Note: I wrote this for my client newsletter a little while ago but I thought it was worth posting publicly as well. I may occasionally update this blog with similar posts in the future.
Last summer I read the wonderful How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, a very practical guide to keeping on top of “care tasks” (e.g. cleaning, cooking, laundry) when you’re too overwhelmed by other things in life to prioritize them. The book’s intended audience is people living with trauma, mental illness, and other serious issues, but I found its lessons to be applicable to almost anyone who finds themselves in a moment (which we all have) where everything is just too much.
The overarching theme to the book, which Davis gently reminds readers throughout, is that Care Tasks Are Not Moral. There’s no connection between keeping a tidy home, looking our best, or cooking from scratch, and being a good person—and yet we’re constantly bombarded by messages from TV, magazines, and (especially) social media that implicitly or explicitly suggest otherwise. When those messages are internalized, a feeling of shame wells up any time, say, the house is messier than it should be, or the dishes get left in the sink overnight. And when you’re already going through a rough time, that can be enough to give up on those tasks entirely.
But as Davis adds, we do need care tasks on a certain level just to be functional: To ensure we have clothes to wear, or that we don’t get bugs in the house. This doesn’t require perfection, or even for everything to be clean all at once—it simply means having a system to make sure that no one thing ever gets too far out of control. For example, maybe one night the dishes get left in the sink, but the living room gets picked up. And the next night the laundry stays in the dryer, but the trash gets taken out. The point is not to make the house ready for the cover of a magazine, but to function on an ongoing basis.
As I read Davis’s book, I thought about how much the same concepts can apply to money and finance. We’re taught that frugality and saving are a form of morality, and encouraged to feel shame for spending on “frivolous” things, even when they make us happy. (Think of a time you’ve ever said something like I bit the bullet and bought a new phone, or I finally broke down and got a new pair of jeans to replace the ones that were falling apart, and what that framing says about how we’re conditioned to think about spending money even on things we need.)
But managing your finances as matter of character misses the point, because at its core, money really just about functionality. You need to live within your means (i.e., spend less than you earn), because if you don’t you’ll eventually run out of money and lose your ability to pay for essentials like food and housing. You need to save for the future if you ever want to give yourself the option of not working. Beyond those mathematical realities, however, there’s no – zero – higher purpose to being “responsible” with money, and no reason to shame yourself if circumstances require you to, e.g., cut back on saving for a while, or carry a credit card balance if your cash flow is out of whack.
You may need to make some choices eventually to make sure nothing gets out of control—but when you approach that choice with a mindset of doing what you need to do to stay functioning, rather than having committed a moral failing, it’s a lot more likely that – instead of giving up in despair on doing the things that need to happen to stay functional – you’ll keep things at least manageable until the challenging times are past, at which point you’ll be ready to get back on track.
Ben Henry-Moreland 