When I was eight or nine years old, I used to go to the local college library a couple times a week after school, to a program run by Mrs. Viola Ridgeway, a petite and wiry woman with an air of authority common to the WWII generation. She would read aloud from Greek myths or King Arthur legends while we kids drew pictures and snacked on graham crackers and Tang. I loved drawing, but I really looked forward to the cup of Tang.
Tang was something that never made an appearance in our house, so I suppose I regarded it as a forbidden pleasure. Processed packaged snacks in general were a rarity in our cupboards, except for an ever-present bag of candy to satisfy my dad’s sweet tooth — usually gumdrops or those jelly-filled butter mints, sometimes ROLO® creamy caramels. When the candy bag was full, we kids knew we could sneak one or two without him noticing, but we never dared to attempt it once the bag had gotten light.
Even with snacks that carried no official prohibitions, there was a certain amount of tension in our house. We closely monitored quantities. We obsessed about fairness. My sister had an auditory superpower that enabled her to sense the breach of any package, detect the slightest crinkle of plastic, even from upstairs in her bedroom. Hearing it, she would howl, “what are you eating?” We all felt some trepidation about finishing a pack or box of anything. The last cookie or potato chip fragments would linger for days, sometimes weeks. The alternative was a forensic probing or an inquisition led by anyone else in the household. “Who finished the…?”
We lived on my dad’s teacher salary, sporting church rummage-sale clothes, mingled with sale items from Sears or J.C. Penny. Our family car at one point was an old camper-top van with a sideways-facing couch in lieu of back seats (no seatbelts). We would walk around and play while cruising around town, as if it was our personal living room on wheels, which indeed it was. It was our vacation vehicle too, obviously. We couldn’t afford air travel.
I need to clarify that we weren’t poor. We were comfortably lower-middle class and never lacked for anything we needed, although I sometimes wished for more, as kids do. Some of our friends and neighbors were extremely wealthy. Their homes had long tree-lined driveways, ponds, tennis courts, non-essential rooms dedicated per their names to crafting or reading or just lounging in the sun. These families owned horses, boats, ATVs, airplanes. Through their hospitality, I enjoyed things that were otherwise out of reach, glimpsed a different life.
When I did yearn for things I couldn’t have, like Tang, or a dirt bike, or the last cookie in the pack, my solution was to try to rationalize the feeling away. I would convince myself that the thing I yearned for was too trivial and ridiculous to warrant my attention, or that having it would make me a dumb crowd-follower, or even that the thing itself was somehow morally suspect. I didn’t precisely understand that this was my rationalization process until many years later when a girlfriend I will call “M” told me I had “low havingness.”
M was the product of a strange childhood. Her dad was a retired NFL linebacker who became a stock broker. Her mom was a hippie who abandoned M when she was a little girl, then returned a few years later and brought her to live on a commune. Eventually her parents settled on a split custody arrangement, and M began a bifurcated life. While she was with her dad, she played tennis at a posh country club, ultimately achieving a national rank as an elite youth player. When she was with her mom, she learned about chakras and auras and how to read the tarot. She continued this split-screen journey into young adulthood, earning a college degree in plant science as well as a certification of some kind from the Berkeley Psychic Institute.
“Havingness,” she explained to me, is an internal capacity that gives us permission to want things, powers our sense of whether we deserve things, and influences whether the universe (or god, higher power, etc) will deliver to us things we want and deserve. I didn’t (and still don’t) buy her notion of a cosmic capacity governing our access to wealth, but since those first two effects of what she called havingness struck me as psychological in nature, I thought it made sense to examine whether I was shooting myself in the foot somehow. The third effect, the idea that it controls whether we will actually get what we wish for, is more woowoo and solidly in the realm of ‘visualize to manifest’ a la The Secret, a book that took the country by storm (at least the daytime-talk-show-watching cohort) some years ago. But who am I to judge? If I know anything at all, it is that reality proves ever stranger and more mysterious each time we think we’ve figured something out.
M’s havingness was in good shape. She would note the difference between hers an mine for example whenever we would stop somewhere for gas. She would invariably pop in to the gas station’s mini-mart and get herself a little treat. She favored spongy cake-esque things. I invariably did not partake. Restaurants were another venue where the disparity was evident. She would truly go for it, per the dictum of her cravings, and almost always ordered dessert. I didn’t even have the ability to recognize what I craved. I would look at prices. I would consider the amount of kitchen labor involved in the various dishes.
To fix my own havingness, she instructed me to close my eyes and imagine two dials or gauges — one representing my sense of whether I deserved the things I wished for, and the other representing the likelihood that the universe would deliver those things to me. She suggested that my dials were both turned very low, and that as vividly as possible I should imagine myself cranking them all the way up. I did as instructed, repeatedly over months whenever she prompted me, and though I don’t believe this bit of transactional magic had anything to do with it, I can say that my personal prosperity did start to tick upwards around that time in noticeable ways.
One real thing that actually happened was the internet, specifically the arrival of what is now referred to as the dotcom bubble. In the late nineties, during the boom years of that bubble, it became shockingly easy to get a job in tech with zero real qualifications. Established companies were frantic to build websites. Brand new ideas were blooming like California springtime after a dozen atmospheric rivers. Some dotcoms were silly (Flooz) and others perhaps just ahead of their time (Kozmo). I joined a small agency as a web designer, knowing absolutely nothing about the web. I didn’t even have AOL until sometime later.
The salary they offered me out of the gate was almost twice what I was making as a retail manager (remember Borders books)? I think I gasped before I accepted their offer without the slightest semblance of a negotiation. I had the same reaction to the next two or three successive job offers after I moved to the Bay Area. It seemed like a crazy dream that someone would pay me so much. Even after I eventually learned I’d been lowballed a little bit, relative to the going rate, I didn’t care, because my mind couldn’t wrap itself around such abundance. It was as inconceivable to me as the notion that any arbitrary thumbnail-sized patch of dark sky contains untold galaxies.
Seriously. Those are whole galaxies!
Just to share a little more context, before I met M, I worked at a small independent bookstore in Tempe, Z. They paid me minimum wage at first, and later raised my rate to a tad more. I couldn’t afford my monthly rent plus utilities on that income, so one or more of my bills was always late. Something was always about to be shut off. I sold a guitar to pay my electric bill one month. I sometimes stole expensive basics like toothpaste and razor cartridges. My technique was to hide them in the shopping cart underneath a crinkled copy of the store’s weekly flier, while I paid for the bulkier, more obvious (and cheaper) items.
Before Tempe, I lived in a sprawling loft in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. It was old and only lightly-renovated but still akin to the ones you see in movies, with its 15-foot ceilings and bright windows. The rent was crazy low because it was an off-the-books sublet from an artist couple who officially still resided there, and had for two decades under rent control, while they actually lived upstate. The rent was low relative to the market rate, I should say. It was still expensive for me, and I cohabited there with four other roommates to make do.
I understood and felt gratitude for my own abundance, however, in that wonderful loft with wonderful roommates in a wonderful city, and working as a clerk at the wonderful Gotham Book Mart. Importantly, my time in New York juxtaposed my own modest condition against that of real poverty, which I knew about but hadn’t really seen before. You witness it every day there (as well as here in San Francisco), and hardening one’s own heart to some extent becomes a necessary tactic for spiritual and psychological survival.
That phrase, “to some extent,” is important to emphasize, because it requires continual recalibration to find a balance that feels compassionate and generous but still allows you to function in a practical sense. My own relationship with what M calls havingness is tangled up with the challenge of finding that balance. How much abundance should I allow for myself (let alone actively seek), I always wonder, in a world where other people are suffering, struggling, mired in poverty? That’s the question that made me gasp each time I was confronted with a salary offer. Does it really make sense for me to take so much, a voice inside me asked. There is still a part of me that resists abundance, let alone opulence, and tries to rationalize away material desire as ugly, trivial, or immoral.
The phrase in the title of this post comes from Matthew Desmond, a sociology professor at Princeton who studies and writes about poverty. His new book, Poverty by America, argues that poverty exists in our country (and the world, for that matter) because we, the affluent, benefit from it. In an interview discussing the book, Desmond described the mood of American affluence as fearful and stingy. I was struck by his phrase, a fearful stingy affluence, because I immediately recognized the fear he is pointing to.
Through every stage of my life, I have naturally yearned for certain things that were out of reach, and dreamt of a future where I could attain them. And, as my own prosperity grew, I did attain some of them. I remember when I was able to buy a brand new car for the first time (a Toyota Tacoma). That same year I bought brand new furniture for the first time, and I felt giddily suddenly grown up. I remember one Friday at work years ago, chatting with a coworker about his weekend plans to go surfing. I groaned that I needed to clean my apartment, and he told me I should hire a housekeeper, as he had. A housekeeper? That seemed like an insane luxury for a single guy living alone. “My time is really valuable to me,” he said, “I would much rather use it for surfing than cleaning. Also, it provides some income for someone else.” He convinced me. I hired a housekeeper, and it was an incredible feeling each time to enter my sparkling clean home, but I wondered whether I was exploiting someone or perpetuating an anachronistic class system.
The other day at Costco I bought a case of Kirkland Signature® sparkling water (LaCroix knockoff) because I wanted it, even though it tastes like Skittles burps. It wasn’t for a party, which is the only reason I’d bought it in the past. I wanted it, so I bought it. This simple fact is weird enough to me days later that it occurred to me to mention it here.
I make bigger purchases sometimes too, and I experience a proportional amount of inner conflict with those. We splurged on a vacation home in Tahoe a few years ago, which was something we dreamt about for a long time and actively saved for. We wanted to be able to spend time in nature and especially to provide that pleasure for our kids. I feel incredibly blessed to now own this thing that we dreamed about, but when people ask us what we did during the summer or following a long-weekend break, I will mention Tahoe while omitting that we have our own place there.
Back when my life was relatively meager, and I lived at the very edge of my means (sometimes beyond it), I was very attuned to the difference between needs and wants. I was not quite able to afford everything I needed, so I rarely thought about things I wanted. Now I can afford more of what I want, but I still feel a nagging resistance each time I consider buying something for no good reason. Those pesky havingness dials are turned down too low again.
I feel guilty about having such things in a world where so many people can’t, but I don’t think the solution is to completely deprive ourselves of everything we’ve dreamt of owning. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, probably, but how should one calculate it? That question itself feels crass. I could imagine a quadrant diagram with cost on one axis and level of desire (how much you want it, how long you’ve dreamt of having it, etc.) on the other. Like, I want an Xbox, but I don’t want one that much. On the other hand, we’ve wanted to renovate our bathrooms for a long time. The renovations would cost quite a bit more than an Xbox, but maybe it’s okay to splurge on that because we really really want new bathrooms.
There’s a quote I sometimes think about from a movie I saw years ago: “You’re not poor, you’re just over-extended.” I don’t remember the movie’s title (Google was no help) nor who was in it, but I remember the context. One character was seeking a financial lifeline from a wealthy friend. They were both upper-middle-class guys living in the suburbs. One had fallen on rough times—lost his job, had some investments go south—and could no longer afford the payments on his large house, fancy car, private school tuitions, etc.
The fear in “fearful, stingy affluence” is the fear of finding oneself over-extended like that, and the awareness that affluence is brittle. I’m feeling this personally right now, after being laid off earlier this year. You become more affluent, and then you spend more money on things you want. It’s not like you’re living at the edge of your means though, until suddenly you are.
As for the stingy part, that should be obvious by now, but each rise in prosperity brings opportunities to treat ourselves more but also to be more generous and give back to the community. It’s possible to do both of course, but it’s a zero-sum game, so again the trick is to find the right balance. There’s a catch though. If you’re affluent, then you are almost certainly also stingy. Every day I’m surrounded by well-meaning, generally compassionate people who live in multimillion dollar houses and drive ninety-thousand-dollar cars. We could could all take less and give more, take less and less, give more and more. Where is the line?
My copout at this point is to wave my hands dramatically in the direction of all the billionaires. My perspective is that billionaires should not exist at all, and if certain people should take less in order for others to have more, then that obligation should fall much more heavily on billionaires.