by Ben Hewitt
“My riches is life.”
—BOB MARLEY
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prelude
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
In which it is revealed that our happiness or lack thereof is often nothing more than a manifestation of our expectations.
CHAPTER TWO
In which I begin to consider my relationship to wealth and how monetary concerns have come to dominate 21st-century American life.
CHAPTER THREE
In which I go mushroom hunting with Erik and Breakfast, thereby proving Benjamin Franklin wrong.
CHAPTER FOUR
In which I explain how I met Erik and became intrigued by his relationship to money and wealth.
CHAPTER FIVE
In which I reveal all.
CHAPTER SIX
In which I consider matters of appropriate scale, industrialism, embedded energy, the creation of money, and the commodification of the natural world. Oh, and rocks. Those, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In which I go for the gold.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In which I grapple with the difference between “value” and “worth” and learn about the currency of trust.
CHAPTER NINE
In which I have doubts.
CHAPTER TEN
In which I choose freedom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which I lay it out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I FEAR it would be impossible—or worse, unforgivably tedious—if I were to list everyone who has contributed to this book, either in person or through the sharing of their ideas and insight via their own works. Therefore, I will keep this relatively brief.
First, I am tremendously grateful to my friend Erik Gillard, both for opening his life to me and in the process demonstrating what true wealth looks like. It is no exaggeration to say that my friendship with Erik has transformed not only my relationship to money, but also my understanding of what simply matters. This is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, and it is my deep hope to pass along his generosity to as many people as possible.
Second, I would like to thank the people who juggled the pragmatic aspects of bringing this book to life. These include my amazing agent Russell Galen, whose insight was essential to the process, and my editor Mike Zimmerman, who granted me the freedom to allow this book to unfold as my experiences dictated. I am also particularly indebted to a pair of insightful and sharp-eyed readers, Mary Elder Jacobsen and Woden Teachout. Thank you, all.
Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my family, including my wife Penny and my sons Finlay and Rye. Not only do they support and nurture me during the writing process, they are forever reminding me that the best things in life aren’t things at all. As if that weren’t enough, not a one of them ever complains that I don’t make enough money.
PRELUDE
The boy is only 12 and already he is a cradle of self-awareness and resourcefulness rarely associated with such tender youth.
At 12, he is a vegetarian and has been for a year already, for he loves animals and cannot imagine their having suffered for his benefit. Or perhaps more accurately, he can imagine it, and because he can, he cannot be party to it.
At 12, he erects complicated structures in the backyard of his parents’ home, utilizing materials scavenged from the cobwebbed corners of the old timber-framed barn that sits listing but still majestic in the center of the property. One of these structures is a tree house he built with his brothers, and when he speaks of it now, he describes like this: “We built it way up in the tree, like five stories, and it had all these platforms and windows and stuff.” His hands dart and jab the air in the retelling, like birds pecking at scraps of food. Nearly 2 decades have unfolded since that tree house was built; perhaps the passing of time has made the tree house grander, as the passing of time is wont to do. But still: five stories!
At 12, he collects castaway bottles, in part because it bothers him to see them cast away, and in part because he likes to line them up in rows along the walls of his room. He thinks the glass is pretty, and he thinks that maybe someday he’ll find a use for them.
At 12, he is walking home from school one afternoon and spies the top of a bar stool emerging from a dumpster. It is orange, like a traffic cone. Like a beacon. He grabs the rim of the dumpster and boosts himself up the smooth metal side. He grabs the stool, throws it over his shoulder, and carries it 1 mile home. It’s a perfectly good stool, and he can’t understand why it was thrown away, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He is only 12, after all.
In the winter when he is 12, he skates every day on the reservoir only a few steps from his house. He thinks about how he learned to skate many years before, alternately wobbling and gliding across the ice, wearing a leather football helmet that once belonged to his grandfather. He remembers how his father would tie his skates for him, stooped over his feet in the open doorway of the barn, his father’s fingers red with cold. Fumbling with the laces. This is one of his strongest memories, and in its recounting, his hands remain still.
He remembers how, years before, someone had released a school of goldfish into the reservoir, how they’d thrived, grown fat and sleek on whatever goldfish eat. He tells how, out on the ice, he pumped his arms and began to push outward on the honed steel blades of his skates. They cut shallow grooves on the reservoir’s surface. Parting frozen water. Rhythmic scrape, blood rushing through him, he begins to move across the frozen surface, graceful, fast, unencumbered, unafraid. No helmet now. He doesn’t fall anymore.
He looks down. The ice is clear, or at least clear enough that he can see the carp, grown now, each a foot long or more. They scatter beneath him and he tries to follow one and for a while it lets him, but then it veers downward and disappears in the murky water. For the briefest of moments he imagines himself a fish, living among a school of other fish. But it’s silly, he knows. He is not equipped for such things and besides, they are down there and he is up here, separated by a barrier that is at once translucent and impenetrable.
He pumps his arms again, faster. He pushes his blades again, harder. He carries nothing; he needs nothing.
Has he ever felt so free?
INTRODUCTION
IN 2008, just as the financial crisis was revealing the full extent of its well-honed teeth, I came to a startling conclusion: I knew nothing about money. This gap in my knowledge was not exactly new, of course: I’d quite happily lived with it for the entirety of the nearly 4 decades I’d been alive. But in late 2008, having watched my meager retirement savings become half as meager, this ignorance suddenly felt like a burden I very much needed to lay down. Where had my money gone? I had a vague notion that it had been transferred to someone else, someone on the right side of a bet I was hardly aware I’d even made, but I wasn’t sure. I mean, money couldn’t just disappear. . . . Or could it?
The more I thought about it (and believe me, I thought about it plenty, for what else is insomnia good for?), the more I recognized how poorly I understood money. Not only did I not know where my fragile little nest egg had flown to, I did not really understand where it had come from, or what, even, it represented. I mean, I knew in the abstract that it could be used to purchase goods and services, things I needed, like toilet paper and gasoline, and things I didn’t really need, but were awfully nice to have, like underwear and Internet access. I grasped that these things had value, which was denominated in and in large part defined by money.
But what if the money was just sitting there, not changing hands, not buying anything? What, then, was it worth? I suspected there must be something more to it than the paper upon which it was printed or (as is increasingly the case) the pixels comprising the digitized numbers flashing across my computer scre
en whenever I accessed one of my online accounts. But what that something more might be, I couldn’t say.
Now, it was at about this time—with my IRA in tatters and my status as almost-middle-class freelance magazine writer threatened by the sudden closure of numerous titles that had previously graced me with a goodly amount of work—that I made the acquaintance of a man named Erik Gillard. Acquaintanceship soon evolved into friendship, and I became very familiar with the particulars of Erik Gillard’s life, which, I was immensely intrigued to learn, did not include money. Or not very much of it, at least. And yet Erik immediately struck me as one of the most contented people I’d ever met. Was there a correlation, I wondered, between Erik’s evident contentment and his aversion to money? I thought there could be, and with my paying work disappearing faster than a keg of Bud Light at a NASCAR race, I figured that at the very least, Erik could teach me a trick or two about living on the cheap. Given the increasingly sporadic nature of my paychecks, I was going to need all the cheap tricks I could get.
These coincident factors—the dawning recognition of my ignorance regarding money, my newfound friendship with a man who barely used it, and the alarming possibility that my primary means for acquiring the currency of 21st-century America was about to join Lehman Brothers in the dust bowl of financial history—seemed to me almost fateful. It also seemed to me like fascinating subject matter for a book. The result is what you are now reading.
As is so often the case, hindsight allows me to see just how naïve I was. Because when I actually starting writing about my friend and my evolving understanding of money, I quickly came to see I’d included only two pieces of a much larger puzzle. The story that was unfolding, I soon realized, was not so much about money, but about the nature of money. It was not so much about my friend’s aversion to money, but his embrace of an entirely different form of wealth. In making these statements it may seem as if I am splitting hairs, but in the following pages, I promise to explain why and how I am not.
This book argues for an evolved definition and consciousness regarding our “economy,” to the extent that at times it may be hardly recognizable as such. I am not talking about a “new economy,” a phrase that is often associated with technology and the gauzy, seductive sense of prosperity we attribute to the digital era. Rather, I am talking about a perspective on economics that transcends almost everything we have come to associate with the word. The perspective I present may sometimes seem radical, but this is only because our current context for economics has become severely distorted by the paradigm of growth-dependent corporatism and the increasingly monetized nature of our lives and relationships. This is what I call the “unconscious economy,” and, as I will argue, this is what’s radical, for it can exist only when we ignore the most basic laws of nature and when we engage in the deepest self-deception.
Across the political and social spectrums there is little debate that there is a need to reform our economy and no shortage of ideas regarding how this might be accomplished. But the overwhelming majority of these ideas, no matter their origins or their details, are tragically flawed, because none of them address the underlying issues at play. In short, they assume the necessity and survival of the unconscious economy, even as it continues to erode the true, holistic wealth upon which all of humanity depends.
Perhaps the greatest challenge inherent in writing a book that attempts to redefine words and disputes the very premise of the ideas behind those words is developing the linguistic shorthand necessary to make it clear which definition is at play at any given time. Are we talking about wealth, or wealth? The economy, or the economy? I might have chosen to develop new words: “econocology” or “wealthonomy.” But the truth is, rather than coining clever new words, we need to profoundly alter our relationship to the words we already have, and, even more important, to the associations contained within these relationships. I chose “conscious economy” because I feel it suggests, to the extent any two-word term can, what it is we need to do most: wake up to the fact that the economy we have been reared under is sadly lacking in its acknowledgement of basic truths. In short, it is unconscious.
The term “conscious economy” does not refer to our economy in the faulty and destructive way we’ve come to understand it, and it is also necessary to redefine “wealth” so that our cultural perceptions of the word are no longer dependent on systems and arrangements that undermine both the natural world and ourselves—which, as we will see, are really one and the same. In discussions of wealth, I have settled on “holistic wealth” to differentiate between the definition I will lay out and the status quo assumption of wealth as relating to monetary and physical assets (aka cash and “stuff”).
Like so many of my fellow Americans, I am not comfortable with our nation’s general trajectory. This is not to say there are no bright spots, such as the slow erosion of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. But on both macro and micro levels, looking out across the spectrum of politics, finance, environment, and even interpersonal relationships, I am troubled. There are, of course, numerous factors contributing to this malaise, but I have come to believe that most, if not all, of these factors are built on the foundation of our personal and collective relationships to money, wealth, and abundance.
In other words, no matter how honorable our intentions might be, no matter how diligently we work to repair what has been broken, or protect that which has not, we will be at best only marginally successful so long as we operate in the unconscious economy. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of environmental protection, where despite the tireless efforts of innumerable activists and passionate citizens, the relentlessly dispiriting trends continue. In 2010, in the face of overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest crises we face, global carbon emissions jumped by a record 5.9 percent. During that same year, and not entirely unrelated to this jump in emissions, the earth lost an estimated 50,000 species—a pace that is 1,000 times the natural extinction rate.
Not surprisingly, most of this pollution, along with a majority of the species losses, can be attributed to habitat destruction wrought by logging, mining, agriculture, and other forms of industry that feed—and feed off of—the unconscious economy. Sure, for a while we might be able to halt (or at least stall) an oil pipeline or protect a particular habitat. But so long as we continue to inhabit an economy that must grow, so long as we continue to devote ourselves to the accumulation of monetary wealth, these measures will never be more than very small bandages on a very big wound.
This is a purposefully simplistic example, as befitting a short introduction to a book that greatly expands on the subjects of wealth (both holistic and not), economy (both conscious and unconscious), money (of every stripe), value, and worth. What is important at this point is not to grasp the minutia of the conscious economy, but rather to begin to understand, in broad terms, what I mean when I speak of it.
One last matter, before we dive in. This book is, in no small part, about a personal process. When I began writing this book, I thought I was writing merely about my friend Erik and his relationship to wealth. It should have come as no surprise to learn that what I was really writing about was my relationship to money and wealth and, by extension, all of our relationships to money and wealth. I did not know it at the outset, but what I was really writing about was the difference between value and worth, between true affluence and the hollow prosperity of the commodity marketplace that now provides and controls almost all of the material components of our very survival.
What I was really writing about, I came to realize, was how we might recast our expectations and shun the empty abundance of material affluence as we acknowledge and embrace true, holistic wealth. We inhabit a socioeconomic environment of historically high income and asset inequality, a nation cleaved by the 99 percent to 1 percent divide. But however unjust this may seem, and however fervently we might wish to balance the scales, I often wonder if those of us among the o
verwhelming majority of this split owe it to ourselves to ask a simple question: Is this a form of wealth we even want?
In short, this is what I hope to convey in the title of this book: We can choose to cut ourselves free from the artifice of monetary wealth. We can save ourselves from the damage such wealth causes, both to humanity and to the natural world. We can save ourselves from the burden of the need to pass the majority of our lives in pursuit of the money we need to procure the goods and services that, in an economy that has commodified practically every facet of our well-being, are essential to our very survival.
Of course, at times it can seem as if we have no other choice but to shoulder this burden. The unconscious economy has backed us into a corner, both individually and collectively, making us both its dependents and its curators. This influence can sometimes feel overwhelming and insurmountable, and it can seem as if the range of choices available to us is limited to only those we are offered by the commodity marketplace. But as we will see, this is merely a story we have been told. Whether or not we believe it is entirely up to us.
[ CHAPTER ONE ]
IN WHICH IT IS REVEALED THAT OUR HAPPINESS OR LACK THEREOF IS OFTEN NOTHING MORE THAN A MANIFESTATION OF OUR EXPECTATIONS.
LATE NOVEMBER in northern Vermont is a time of cold, snow, and a raw, ceaseless wind that howls across the landscape in unending curtains like a bad joke you’ve heard 1,000 times before. During this period, storms blow in from the northwest, one after another after another, gathering their anger as they sweep across the stolid gray waters of the Great Lakes. Or they spiral up the coast, sucking moisture off the oceanic surface—this they hoard and then deposit across the northern hills. Or (and this happens quite frequently) they erupt in localized bursts, provoked by moist air climbing the frozen mountains. The moisture rises, crystallizes and falls, rises, crystallizes and falls, a cycle not unlike schools of spawning salmon trying to overcome the cruel laws of nature.