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.
