One of my major character flaws is that I love money too much. I don’t mean having it and spending it — though those things are, of course, very nice — but rather managing and husbanding it, reading about it, learning and thinking about it. I remember, just before leaving home to begin my first grown-up job, asking for personal finance books for Christmas (I received three, and read them cover-to-cover). I also remember, during the 2008 financial crisis, feeling a perverse kind of thrill about it — even though Lehman Brothers was my employer’s biggest client — because here was a story, here was a chance to see how it all really worked. The updates on dealbreaker.com, which I read breathlessly, gave me a particular rush. These reactions were ghoulish and grotesque of me, given that so many people suffered needlessly because of powerful and corrupt systems that were not acting in their interest, and I myself was young and in Canada (which wasn’t hit quite as hard) and kept my job, and didn’t suffer very much at all. The closest analogue I can imagine is people who are fascinated by war and military tactics, getting a charge out of reading gruesome battle reports in the news.
Today, this interest mostly manifests in the following behaviors: reading Matt Levine religiously, watching nerdy movies like Margin Call, keeping detailed spreadsheets about my own finances, and consuming lots of news about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. I’ve always been fascinated by stories about things collapsing. One of my favorite things I’ve ever written for this newsletter is this review of The Lehman Trilogy, the play adapted from an epic poem (!) that played Broadway in 2021. I’m honestly not sure when I’ll see something on stage that good again.
Perhaps I am like this because finance appeals simultaneously to the computer programming, systematizing part of my brain, and also the literary part. It’s almost a rational system, with charts and mathematical formulas and the trappings of science. But as a human-created system, and especially as a human-created system tied up with desire and ambition and class and power and taste, there is always passion and irrationality at its core.
The 19th-century novels I love are often obsessed with money, and I am always pleased when authors, like Balzac, are not squeamish about discussing it. But it’s also what sometimes makes them distasteful. One theme of a lot of 19th-century literature is the difference between being rich and being an aristocrat — two things that often go together but don’t always — and the tension when one is present without the other. I’m reminded of how different their assumptions were from ours when they’re happy to condemn wealth as soulless, vulgar, mercenary, and corrosive (often with antisemitic undertones) while praising the aristocracy as noble and dutiful. The Proustian fallacy is to believe that the vulgarity of wealth is absolved by aristocratic taste.
When I was younger I prided myself on being very careful with money. I attended university while living at home in Edmonton (not entirely, but largely, for financial reasons), scrupulously budgeted the money I earned from working in a shoe store, was careful never to carry a credit card balance, and started contributing to investment accounts while still in school. My income was not high but my savings balance was a source of enormous pride.
Also a matter of pride was that I knew — from those same personal finance books — never, ever to panic-sell. During the 2008 crash my small investment account was devastated, but I held firm and kept up my regular contributions, and it paid off in the end. It felt — and sometimes still feels — like special knowledge to understand the psychology of buy low, sell high and why so many people do exactly the opposite. “Buying low” always feels foolish, because if things are “low” it means the newspapers are full of disaster and dire predictions, and people you know are reeling from how much money they just lost. It takes a leap of imagination (and perhaps a mercenary temperament) to see the situation as advantageous. It’s much easier to put money in when things are high; every day you hear about someone who’s retiring off a lucky cryptocurrency bet or who sold their house for three times what they bought it for. In times like those, it feels exciting to put money in! But that’s when circumstances are actually the most dangerous.1 People who know better get caught up all the time. Unless you make a specific point of fighting your natural inclination, you’ll inevitably buy high and sell low. This is why most experts recommend just making contributions on a predetermined schedule and never acting reactively.
This is all kind of embarrassing to write about. Thinking so much about how to get money, when you have more than enough, is bad for one’s sympathies and corrosive to the soul — this is the stuff of novels. And that’s not even getting into the cruelties, perversities, and irrationalities of the capitalist system that generates so much fascination for me.
When I started working for Google in my early 30s, they offered me a compensation package that was quadruple what I was making at the time. And when it came to my finances, it actually saddened me to see how comparatively futile all my efforts had been before. In my 20s I planned and saved so carefully to build up my stash, only to have it dwarfed by the new money coming in. In the end, none of those early efforts really mattered. What mattered was lucking into the right kind of degree and solving algorithms problems on a whiteboard.
Natalia Ginzburg has a famous essay called “The Little Virtues” (which can be found in a collection by that name). Her argument is that parents typically raise their children with great attention paid to the “little” virtues — being thrifty, punctual, diligent, polite, and so on — and not enough attention to the greater virtues of generosity, compassion, and courage. I try to always stay aware, when I obsess over my own “little virtues”, that better ideals exist.
I was monstrously pleased with myself when I made a modest profit off GameStop stock by buying when it was a semi-obscure Reddit phenomenon and selling when the literary people I follow on twitter started talking about it. But I can’t gloat too much, because I have also lost money on some real turkeys.