Even People Who Have Money Feel Messed Up About It: But Look to Culture, Not Psychology for the Answer
July 09, 2024
While we don’t need yet another diagnosis, the experience of “money dysmorphia” can be very real and painful
The New York Times recently published an article about “money dysmorphia,” which they define as “someone who is irrationally insecure about finances.” While we do not need yet another popular diagnosis, the struggles the article exposes of feeling financially insecure when you have plenty are very real. When we think of “money problems,” we typically imagine some form of lack—not enough money or overspending, which yields the same effect. Yet, there can be other financial problems even when a person has means.
This can manifest in a few ways, including underspending on essentials relative to need such as a frequent work traveler who drags around a broken suitcase or someone who can afford to buy lunch but suffers without when too rushed to pack to save a few dollars. Some people also underspend on their kids and dependents in scenarios in which money could make a big difference like kids missing out on field trips or medical care. At times, kids become the focus of parents overly worrying about leaving money for their children. Other people struggle with not being able to tolerate risk or debt, leading to forgoing a job with equity for a lower salary or renting when in a position to buy to avoid a mortgage. Ultimately, these struggles lead to not being able to enjoy—not going on a family vacation or even not buying small things like a latte when you can do so.
Emotional experiences of scarcity last well beyond the material reality of poverty itself
People who grow up with scarcity, which can include scarcity of security or a scarcity of nourishing and reassurance from parents and caregivers, can frequently continue to struggle with finances even when they have enough. Experiences of real poverty and scarcity—hunger pangs, not being able to afford medicine, the humiliation of clothes that don’t fit, an anxiety about not being able to meet basic needs—are formative and last well beyond the material reality of poverty itself.
Psychology tells us that when an emotional experience is internalized (i.e. becomes a part of us), it remains even after the experience changes. Feelings leave an imprint. At the extremes, we call these experiences trauma, effects on our psyche that persist well beyond re-establishing safety. You feel afraid and as though you are in danger long past when you are, which is why the emotional experience of poverty lingers even if the condition of poverty changes.
Money problems are often seen as moral problems: When you make more money, the shame and fear remain
One of the oldest tricks of capitalism is to create a scenario in which people aren’t paid enough to make ends meet and then convince them that’s a moral problem rather than a structural problem. Even apart from crushing material poverty, we still relate to finances morally. Think about all those financial articles blaming millennials for throwing away their money on avocado toast or daily Starbucks. These articles seem to say, “If you’re not doing this ONE thing with your money, you’re ruining your future.”
There is a connection between these late-capitalist shaming barrages and a key piece of “money dysmorphia,” which is, what an object relations person would call, an inability to properly externalize. Our culture has created relationships with money that are unnecessarily complicated (to justify big commissions and profits with banks). If you’re broke, or more accurately, living in a society where the relationship between what you earn and what you need to spend (or are told you need to spend) is designed to leave you in a perpetual deficit, “solving” one of these problems by making more money doesn’t solve the underlying psychological or material issue. The shame and the constant sense of fear remain.
And with more money, the expectation of what you need to spend goes up and things get more expensive. The biggest flex of the ultra-rich is that they have stuff and they’re not worried about holding onto it. “Quiet” luxury is quiet because it’s secure—not just because they have the disposable income to spend but because their parents did and so they didn’t inherit insecurity.
Moralizing creates a tension between shaming wants and needs and unthinkingly indulging them
Moralizing always operates on the lines of fear—if you do x, it means something quite bad about you for which you might be punished, often with the punishment being ostracized from the group. This is a fear that when you think about it is quite a lot more frightening than it initially seems. Many of us operate around money from a kind of moral register rather than a kind of self-protection or self-satisfaction register. In a sense, we operate between the superego and the id—denying and shaming our wants and needs and then, unthinkingly indulging those needs. In these cases, rejecting thoughts of “going out to dinner would be quite nice” or “the kids having their own bedroom would give them some privacy and space” becomes a kind of denial of desire (and there are parallels here with both sex and food).
What do you do about "money dysmorphia"?: Grieve both the culture and personal emotional experiences of scarcity
When dealing with financial insecurity that doesn’t line up with your means, there are two pieces of work here that need to be done, both involve grieving. The first is to have an understanding of the macro dynamics at work: that these struggles with money are not just incidental to your emotional life but that they’re also no small part of your struggle. We’re all not a bunch of crazy, lazy profligates. We’re up against a powerful consumer culture built to keep us spending and in a state of disorientation, even as we want to badly change this reality.
The second is to understand the fundamental feature of neurosis, namely that it identifies a human tendency to try to change the past by recreating scenarios of the past and getting them right. It’s to realize that everything now is really okay: “I have enough. I don’t have to keep chasing to catch up. I’m secure.” It’s also to recognize that “mo money, mo problems” can be, by understanding its lessons deeply, a directive on how to live with plenty. You can be free to understand scarcity as a state that’s in the past but very much still felt in the present and then, you can do the work of mourning.
