Hey, guys.
It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet.
And this week's video is brought to you
by my own fabulous tweets.
Now, you guys know that if I love one thing on this channel,
it is taking a thought that I randomly shared on social media
or in a passing comment and another video
and making it into a full fledged rant.
And this is actually one of these topics
that I come back to frequently on Twitter.
I recently tweeted about it, which is what kind of inspired
me to have this talk today because it did kick off
a little bit of discussion.
When I tweeted it but I've also tweeted about similar things
before, and it is something I think about a lot.
Because in all of the sociological research that we
do for TFD, in all of these videos and all of the content
we create, a very common theme has started to stick out to me,
and that is how increasingly lonely and socially isolated
Americans are.
Now, there's a whole lot to unpack in this data
and we'll get into that a little bit in the video.
But I want to talk about what I feel
like is a pretty underexplored aspect
of the phenomenon of isolation.
And that is what I personally believe
is our increasing social validation and even
kind of fetishization of being quite frankly pretty
fucking selfish, and also in many ways stingy and cheap.
And not cheap just in terms of money, although sometimes that
is the case too and we'll get into that, but also
cheap with our time, cheap with our energy, cheap
with our consideration, cheap with how we're
happy with others, how we make them feel, how we lift them up.
And I want to talk today here about what
I believe is the sort of living generously mindset,
not to be confused with stuff like The Secret or whatever
or Money Manifesting or prosperity gospel
because that doesn't work and it's not
a replacement for financial advice,
versus what I would consider to be a cheap mindset.
And again, cheap spiritually, not
just cheap in terms of money.
Over the past several years, and I
would consider this like somewhat a bit
of the nuclear fallout from Tumblr and that whole approach
to mental health, but it's rampant,
there has been an enormous focus on what I personally
consider to be extremely self-centered visions
of human relationships.
We have all kinds of articles and viral tweets
referring to things like just having basic compassion
and presence for a friend as performing
emotional labor, which like just let's
be clear that is not what emotional labor means.
Emotional labor is like the fact that service workers
have to smile and pretend to be your friend while you degrade
and hit on them and then still leave them with a terrible tip
at the end of their service because otherwise they'll
get fired.
That's emotional labor.
Going to visit your friend because her cat died
is just called being a human being.
But we also have, and I would consider
this a partial outcropping of the huge like introvert
industrial complex that was also massive
on the internet in the mid 2010s, which by the way,
I was writing for like a viral internet website at the time,
and let me tell you that introvert content was
worth its weight in gold at that time.
We have all kinds of relatable viral content
about how it's not just awesome but somehow quasi-holistic
to do things like cancel plans at the last minute,
not show up to events, not return phone calls,
or even get on the phone with someone
who needs to talk to you.
Now I can already hear you guys cracking your knuckles to type
at me in the comments about how some people have
various mental health concerns that
lead them to have a very difficult time with things
like punctuality, or speaking on the phone,
or being in crowded spaces.
I get all that.
I want to be clear that we need to make a distinction here
between preserving one's mental health and just
kind of being a dickhead, and that we need to be a little bit
more honest as a society about when we're conflating
the latter with the former.
Because even if there are a lot of social situations
and contexts that give you a lot of trouble,
the entire concept of consideration and caring
for another person is that you find
workarounds that work for both parties
so that the other person knows that they
are being seen and cared for while you're also protecting
your own mental health.
And I'm sorry, but bailing on a friend at the very last minute
for something that was important to them,
and then talking on Twitter about how awesome
that feels to do is not mental health care.
And we haven't just gotten into this valorization
of being incredibly selfish with your time and energy.
We're also in a generation that has
seen the meteoric rise of money transfer apps
like Venmo and PayPal, where we've
gotten into this habit of constantly charging
each other for everything and counting
every dollar between friends and loved ones
down to things like people charging
their friends for ingredients after they invited them
over to what appeared to be a normal dinner party,
or send them itemized bills for trips that you invited them to,
or going back and forth charging each other for the same cup
of coffee over and over again until you both die, I guess.
And, again, to be clear, I work in personal finance.
I understand how valuable these kinds of apps
are I use them all the time for all sorts of purposes,
some of them social.
And obviously, they're very helpful to helping
us pay each other easily or minimize how many checks
the poor overworked waiter has to divide your bill into,
or more intelligently split costs of people
are working with different budgets
and buying different things and not
having to pretend like it's all even when one of you
had literally a soda and an appetizer
and someone else had four courses
and four alcoholic drinks.
I get all that.
But the culture of charging each other for every little thing
and itemizing almost every single purchase between loved
ones similarly erodes what is, in my opinion,
a very important, yes I have to be honest,
quasi-spiritual practice between loved ones which
is the joy of being able to treat each other.
In a good and healthy relationship
over the course of time, this act of treating each other
will generally balance out, especially
to be representative of people's relative financial privilege.
And if it's not and one party is constantly
being exploited or expected to pay for things,
obviously that's a separate issue.
But in a good relationship, the goal
shouldn't be to make sure that everything is perfectly even
at all times.
Treating one another is about showing
each other a spontaneous sense of love and affection,
wanting to make sure that the other person feels special
and cared for, even over something small.
Just the other day, I was out with a good friend
and I went to go get the bill.
We had a pretty decadent lunch honestly,
and she was like absolutely not, I won't hear a word of that.
You've been treating for several things lately,
it's my pleasure.
I want to get this.
Is it exactly even to the cent of how much we've
paid for each other?
I don't know.
Did it feel awesome to have that moment of being
treated just like I knew it felt awesome
the times I treated her?
Yes, absolutely.
And if everything were constantly
a matter of charging each other over every little penny, which
for the record, we also do money transfers all
the time for other things, like when
we go on trips together, or going in on a gift together,
or have a birthday or some other event,
we would lose the magic and what is ultimately again
a display of affection.
But I do believe that miserly attitude isn't
just limited to the financial or the social
like we talked about before.
I think all of these things are starting
to coalesce into what I consider to be,
again, through the large amount of sociological research we've
done here at TFD, to be a bit of a rising American culture
of hyper self-centeredness.
Now a lot of this is a response from us
all living under capitalism with diminishing economic prospects
and limited time to offer.
And I totally understand that financial privilege, as well as
things like your current lifestyle,
for example, if you have several kids or dependents
versus if you don't, all of these
contribute to the amount you're able to give of yourself
or think of others.
But I'm someone who I'll admit I think errs quite a bit
to the side of being a little bit overly generous
or accommodating.
Giving gifts are my love language.
I have a calendar full of other people's important days
that I like to remember.
I generally love to make other people feel
welcomed and special.
I love to host people.
All of that is very important to me.
But I would actually make the point of it
that I do believe that attitude is not
inherently financial in nature.
I am more financially privileged now but I didn't used to be.
And trust me that I was in some ways
even more generous proportionally with my stuff
when I was broke.
And I do believe, and a lot of the studies
actually bear this out, that part
of the reason these things have been important to me
is because I grew up low income.
It was instilled in me from my absolute youngest age
that although I might never have the designer
clothes another person might have or go to the fancy schools
another person might, that one thing that is always
free and accessible is having good manners, saying thank you,
making other people feel seen and listened to and remembered,
being considerate.
And it actually isn't anecdotal that in general,
people with less to spend actually
do tend to be more generous proportionally.
They share more with their neighbors.
They give more to charity.
And we dive into that in a huge way in our recent video
about why rich people sociologically become assholes.
And it is hard sometimes to tell what is the chicken or the egg
in this scenario because, like I mentioned,
we are living in a generation where economically we're
worse off than our parents.
We have diminishing wages and rising inequality
and in many ways we're sold huge lies
about things like taking on student debt
or entering into a housing market that has hugely
outpaced our ability to save.
And in fact, many people who grew up low income often
enter a hyper scarcity mindset for themselves
while still allowing themselves to be generous with others
because they've accumulated such negative ideas about spending
on themselves through their childhood.
We did a whole members only bonus video
just on the scarcity mindset and how to combat it.
It's our bonus video for this month
and you can check it out at the link in our description
or by hitting our join button and joining our society at TFD
at the $4.99 a month tier.
You'll get access to all kinds of other awesome perks of being
a member, including things like all of our other bonus videos,
our live monthly office hours with me,
and plenty of other awesome stuff.
So check it out.
But we also in an increasingly atomized society.
We don't live as much intergenerationally.
We stick to our nuclear single family homes
that are getting bigger over time
even as our families are getting smaller.
Statistically, Americans are having fewer and fewer close
friends as they age, especially men.
And it's very easy to see how under these conditions,
the easiest response socially, financially emotionally
could feel to lean into being even more
self-centered and even more cheap,
and to really focus on the self and perhaps maybe
your immediate nuclear family as the ultimate entity
to care for or think about.
But there is also a self-fulfilling prophecy
in that spiritual stinginess ultimately
manifesting in fewer connections as we age.
This is also one of the primary reasons
as we discussed in that recent video
why the wealthier tend to have way less empathy.
They just don't need connections as much.
They don't have to give a shit about anyone
with themselves and their little kids.
But it is only in accepting that we as individuals are not
the most important thing and that the greater
community that we belong to and the connections that we have
are just as important as we are that we can start to implement
the social policies that we desperately
need to combat all the massive economic and social erosion
that we've seen over the past 40 years.
Becoming more selfish and atomized only helps capitalism.
And we can also see this so clearly
in things like the girlboss phenomenon and the Instagram
self care industrial complex, which I previously did
a rant on because that sucks.
Because both of them are all about hyper
centering the self, and not just the self generally
but the immediate self at the expense of basically everything
else.
Doing what feels good, getting ahead, being super self
motivated and interested in opportunistic.
And it's not just about doing those things
but about reframing them as a kind of moral good.
In the girlboss realm, a woman pursuing an executive title
is in and of itself some kind of a win for women as a whole
even if women overall at that company
are materially worse off with her
in power, which happened at a lot
of those girlboss companies.
Or in the world of Instagram self-care,
where it's all about centering yourself
in every emotional and social interaction,
and thinking in terms of what you want and how you feel,
and never about considering the other person.
And both of these things rarely take into consideration
how often our biggest moments of professional and personal
growth come specifically when we de-center ourselves and center
other people.
For example, the best opportunities for work
often come in things like facilitating, networking,
mentoring, advocating for others,
putting other people up for opportunities,
on top of-- let's be honest-- the good
that it does for your actual soul.
And many times the biggest moments
of growth that will realize in our emotional lives
come from when we accept that we're not
the only person in a given situation,
and that it may be just as important for us to accept
and learn what we might have done wrong
as it is to call out what someone else might have done.
In general, I do feel that we have created
a cultural obsession with the self that
comes at the expense of basically everyone
else and everything else if we're being honest.
And I do think that all of this is connected,
the hyper-stinginess with money, the erosion of things like gift
giving or having vibrant social communities
and living intergenerationally.
And again none of this is to dismiss
all of the real economic concerns or the fact
that for many of us, we simply have a lot less time
to work with.
We have to work longer hours to make less money
and that's doubly true if you have children
where in most cases parents are increasingly both forced
to work outside the home.
But our sense of community in the United States
has in a very real way been decreasing over the past 40
years.
We are losing connections with each other.
And centering people other than yourself
and thinking of how you can be generous with others as much
as you are generous with yourself
is not just about feeling like a good person
or having a lot of friends.
It's also about feeling like part
of a community, which is the bedrock of good social policy.
For example, you're a lot more likely to care
if all of the women around you are
able to access comprehensive and humane maternity
leave if you actually talk to some moms every now and again.
I'm not a mom, don't plan to be a mom.
But mom's problems are my problems
because I live in a society with these women
and I want them in their children
to be well taken care of.
But I also, and I must be honest here
as I said in my initial tweet, I do
believe that switching to a more generous mindset
leads you directly to a more abundant life.
We are often not asking ourselves enough questions.
How am I making someone else feel special?
Are there skills and resources I have professionally that I
could be helping others with?
What are ways in which I'm showing up or being
a reliable friend or loved one?
Am I the type of person that people can trust or feel
will actually listen to them to be empathetic
or to apologize when I messed up?
Do I remember people's special moments
and treat them in a way that's affordable to me?
Am I being a generous person in ways
that extend well beyond money?
And as I said in that tweet, if you
do have a lot of financial privilege,
that better be applying to money itself as well.
There are many spiritual traditions
in the world that believe that the truest forms of joy
and fulfillment come from when we absolutely
de-center ourselves.
And capitalism, girlboss-ification,
Instagram mental health, Venmo, and all this other stuff
has really come together to make a noxious cloud of what
is in it for me as general mode of being.
It's not The Secret, it's not Money Manifesting,
it's not any of those things.
But live generously and live considerately
and I bet you you'll start to see that coming
back to you in spades.
Also don't be cheap.
If you have the money, don't be cheap.
It's so tacky.
I have so many anecdotes I'm not going to go into here.
But trust me, someone recently in my life
who has a eff-ton of money did the cheapest thing to someone
I also know very well who doesn't have as much money.
And I was like, I will lose sleep over this for a month.
This is the tackiest thing I've ever heard.
I'm going to call the cops on her.
Anyway, that's my rant.
Live abundantly.
Bye, guys.