The Curse and Necessity of Money
The Curse and Necessity of Money
What Money Means and Why
Today’s essay is part of a new series that includes , , , , and . Each of us will wrestle this week with how we negotiate our personal relationships with work and money.
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There’s no way around the obvious truth: I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I just did. I could try to tap-dance around that reality…but why? It’s easier to simply be honest. My grandfather was an electrical engineer wizard, a corporate CEO many times over, and a wise and lucky stock-investor. He was worth millions.
Growing up—in Ojai, California, 90 miles northeast of L.A.—I lived a comfortable upper-middleclass life. Dad was a computer engineer and former college professor and had two master’s degrees. Mom was a nursing instructor (and former nurse) at the college level and had a master’s as well. Most of my family had master’s degrees. Mom—also a writer—had a lovely, massive library at home and I pulled musty classics down from the shelf often and read.
Early in life—around the age of 10 or 11—it became clear that I was for mysterious reasons attracted to trouble. This came in many forms but one form was that I enjoyed hanging out with guys my age from “the other side of the tracks.” Some of my best friends came from blue-collar working-class families in the nearby town of Oak View, sandwiched between Ojai and coastal Ventura. O.V., as locals called it, was a decent little town with cops and firefighters and plumbers…but also neo-Nazi skinheads and serious drug-dealers.
I got to know some of these families intimately. Some were quite dysfunctional. Alcoholism seemed to tear through the fabric of most of them. These kids grew up in diametrically opposed circumstances to me: They had required household chores; they worked after school all four years of high school; they moved out at 18; they did not plan to go to college. These kids mostly became plumbers and electricians and got into construction, etc. *(Not every family was like this, and some did go to college, and there were of course complex variations and exceptions, as there always are, but for the most part, 95% of the time this was the general case.)
On the contrary: I grew up in a big house with a huge backyard, bone-shaped Olympic-sized pool; my grandmother’s 100-year-old pool table (Dad was a shark); no chores; and basically whatever I wanted. In many ways it was a luxury and yet a bad thing: It did not prepare me for the unforgiving real world. (I didn’t grasp this until much later.) My parents—who were exceedingly good people—wanted me to be safe, happy and educated, not self-sustaining and financially-independent. Such was the nature of my childhood. I grew up hyper self-conscious, especially when it came to distinctions of class. I was always an outsider with these working-class friends. They liked me and embraced me but also saw me as an outsider and rich boy (which I was).
As is often typical—and ironic—I tried harder than others to “act tough,” trying desperately to prove I wasn’t just some boring bourgeoise. (A term I did not know back then, of course.) While the O.V. kids were in effect just being themselves, I felt a deep need to “prove myself.”
*
I moved out of my parents’ house just after high school. I’d somehow managed to graduate despite being expelled three weeks before senior graduation at the fancy college-prep Catholic institution I attended. (You’ll have to read my semi-autobiographical punk rock/philosophical YA novel to hear about how that all went down and what happened next.)
I lived on the couch of my high school punk buddy’s tiny, nasty one-bedroom apartment which he shared with his punk girlfriend. I paid the utilities; $200/month. At the time I worked at a prestigious tennis club—which is hilarious when you think about the punk rock alcoholic anarchy I was involved with back then—five days a week from 5am to noon. When I wasn’t working I was saving up, drinking forties, reading Orwell or Huxley or Kerouac, surfing, or else listening to punk records on the ole classic hipster turntable.
At 22 I left Ventura for Santa Cruz. This brief period was a disaster. I blacked-out almost every day. I got arrested. I shot up heroin. I was a disorderly, tainted mess. I hated myself. Any money my well-meaning parents sent to me went up my nose in the form of white powder. I was young, drunk and angry. Only punk shows, serious literature, surfing and sex took the edge off. I was lost, meandering in a nowhere land which I couldn’t seem to escape from.
At 23 a punk friend and I moved together into a small one-bedroom apartment in San Diego in Pacific Beach. We hated it but it was out of Ventura and that was the main thing. I got a fulltime job working for an Israeli family in La Jolla selling tourist clothes.
*
I had dozens of jobs over the years I was drinking; read about these various jobs here. I always quit after three, six months, maybe a year occasionally. I hated work. I loathed money. I was financially supporting myself but no matter what job I had I always felt it was absurd, pointless, painful. I was beginning, in my mid-twenties, to slowly fade out of punk-rock into the man I am today: A writer; a sensitive, unconventional artist.
Money, for me, had never been about power or about opportunity or about the acquisition of money for money’s sake. Having come from money—from class privilege—I felt I didn’t need money, a rather confused, immature and naïve notion I nevertheless clung onto well into my twenties. Money did seem, to me, to be the classical “root of all evil.” Money created bad, dishonest, immoral incentives. Money corrupted. Money made people do things they would never do normally or for any other reason. You heard about people being killed for money; siblings angrily fighting legal battles against each other over a parent’s will; money wedging itself between best friends; and of course the grotesque nature of money’s corrupting nature in politics.
Who needed money?
And yet, of course, we all need money. It’s the economic and social glue that binds humanity together, for better and for worse. Even the earliest agricultural societies 10,000 years ago used some form of “money” in the form of bartering for objects, exchanging items of equal value, giving certain items hierarchical value over others. Money is just a symbol for a bigger concept: Power; control over one’s autonomy; social acceptance; class divisions; hierarchy; opportunity. One needs money simply to survive. Those who lack money are perpetually trying to get it.
In my thirties I started getting my writing published in little literary magazines and journals. I started making a small living as a developmental book editor. I taught at writing conferences. I put myself out there. I began to understand that the best goal was not to avoid money or to pretend that money wasn’t the Alpha and Omega, but instead to find things I genuinely enjoyed doing—things I was passionate about—and try to find a way to make money doing that. My mother—to her credit—had told me that since I was a kid: Find something you’re passionate about and try to make a living doing that. Truer words I could not find.
And so I have: Book editing, novel writing, short stories, even dog-walking over the years have brought me income. It’s been a long, long time since I worked a regular, conventional 9-5 job. Once upon a time I worked at many of them: Restaurants and clothing stores; food markets and trail-clearing; surfboard-shaping and moving companies; and many other jobs. I remember being in my early twenties and thinking that the only thing I wanted to do was to be a rock-n-roll “professional tour roadie.” I just wanted to travel and drink and feel alive and experience life.
I also remember being in grade-school with my best friend and going after school to his father’s career counseling office one day. His dad had us fill out career forms trying to indicate what we might do in the future. Guess what my future career was: Writer. That man got to see me go full-circle and, in 2013, before he died of skin cancer, he hugged me close, clutched my hand and said, “See. I told you you’d be a writer.”
Touche.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned in my life about work and money is that we all have to work, money is necessary for survival but that, if you push hard at it, you can find a way to make money doing what you truly love to do in this world. That is a blessing. Not everyone necessarily gets this chance. I come from privilege. I came from a family that enabled me to attend a private Catholic college-prep high school, to attend college, do things more or less my own way and at my own slow, confused pace. I may not have felt fully prepared for the world as a teenager forging my own wayward path, but I figured it out by bushwhacking through the jungle that is young adulthood. Looking back: I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Everything I went through made me who I am today. Had I not had the opportunities, privilege and confusion I did back then, I probably wouldn’t be the writer I am today.
For all of this—my upbringing, my parents, even money—I am forever grateful.
Well written Michael. I sort of snorted reading the "I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth," part. (Snippets of The Who playing through my head; I had the plastic one.) I grew up poor, but never really knew it. There was food on the table, there were eight of us living in a small house that had an oil stove. Some winters--they seemed colder when I was a kid--the condensation on the windows froze. I never knew we were poor immigrants. My Dad worked in a mill, worked night shifts because it paid more. My mother cleaned hotel rooms under the table sometimes. I never realized we had little to live on, until I moved out. I was never good with my money because I was like you. I blew it up my nose and cranked it up my arm; I pissed it up against the wall. But I kept the same job for 45 years. I needed a calming influence in my life and found that with my wife. She was just as fucked up as I was (except for all the hard stuff), but she knew how to save money. (She came from fine immigrant stock as well.) Like I said, all I ever did with my money was spend it.
I don't think being born poor, or being born rich, makes any difference to the people we eventually become. My parents believed in me. It made me believe in me. You're right, there are more riches in the world than just money. Sure, it pays the bills, and you can actually buy your freedom with it when you get older, but you can't buy the memories of having gotten to where you are. I never went to college and learned everything I know by reading and studying. I learned that from my father. He never went to higher education because of the War. It amazes me to think of what he would have become with the education he deserved. But it doesn't work that way, does it?
Well done Michael. Your essay does a great job of pointing out what we will do to fit in with our chosen crowd. From the outside it looked like you had it made, yet on the inside you felt the need to prove yourself.
From the outside we all want the kind of upbringing (wealth) you had, yet on the inside it may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
I found it interesting, and appreciated, your suspicion of money while also stating your wealthy parents were very good people. There is no one right way and, perhaps, no matter what we’ve got, we want the other.