The Way Not to Worry
I hate cleaning. It’s not productive. It’s not creative. It’s not engaging. It’s boring, tedious work. It is necessary, though, so I end up doing a lot of it. But I try to minimize the amount. My family has no such compunction. My son scatters his toys all over the floor and then runs off to get more. My daughter dumps her school work all over the table and leaves her crafts arrayed in various states of completion. I’m convinced my wife, when she cooks, competes to show how many unique pans and plates and utensils she can use for a single dish. She’s gotten really good at it. Maybe they secretly like to clean and are letting it build up for extra fun those few times (usually right before the cleaners come) when we all pick up the house. Maybe they just enjoy watching me do it.
But I do what I can do avoid it. I refill my kids water from the same cup all day. I wipe off the knives for next time after I spread butter or cut fruit rather than toss it in the sink. I reuse snack bowls for the same food group (fruit for fruit, cereal for cereal, chips for chips, etc.). I use a paper towel for serving toast instead of a plate. Can you tell I especially hate doing dishes? I always put my stuff back in the same spots, whether my water glass or workout stuff or books or keys, so I know where to find them and don’t have to clean them up later. My office is the one room in the whole house that doesn’t slowly devolve into clutter. Because I realized a while back that there’s really only one way to avoid cleaning: don’t make a mess.
The irony is that putting things back where they go and reusing everything and throwing away trash is really just another form of cleaning. The only way to avoid cleaning a lot is to clean more often. You have to think about the cleaning impact of everything you do in order to minimize the cleaning you have to do later. So the less you want to care about it the more care you have to take in doing it.
This turns out to be a universal truth. Avoiding something takes conscious effort, often as much effort as doing it. Think about movie spoilers. It’s easy not to how a movie ends if you’ve never seen it. Also, if you don’t care whether you spoil the ending, you can go about your life, talking to whoever, reading whatever, maybe spoiling it, maybe not. But if you want to avoid ever spoiling the movie, you have to be very careful about it. It takes work.
Some things you can safely ignore. You never have to think about country music so long as you don’t care whether you accidentally hear some. But for anything essential, you must either reckon with it or spend a lot of time and energy not reckoning with it. Food is expensive, shopping is time-consuming, meal planning is a hassle, cooking and cleaning is a chore. You put a lot of time and money into food, but if you want save by eating as little as possible, or nothing at all, you’d have to plan very carefully and have incredible discipline in how you went about it. As someone who diets regularly, I think it’s fair to say you would end up spending almost all of your time thinking about (but not eating) food.
Money works this way, too. I don’t want to think about money. It doesn’t motivate me, and I don’t care about getting it. I’m not poor, but I don’t want to be rich. I have a job. My wife has a job. We can afford groceries and our house and school and whatever else we need. We have a good life, and I don’t desire any more than that. I never want to be either in a position where we struggle to afford necessities or where I feel the need to make more money to afford the things we want. Maybe that sounds easy. Just keep going and don’t think about it, right? Not exactly. As with cleaning, as with food, the only way to not worry about money is to be very careful with it.
There are two sides to every ledger. Add to the messiness column and you’ll eventually have to balance it by cleaning up. Rack up a ton of expenses and you’ll have to pay them off somehow. Making a lot more money isn’t an option for most people, and it’s a hassle regardless. More work, less time with family, a new office, a lot of risk. For some people, squeezing the absolute most out of their career is fun and rewarding. Not me. I don’t want to worry about making as much as possible at the expense of other things I care about. That doesn’t mean I never have to think about money, though. I can ignore one side of the ledger only by focusing on the other. Fortunately, you have a lot more control over that side. The key to worrying less about money is to spend as little of it as possible.
Obvious, maybe, but far from easy. It takes a lot of effort. Everyone and everything is telling us to buy. Advertising is a huge chunk of what you read online, see on TV, and hear on the radio or podcasts. Our days are flooded with those little promises that the next new thing is what we always needed to make our work easier, our leisure better, our lives happier. We know the lie, but it fools us every time. Because there are so many good things to buy. I could spend three budgets on good food alone. But even the best meals, the nicest vacations, the coolest gadgets don’t deliver on the promise. All they do is pile up a huge debt you’ll struggle to pay at the expense of your family and fulfilment.
To keep the ledger in balance, you have to be diligent with every decision. The question to ask is not whether a thing is desirable, but whether it is necessary. Not whether it is good, but whether it is better. Is it better than the freedom from the pressure of needing to always earn more? Is it better than having extra time to spend with your kids? Better than a closer relationship with your wife? Better than more flexibility in your career?
Maybe that sounds dramatic, but I literally ask myself those questions every time I think about buying that box of specialty donuts at Walmart or the fancy cheese at Harris Teeter, when I wonder whether I should get a new phone, and when I’m tempted to grab lunch on the go. None of those things would tip the scale much on their own, of course, but a lifetime of careless decisions would quickly put me in the unwelcome position of worrying about my income and stealing time from my family to compensate.
I wish it weren’t so. It would be so much simpler just to never think about money at all while getting everything I want, spending plenty of time with my family, and having a fulfilling career. But most of us men don’t have that option. We have to sacrifice something. If you want to spend all your time and effort on your career, you certainly won’t be alone, and it may solve your money problems. But finding that balance between career and family doesn’t mean you can ignore money altogether. It means you must be intentional about keeping your financial house clean. It takes work. But it’s worth it.