dying of old age. (Brain: “The point is to *not* die; why would I make Plan A’s that rely on me dying at some point?”)

(Not to mention the various in-between consolation-prize states, in which one can cover a significant chunk of one’s expenses with interest and only needs to find a *little* work to cover the rest, which is not entirely safe but still quite an improvement.)

You might not find that sort of thing helpful yourself, but personally I find it reassuring to have a sense of the end goal. Even if I have a hard time believing I’ll ever actually have that kind of money, I like having an idea of what Enough money would look like, to help me know where I stand.

—

I was mostly using food as a metonym for necessities, but yeah, it does sound like you’ve got some food-specific brain issues.

(I have fairly low food needs myself, but that’s really just luck. Luck that I have a low metabolism, luck that when a nasty stomach bug in 2012 gave my gut flora a hard whack I found that afterwards my appetite now matched said metabolism rather than being slightly higher, luck that I live in a place where drinking water is extremely easy to source so that needing an extra 2 – 3 litres of water a day doesn’t cause more problems than needing less food prevents. (I don’t expect those things are *directly* related, but all bodies have their own quirks, and some circumstances are more amenable to some quirks than others.))

—

>>I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live.<<

I wonder if something like that isn’t more common than one might think, though maybe not to the same severity and…I think it’s particularly expected of *higher*-tier workers? Like, cubicle farmers and stuff. There is *some* room in the cultural consciousness for people scraping by on minimum wage to be displeased by having their hours cut, but people with a generally comfortable-in-the-medium-term paycheck are expected to have that mental disconnect between work and money, expected to desire to work as little as possible even when their pay is directly tied to how much they work. One is supposed to respond to the prospect of an additional day off with “Sweet, vacation!”, not “Damn, I wanted some more metaphorical acorns to squirrel away for later.”

(and even with low-tier stuff, I *still* sometimes get people expecting me to be pleased if one of my shifts gets removed from the schedule. even my own mother does this sometimes, and she *really* should know better.)

(And yeah, this is another financial aspect where I have the opposite psychological issues to you: I’m *acutely* aware of the connection between work and money. I still have a hard time believing that anyone is willing to pay me $14/hour just to do *this*, and I feel like I have to constantly justify my wage.

On the bright side, I think that *has* gotten me a niche in the employee schedule: slow times and times when he’s not *entirely* sure he needs an extra person on but the risk of being understaffed if he doesn’t is too great. My *top* speed is not very good, but my *average* speed can be quite competitive, because I keep looking for things to do long after everyone else has given up and started looking at stuff on their smartphones (or chatting to each other, or showing each other stuff on their smartphones). And if he puts me on and then finds out too late he didn’t need me after all, he gets a consolation prize of cleaner walls.)

—

>>“Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.<<

Reminds me of a conversation we had a while back regarding nausea, where the same basic impulse manifests in *your* brain as “I want to die” and in *my* brain as “I want to be temporarily unconscious; please wake me when this is over”.

---

Tags:

#…and now I’m late for bed #oops #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disordered eating #abuse cw #suicide cw #death tw #long post #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers