5.23.24

 Let’s talk about money.

I used to tell people that, “Everyone lies about two things: sex and money.” I still mostly think this is true.

And it is interesting to think about why these concepts belong in the same sentence, occupy much of the same overlapping space in our individual and collective psyches. (If you doubt this, consider that the biggest news story of the week in the US is about hush MONEY paid to a porn-star for SEX by a former president.) But I don’t want to talk about sex here, this blog attempts to evade the lurid for the most part.

So let’s talk about money.

In particular, I find that many people have a very complicated and awkward relationship with money. Mostly people are quite lousy at managing it or thinking about it as an objective math-problem, which it mostly should be. And people do lie about it compulsively. And even a few folks who are pretty good at managing or tracking or growing it still seem to allow it to cast undue emotional shadows on their lives. (I’m one of these.)

Now for some folks – regrettably many around the world – the push to have enough, to sustain for their families, to avoid starvation, afford clothes, shoes, school for the kids, and so on really is a daily struggle. But for many in the developed world, this is simply no longer the situation. We live in a time of profound abundance, and, yes, the price of milk is high now, but folks are mostly carrying iPhones so…

Why are well-enough off people still constantly stressed by and defined by money or worry about its lack?

A friend tells me “90% of my stress is about money” but on the same day tells me, “I’ve been to all but 2 of the Top 30 restaurants in Austin.” So it isn’t that we don’t have money, are starving, existing at a subsistence level. It’s that our desire for a relative level of wealth drives anxieties. (This is not a new concept so far Thorstein Veblen pointed this out at the turn of the last century in his scathing critiques of the well-to-do.) Why do people who have plenty still get so obsessed about being able to have even more in order to experience the more rarified things money can buy?

 

There’s something more here too though: I recently had a call with two brilliant researchers from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. Their focus is on economics, currencies, the use of money and tokens as a symbol of trust, proof of work, and so on. Obviously there are Web3 implications to this kind of research but I find myself thinking of it more as a “Three body problem” of economics. This is highly theoretical stuff with deep real-world application. And it speaks again to the importance of this abstract concept: Why do homo sapiens – the really smart ones and the less-so – all get so obsessed over this concept?

And what does any of this have to do with the creative impulse or creation in general?

This one is easier for me to answer, I think. Some people are inherently driven by a desire to create things. Others mostly focus on consuming. (I have yet to meet anyone who would self-describe as being in that latter camp, but people show you who they are in what they do. “What is something you’re proud of creating this month?” If the answer is, “Oh, I haven’t had time…” Well, there you go.) But many of the things that the monkeys imagine and want to create (pyramids, AAA video games, etc.) take the concerted efforts of many people over time to come to fruition. This means that in order to succeed at creating some kinds of things, you must be able to persuade (or compel through force, in the case of the pyramids) many others to devote significant portions of their time to a particular goal. This means you need to pay them. And this forces some part of most creative activities at scale to become financial exercises.

So it is virtually impossible to disentangle some categories of creative enterprise from discussions of money.

The role of sex and the desire-for-sex in motivating creation will have to wait for a later entry! 😉