on money, and the lack thereof

since i'm not writing much these days, i cobbled this together from a couple old emails to a friend; it's apropos of nothing in particular.  there may be more of these in the future.  or not.


growing up, i never thought about money much.  my parents were depression babies, so they were on the same page financially and always careful with a buck, but there was never a sense of either deprivation or excess in our house; things in that regard were always pretty much just right.

after my father died, three things changed (as regards this subject, anyway):  we became poorer to the point where money suddenly was something we talked about; my father's brother eventually became quite rich; and i, for reasons quite unrelated to money, became quite unhappy.

i've talked about my uncle don a lot on this blog--hell, he's even got his own section on the sidebar--but what happened to him and his family, and me and my family, as either a result of, or maybe despite, all that sudden money, really started me thinking about the whole scarcity/abundance thing.

because while don's rise to riches was heady and fun, and he and my aunt pat were incredibly generous with what they had come into, it really didn't make a goddam bit of difference in how happy any of us were; in fact, in some ways it might have made things worse.

i remember one night, sitting miserably in my nice, new uncle-don-supplied condo three blocks from the university, with a nice uncle-don-supplied car down in the parking lot, years of plush, prepaid education ahead of me and enough cash in the bank to carry me through the school year in comfort, and thinking about how decisively that wish i'd made back when i was a 15-year-old slaving away for $1.10 an hour at a sizzler steak house--how, if only i had money, all my problems would be solved--had come true.  and how it hadn't.

and i saw don and pat's marriage deteriorate, and how he coped with success by drinking, and she, remodeling, and how their kids went from great to losing-their-way spoiled, and how insufferable all their rich friends were, and how, although my mother's cage was plush and gilded now, it was still the same cage.

I didn’t study architecture so i could design taj mahals or high-rises to the sky; all I ever wanted to do was houses—my houses. But I knew before that could happen, I’d have to cut my teeth on other people’s houses first. so, after graduation, and to that end, I worked for two high-end residential firms; first in austin, and then LA.

and I hated it, so i quit.

for a bunch of reasons, actually, but not the least of which was because designing and building a dream house seemed to bring out the worst in people. or maybe it was just the people who made up our client base--nouveau-riche types who wanted monuments to their success. it wasn’t all bad—some of ‘em were actually fun—but so often it came down to couples bickering like sibling rivals over colors, or whose closet was bigger, or which mega sub-zero would look better in the kitchen. I mean, these were people who really seemed to pin all their hopes on the notion that their new house would finally make their lives complete. and then, after all the drama, angst and knockdown-dragouts along the way from concept sketch to finished house were exhausted, and the crystal bowl with the three perfect apples had finally been placed on the gleaming granite countertop, more often than not, they’d look around at all the magnificence they’d paid so dearly for, and i'd hear 'em say something like, “ok—now what?”.

and then after i quit architecture for other people and did my own first house and talked to the day laborers i hired to help me--about how much they missed their countries, how they were only here for the money, how they'd never bring their families--and certainly not their daughters--here, and saw america through their eyes, it propelled me on to look hard at the myth--you know, the one that ours is the life to which everyone on earth aspires.  and i started looking at happiness indices for the various supposed hell-holes of the earth, saw how little those people managed to live on, saw how a cast-off pair of nikes could give some kid in mogadishu a bigger grin than almost any american kid on his playstation-extravaganza christmas morning; saw how, in those primitive countries, family was everything, like it used to be here.

and then i widened my scope of vision to look, for the first time critically, at the panoply of wretched souls whom we've pushed to the top of the world we've made--the judy garlands and marilyn monroes and elvis presleys and justin biebers--and then, eventually, even wider to encompass my whole goddam country.  america, we're number one--in both wealth and sales of antidepressants.

when I finally hit my big payday, i surprised everybody with my restraint--i bought a decent car for my mom, a little pickup for myself (because I needed one), and invested the rest. while I’m by no means anti-materialistic (in fact, I just indulged in a little of it recently), I have come to believe that things really don't matter all that much.

don't get me wrong--i'm not extolling the virtues of poverty here.  poverty sucks, and sucks happiness outta the lives of people who might otherwise be happy.  all i'm sayin here is that maybe there's a point beyond which money doesn't buy happiness.

and that maybe we here in the first world have passed it.

that's all.