💡 Money series For the full picture of why guilt follows earning — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → The True Nature of the Guilt Around Earning
Introduction: You Reach the Figure, and the Doubt Begins
Three months of living expenses. Six months. A year. You looked up the figures held out as guides and built up toward them as a target.
And you reach that figure. But the instant you reach it, you think: this may still not be enough. Once six months is saved, a year comes into view; once a year is saved, now new assumptions arise — if I fall ill, if my income is cut off.
Guides on how much savings you need have been told at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: why, however much you save, the point of arrival now I am safe never comes.
Let me give the conclusion first. Because, as long as you try to buy relief with a figure, the terminus, structurally, does not exist.
📖 Contents
The Reference Point Rises the Instant You Attain It
First, check the mechanism on the side of the heart. People grow used to a level they have attained astonishingly fast. You grow used to the relief you gained at once, and the reference point itself creeps upward. So a little more stays a little more forever, however much you attain.
This phenomenon appears especially clearly with savings. Because with savings, no objective line of this is enough can be drawn. No one knows what will happen in the future. Since it is unknown, however large a figure you pile up, the assumption it may not be enough can be raised without limit.
That assumptions can be raised infinitely means the necessary figure, too, can be updated infinitely. As long as the standard is a figure that can prepare for every possible event, there is no terminus.
Moreover, there are countless comparison-targets. See the average savings of your generation and that becomes the new standard. See someone who holds more and you feel you still fall short. Just short of satisfaction, a chain that holds out the next standard keeps turning.
Only the Object of the Fear Is Swapped
Check from the reverse side too: can you relax once income increases?
Many people whose income actually rose testify that it did not go as this logic runs. The anxiety what about next month does not vanish. If anything, with more to protect, the anxiety can rather gain weight.
Before earning you feared falling short; after earning you fear losing. Only the object of the fear was swapped; the state of being afraid has not changed one bit.
With savings, exactly the same thing happens. While small, you fear falling short; once piled up, you fear drawing down. The more the balance grows, the stronger the resistance to spending that reduces it. What you saved in order to gain relief, the saved figure itself becomes a new source of tension.
If the anxiety came purely from a shortfall of the figure, it should vanish the moment the figure is met. But it does not. If so, the true source of the anxiety lies in some place other than the figure.
Not the Figure but the Footing Decides Stability of Heart
Where, then, is that other place?
Even holding the same figure, whether that income comes from a structure of when will it stop, no one knows or from a structure of it continues even if I stop my hands makes the stability of the heart entirely different.
Consider. Why do you feel savings are necessary? To prepare for when income is cut off. That is, the urgency toward savings is born from the very structure that income might stop.
If so, savings are not a response to that structure. They are work that eases the fear the structure produces with the buffer of a balance. A buffer eases a shock but does not touch the source of the shock. So however thick you make it, as long as the source remains, the fear keeps welling.
The self-determination theory of the psychologists Deci and Ryan names “autonomy” as one of the needs indispensable for a person to be stable — the sense of choosing your own action and governing yourself [Deci & Ryan, 1985]. A state in which income rises and falls at another’s convenience takes this autonomy. And a want of autonomy keeps supplying chronic anxiety, unrelated to the figure.
So between a person who is unsettled though earning a high income and a person who is calm though on a modest income, a difference arises that the figure cannot explain. What divides the difference is not the balance but who holds the reins.
▸ On this location of the reins, see why you cannot set your own salary.
Conclusion: Move the Question From “the Figure” to “How It Comes In”
Relief never arrives however much you pile into savings not because your target figure is set too soft, nor because it is not yet enough. Because, as long as you try to buy relief with a figure, its price ratchets up without limit.
Let me note, to be safe: I am not denying holding savings itself. Having a margin at hand widens your options. There is real meaning, too, in preparing for a sudden expense.
The problem arises when you make savings shoulder the role of resolving anxiety. Savings ease the fear that income might stop, but they do not touch the structure producing that fear. So however much you pile up, no sense of arrival comes.
The question to check is one. Is what I am now trying to build up for a concrete plan? Or is it to quiet a nameless fear?
If the latter, before chasing the figure, it is time to turn the question toward how it comes in. This whole structure is gathered in the true nature of the guilt around earning.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation” (2000) American Psychologist, 55(1)
