Timothy Ratliff is screwed.

While on vacation at a fictional resort in Thailand called the White Lotus (filmed at the real Four Seasons Koh Samui, where the Ratliffs’ “Three Bedroom Residence Villa with Pool” will set you back an astonishing $10,349 per night), our friend Tim finds out the FBI is ransacking his office in connection to his involvement with a money laundering operation. (“And I only made $10 million out of your stupid fucking scheme? Fuck!” he shouts at his co-conspirator from 11 timezones away.) This is one of the subplots of the third season of HBO’s White Lotus, a show which is mostly about power dynamics and rich people behaving badly in beautiful places, a “class satire” about “social climbing” and the necks that typically get stepped on in pursuit of ascension.

For much of our two-week travel bender, my sense of time warped under the influence of changing time zones, producing moments of genuine pleasure. While I had hoped for the purity of an unpunctured pause, I often haggled with recurrent flares of anxiety that everything I had left thousands of miles behind was still playing without me; that when I returned, I’d be on fast-forward until synced up again. (In the words of the paid time off study: “Fear of falling behind.”) But it’s also undeniable that several days of fewer than 30 minutes total screen time produced a startling mental clarity (and the sheepish embarrassment of embodying a cliché): Millennial Woman Finally Turns Off Phone and Knows Peace for First Time.

For our last meal before heading to the airport, we decided to visit the Four Seasons Wailea (where the first season of White Lotus was filmed). The poolside breakfast restaurant was bustling with people who could’ve easily been cast as extras: women with Connie Britton-blond blowouts, wrinkle-free foreheads, a rainbow of Hermès sandals on teen boys and older women alike, and silky swim coverups draped leisurely over taut pilates bodies. Men whose behavior seemed calibrated to project an air of harried importance took calls at breakfast while their families dined and chatted around them; I nearly broadsided one rushing to meet his seated wife and children after bellowing to the host he had been working that morning and needed something quick before he returned.

It was a caricature of the caricature portrayed in Mike White’s world, rendering the presentation of families like the Ratliffs something closer to a docuseries than a drama. Even here, at a beautiful beach resort surrounded by ocean on all sides for thousands of miles where a week-long stay costs the equivalent of six months median rent at a minimum, many still seemed clocked in by choice. It is a strange affluence of Faustian proportions in which one can afford a $2,000 nightly room rate, but cannot afford to eat breakfast without joining a conference call. I wonder what John Maynard Keynes, famed predictor of the late twentieth century 15-hour work week, would say. A life that permits you the most rarefied luxury of time freedom in theory but not in practice presents interesting questions about what “luxury” really means, though sitting at the Four Seasons Wailea, I felt pretty sure it wasn’t sitting by a pool responding to emails.

There’s a glut of research attempting to study the screen time habits of children and teenagers, which is sometimes found to be higher in low-income households—but there’s surprisingly little in the way of studies attempting to parse how adults’ relationships with the worlds in their devices are impacted by characteristics like income or wealth. The digital attention economy is, in many ways, an equal opportunity spiritual vampire, a rare feature of modern life that does not improve with socioeconomic standing. Extreme wealth can buy a room at the Four Seasons, but it can’t buy a less addictive iPhone.

As we wrapped up, our waiter, as if waiting for the meal to conclude before raising the subject, asked if we “had seen White Lotus.” Thomas and I exchanged a brief glance, telepathically negotiating whether we’d try to play it cool or admit it was the only reason we drove 30 minutes out of our way. “We’ve seen it!” Thomas responded, as though we hadn’t just been debating if the infamous Pineapple Suite was real over $37 of bacon and eggs. Fortunately, our restraint didn’t deter him. He immediately began ticking off production trivia: Most outdoor scenes were filmed at the adult pool up those stairs to the left. There’s no “Pineapple Suite” (but you can stay in its real-life equivalent, the “Maile Presidential Suite,” for $31,000 per night!). Jennifer Coolidge ate breakfast in that corner, sealed off from other guests. “There were real guests staying here while they filmed?” Thomas asked. “Yeah,” he replied, “They just blended right in.”

The equations of the “financial independence, retire early” movement translate time to money: The accumulation of investments worth 25x your annual expenses in tax-advantaged, low-cost index funds is, supposedly, the most direct way to buy your freedom. Something tells me that locked tech bag might be cheaper.

Over the next couple of days, I kept returning to this message, struggling to metabolize it. To make sense of how unsettled I felt, I went hunting for essays that unpacked the absurdity of its grisly, heavy-handed symbolism. One piece, which included an interview with beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino, featured an arresting line (emphases mine) that I’ve found myself returning to a lot—not because it makes me feel good, but because it treats not feeling good as normal: 

“People ask me, after years of doing this work, do you feel good about yourself all the time? And I’m like, no, I feel like f***ing shit most of the time. But I don’t feel any worse than I did. The difference is, I’ve freed up a lot of my actual sources of power: my time, my money, my energy, and attention, and the amount of myself that I now have to dedicate to other pursuits. As a result, my life has materially improved in a lot of ways that don’t currently include feeling great about what I look like.”

When I engaged in an intentional glow-down several years ago, I figured at some point I’d burst through the clouds of superficiality and come to appreciate my natural self as favorably as I did the artificial one. But as my blond highlights grew out and my face, nails, and body resumed their natural shapes and coloring, I confronted a startling discovery: By the conventional, rapacious standards of capital-B Beauty, all that effort really did make me look better before.

This realization presented a choice that felt existential in the way the film made literal: Accept these terms and choose to reclaim the undeniable economic power of being a stereotypically “well-groomed” woman in exchange for the life force it consumes, or take the chance that there’s something different, and hopefully better, waiting on the other side (even if that means forgoing the dark magic of Botox and bleach). 

In retrospect, my surprise was naïve. To think I could wrest back the time, money, and energy I had formerly devoted to this pursuit without losing the very things that the time, money, and energy had been in service of was an obvious miscalculation. Gaining something else necessarily meant losing elements of what our culture deems “aspirational” for women. 

My naïvete aside, this sort of reverse-Faustian bargain—otherwise known as the distinctly American fantasy that we can get a bunch of something for nothing—happens all the time in economic theory. It’s why we often remain gridlocked when debating the validity of certain plans and proposals. The most explicit example is probably the Laffer curve, an idea which entered the mainstream in the 1970s and became the bedrock logic for Reaganomics and the idea of “trickle-down” prosperity, promising that if you lowered taxes for corporations and high earners, tax revenues would actually go up and everyone would get richer. Its supposedly ‘win-win’ nature makes it a powerful narrative that still dominates in some circles today. 

And while it’s true that Reagan cut taxes in his first year as president and revenues rose during his time in office, the lesser-known plot point of this story is the part where the 1981 tax cut blew such a huge hole in the government’s revenue that the rest of his presidency was spent finding new ways to covertly raise the money to pay for it. “If you add [all the following tax increases] together,” wrote Justin Fox for Bloomberg, they “were almost as big or even bigger than the 1981 cuts, depending on the measure you use.” One of Reagan’s staffers (who later became an adviser to Bush in the 2000s) estimated that the positive economic effects driven by the 1981 cuts recouped only about a third of the revenue losses they created, so the rest had to be generated by increasing taxes elsewhere. One such area was payroll taxes, which disproportionately impact people under the payroll tax limit. They’re far less painful for high earners, for whom the majority of income is over the Social Security cap. (Believe it or not, this will come back around to Demi Moore’s hotness.)

But I don’t want to suggest this rhetorical strategy is solely employed by conservative economists: Progressives use it, too, when we’re trying to sell the idea that programs like universal childcare would “pay for themselves,” or that four-day work week experiments don’t result in any productivity loss. The subtext is, You will lose nothing, and you have so much to gain. In other words, nothing will have to be sacrificed. I understand why we frame these policy positions in this way—we’ve been trained to fear things like higher taxes and trust things like profit motive, so the best way to persuade skeptics is to point out all the ways in which something like universal healthcare is actually way cheaper than our current system, right?

But something would have to be sacrificed—and maybe that “something” is the standard of value we’ve been applying to these questions; the terms of the discussion. 

Rather than emphasizing how we don’t lose any productivity when we only work four days per week, what if we asked whether our current level of productivity is necessary? What if instead the pitch were, “Yeah, we might lose some productivity and money. Would that be so bad? If you can work 20% less but only earn 5% less, would you take that trade?” Or, more to the point, “Why is the current level of productivity necessarily the right level?” Now we’re having a much more interesting conversation!

Rather than promising that universal healthcare or childcare would be less expensive or boost GDP, what if we said, “Yeah, your taxes might go up. You might have less money. But you’ll also get to go to the doctor for free whenever you need to, and every child will be guaranteed a spot at high-quality care centers with healthy, four-course meals like those little baguette-swingin’ French kids get. Is that worth having a little less discretionary income? If so, how much less?” At the very least, having the discussion on these terms would force us to identify more clearly where we disagree. 

To hash out these questions in terms of their costs automatically cedes the framing to a few core assumptions: that anything that raises taxes, lowers productivity, or results in someone having less money, is bad. End of conversation. Nobody in charge (well, almost nobody) is interested in challenging this framing. That we rarely step back to question whether these are the right metrics to optimize for is part of the problem. 

America’s economic identity is one of aspiration, and that means we’ve spent the last 40 years maneuvering for change within frustratingly narrow terms: More growth = good. More tax = bad. That partially explains our current bewildering position, in which all the data says life in America unilaterally rocks (and rocks more than anywhere else!), while a plurality of people who live here insist otherwise. Still, part of the challenge is how enduring the romantic Reaganomics vision turned out to be: one that replaced our early twentieth century skepticism of the ultra-ultra-rich with reverence, and defined “freedom” as the unrestrained ability to lose everything. (The latter is probably best captured by what political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “the great risk shift,” or the systematic transfer of financial precarity from government and big business to individuals.)

Electoral politics aside, I think there’s something to be gained from this lens on a personal level, too. To not feel favorably about, say, the shape of your body or the size of your bank account, and then not feel compelled to change it, is to introduce a glitch in the system, to redefine the discussion on your own terms. Sometimes, in a perverse way, the only thing that provides relief when I feel like I’m failing is to embrace what I get in exchange for this ordinary suffering: a life in which I set the standards. The suggestion that we should always feel thrilled about the way we look, or, in a much broader sense, that it’s even possible to feel good all of the time, is, in many ways, the promise and project of a system for which the chief economic health indicator is just the value of everything being bought and sold. The idea that perfect mental health is attainable at all creates a sort of obligation to attain it, which, it’s worth stating explicitly, leaves us pretty vulnerable to marketing departments the world over. 

The US in 2024 feels a little like Elisabeth, holed up in her apartment, staring at a gigantic, mythic version of herself on the billboard outside—one that, maybe, never really existed—accepting that her best days are necessarily behind her. The fantasy of perpetual youth is similar to the mirage of casino-style bootstrapped success, in the sense that neither pursuit adequately or honestly addresses what must be sacrificed in order to preserve their supremacy. Something will be lost in releasing these fantasies. Something better will be gained.

House hunting transforms the subtleties of class difference into the literal terms of the physical world. Passing through areas with sprawling lawns and wide medians studded with spruce trees, you can sense immediately you’ve drifted too far outside the bounds of affordability. This place is not for you. Similarly, onsite inspection of parts of town that look intriguing on Google Maps reveal auto shops with stacks of rotting tires and overgrown side streets laced with barbed wire, inducing a similar feeling of being too much a compromise on price. Denver, like many major US cities, has a growing unhoused population, and the most expensive neighborhoods mostly shield their inhabitants from the human suffering that all those rising expenses created. Cities—especially growing ones—are unique in that they contain these multitudes of vast wealth and painful poverty often within the same square mile, which makes the disparity impossible to ignore.

Looking for a place to live forces you to locate yourself somewhere on this socioeconomic spectrum. It is as much a ritual of self-stratification as it is a practical operation about budgets and commutes. Nobody knows better than a woman who stumbles into a home with large kitchen windows and tastefully exposed brick how quickly hard numbers can soften under the glow of natural morning light. What’s a reasonable budget when faced with the selves we can envision in these fireplace-warmed family rooms and cozy breakfast nooks? Who is the “you” that lives in the studio apartment downtown above the art gallery, and how is she different from the “you” that retreats to the suburbs? Geography is, as they say, destiny, and the prospect of being spread thin financially for 30 years can fade into the background when it feels like a physical affirmation of your sense of self is on the line. Where you most aspire to live is an assertion about who you are, but it’s also a validation of it. 

As such, this sensible exercise in finding shelter can devolve rapidly into fraught territory: We project ourselves, our futures into these spaces. They become a reflection of us, our striving, and, crucially, how fruitful that striving has been. The process forecloses on practicality by inducing acute economic self-consciousness at every turn. Before long, you’ll find yourself speaking a new language: “Up-and-coming” means “not all the way gentrified yet,” while “good bones” is shorthand for “this neglected piece of shit costs about $200,000 more than you think it should because it’s in the zip code where all the rich white people live, and what you’re actually paying for is access to the schools that their property taxes fund.”

In this way, the United States is a unique place. We’re a country that is both heavily segregated by class and deeply committed to pretending that it doesn’t really exist (it’s a bit of a joke in finance circles that everyone thinks they’re “middle class”). But class is, maybe more than just about anything else, the organizing principle of our society—the scaffolding which provides structure to the rest of it. Housing just renders that organization explicit. Central to this classless mythology is the belief that upward mobility is an equal birthright; that someone who grows up in the neighborhood with the Whole Foods has the same shot as the kid down the street from Dollar General. That’s an economic distinction, but in the US, it feels like a moral one: If opportunity is equal for everyone, your neighborhood is a representation of your character. Talk about stakes! 

Once we find our places, we fill them with our belongings (and, if we’re really swinging for the Americana fences, a bunch of kids). Sometimes, if we do too good a job of this, we have to move somewhere larger that can accommodate these things and people while still affording enough space to avoid feeling suffocated by all of it. The existence of the “starter home” implies square footage is a game to be progressed through by sheer force of purchasing power. You will attach yourself to the property ladder by any means necessary such that you can eventually graduate to the sort of space your friends and colleagues will envy and your out-of-state parents will be impressed by. It’s encoded in the mythos of this country: Manifest your destiny by writing your name on the right plot of land. It’s not just your prosperity on the line, but your ability to secure the prosperity of those who come after you—most conversations about housing turn to discussions about ‘generational wealth’ after approximately four minutes.

We submit to this gauntlet by arranging our lives around it, Zillow push notifications on full volume, accumulating both the space and the stuff that assures us we are moving in the right direction (up) and navigating the pressures of modernity with the right skills (competence). There are architectural tells that things are going according to plan: pallid granite countertops, aluminum-faced appliances, black metal features stripped of all ornamentation. The magic of this popular, Selling Sunset-style cold sterility, with all its white space and sharp edges, is that it is radically bland. It suits anyone with enough money to pay for it. In her book of essays Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino calls athleisure “late capitalist fetishwear.” This design aesthetic is the architectural equivalent. 

I like it, because of course I do! It’s a risk-free environment to reliably signal you’ve Done Things Right. The ability—or inability—to manifest it for yourself once you’re of Proper Home-Buying Age telegraphs that reality to others more effectively than just about anything else. It’s like living inside a management position at Goldman Sachs. The homes we’re supposed to find desirable are not places to live, but places to affirm our proficiency at navigating the marketplace of modern life. A private thrill surges through me anytime a 22-year-old CleanTok influencer appears in one of these spaces in my feed, a disembodied forearm hovering over a deep stainless steel farm sink doused in chemicals, ScrubDaddy in hand. It brings me an illicit comfort to observe a presentation of upper class life that is so miraculously, stereotypically capable, and this 4,000-square-foot glass box is the most fitting stage for such a performance. 

As we drove through the neighborhoods that contained houses we couldn’t even tour without feeling as though our very presence was a flagrant lie, we joked about how we’d eventually be able to afford to live there—how someday, those giant yards and theater rooms would be within reach. It was easy and fun to fantasize about that version of my life, how I’d plant real roots in the Whole Foods part of town for the first time since I was a Kentucky kid living down the street from Dollar General. We slowed to a stop outside of a stately home enveloped by a crown of towering pine trees. At that moment, delirious from exposure to the fumes of so many commas, I could think of no better way to spend a life than endeavoring to afford such a gorgeous endorsement of one’s success. My fatigued Zillow app told me the mortgage was $13,000 per month.

On our third day of scoping, we noticed signs bearing cartoonishly oversized arrows pointing toward an estate sale for several blocks. We decided to take a break from our patrol to have a look around. As I always do before entering a homespun shopping opportunity in a ritzy part of town, I fantasized about encountering a vintage Hermés bag amidst the discarded furs of some old rich lady who had passed on without communicating its value to the clueless son charged with executing her estate. Given the stratospheric prices of the homes we were passing ($2,995,000 million or best offer!), I felt this daydream realistic. But upon entering, I knew immediately I had miscalculated. Threading through a crowd of people of all ages, we stepped gingerly on green carpets compressed from decades of stepping, dodging low-hanging gold light fixtures. The musty scent of stale cigarette smoke and camphor clung to every surface. 

In the kitchen, a woman animated by the frenzied ecstasy of a bargain wrapped pink china in off-white packing paper while her husband, obviously the muscle of the operation, diligently arranged it in a Sterilite tub. In a small bedroom, painted aquamarine, rainbow towers of old sheets and knitted blankets were stacked high, threatening to topple. In the garage, we found rows of books about cats and a collection of children’s easter baskets. In the basement, two old typewriters, half a set of Encyclopedias, and a few sun-bleached South Beach Diet books that looked as though they had been read quickly and forgotten. This was a caricature of normalcy: Tiffany blue vinyl benches installed around a plastic dining table, beat-up pots and pans bearing no brand names. A woman who liked cigarettes and cats and sewing and writing and, occasionally, dieting.

The old Denver native who once lived in this home clearly preceded the influx of elder millennials with tech money and BMWs and the billionaires buying their fourth vacation houses in Aspen. Her home, flanked on either side by enormous new constructions, was like a postcard from a bygone era. Now, we panned through the detritus of that past. Who was this woman, I wondered, and what would she think of this scene? Would she mind this callous analysis of her belongings by her community? Would she think it amusing or hurtful?

It was both touching and unnerving to move so casually between the walls of a stranger’s life, at once intimate and impersonal. I watched as teenage girls picked through costume jewelry, as old men collected dusty jumper cables from a pile in the shop that looked as though they hadn’t been connected to anything with an electrical current since the turn of the century. I couldn’t believe that people wanted to sort through, purchase, transport, and store this junk, and at the same time, that the precious accumulations of an entire life on earth could be swiftly categorized, priced, and sold for parts to schmucks like me passing through from out of state. 

Something about the scene felt profane, even though the arc of every life bends toward the great equalizing force of the estate sale. I imagined the contents of my own closet being dragged out for dispassionate display on folding tables, marked with round, neon stickers. $50 for the Chanel sandals she spent six months pining after. Used socks by the dozen. Hand towels free with purchase. I pictured strangers sifting through the drag net of my life, noticing how many colored pens I had hoarded in pockets around the house; all the used-up Duracells in a gallon bag labeled “Dead?” because I was never sure how to dispose of them properly without starting a battery fire in the California desert. I had spent all weekend mentally projecting my future into the homes I was entering—just not like this. 

Our economic status quo prescribes devoting your life energy to this material arms race: to run as fast and as far as you can from your individual starting line, the distance you’ve traveled intended to scan as undeniable proof of your capability. We’re encouraged to infuse this distance with meaning; allow it to determine how we feel about how well (or not well) we’ve done. Ask any adult how they’ll know they’ve “made it,” and nine out of 10 will mumble something about a dream home. 

Standing in the aftermath of someone else’s journey is a little bit like watching a wave make light work of a sand castle.* It’s easy to forget as we diligently abide the stratifying status quo that we are all bound for the same destination, emptied out, where the distance will be sorted suddenly and irreversibly into anonymous stacks and piles. The quintessentially American proposition that a good life is one dominated by building the biggest castles possible—when they are all necessarily destined for the tides of our inescapable fate!—is absurd, and that revelation is as depressing as it is liberating. We’re going to keep renting.

—
*I’m sorry. Any time I write “sand castles,” I can’t help but think of this undeniable sitcom bop. Robin Sparkles is the star Sabrina Carpenter wishes she was.

As I filed away new evidence of my own impending mortality with each story of life interrupted, I imagined how small and insignificant something like pErSoNaL fInAnCe must feel in light of the news that you’ve got, say, a Stage 3 diagnosis. Periodically, a post will appear in the personal finance Subreddit that describes exactly this grim outlook: I’m 35 and my doctors think I have 18 months left. Should I drain my 401(k)? The responses are always empathetic, encouraging, and congregate in the “burn it all down and go out in a flame of glory” camp. The corporeal reality of the situation thrusts the carefully honed Responsible Life Plan playbook into an embarrassing light, like an accumulation strategy caught with its pants down. 

I remember getting a flash of this financial nihilism while scheduling Beandog’s euthanasia appointment. My insides were raw, and I sensed that something profound was about to take place—like I was stepping briefly into another realm. When the compassionate woman on the phone gently (and understandably!) mentioned the house call fee before we hung up, it felt preposterous, like discussing the particulars of the weather forecast while strapped to the electric chair. Normally, my money feels intimate to me; personal, a source of comfort and control. But at that moment, having already conceded that I was about to facilitate the loss of something irreplaceable, money felt detached, meaningless, far away. It’s hard to imagine how it must feel when a human life—or your own life—is in jeopardy. 

By the time I was shifting uncomfortably on the crinkly paper of the exam room, I was belly button-deep in lists of WebMD symptoms (the stomachache is definitely colon cancer; no other explanation) and life expectancy statistics. I wanted to know how many people live to spend their retirement savings, a question I had never once pondered for myself, assuming I’d hit at least 90 before slowing down. Turns out that an adult woman in the United States has an 11% chance of dying before her 60th birthday. Men fare a little worse: They have a 19% chance. (Technically, the data tries to predict how many people born today will still be living 60 years from now, and out of 100,000 people, the numbers are 89,000 and 81,000, respectively.)

I’m not sure if this is how statistics actually work (someone who didn’t major in communications, weigh in), but according to the Social Security Administration in 2021, you’ve got between an 80% and 90% chance of hitting retirement age. There are a lot of variables that impact your chances in either direction—smoking! running ultramarathons!—but we don’t have total control over our odds, of course.

The relationship between our health and money is complicated. A realization that one’s life might be cut unexpectedly short by illness puts our financial plan in stark perspective, yes, but a new, out-of-pocket-maximum-shaped sinkhole yawns open underneath it, too. Most people recognize that sacrificing your life savings is worth it if it means you get to keep your life: 41% of American adults live with medical debt. 17% of that group declares bankruptcy because of it. 

This is why describing healthcare as a marketplace is so hollow. A free market is a place where rational actors can consensually exchange value; where the law of competition forces a seller to make a better product at a lower price. The buyer always has the option not to transact (or to find a substitute). But I need to find out why my stomach always hurts in a different way than I want to buy a new pair of shoes. 

One story in the issue described the physical and mental deterioration of a woman whose condition kept getting misdiagnosed. I imagined how hard it must be to re-enter the slot machine of the medical system over and over again, watching your bill climb higher with each pull of the lever, while your body continues to fail you. Did she quit her job? How did she keep working? I wondered, before realizing she probably needed the job to keep the insurance that fed quarters to the machine.

We’re told our private healthcare system (and the for-profit financing that powers it) maximizes our “consumer choice.” (Your choice of doctors who are “in network,” at least.) But did this woman have a rational, market-driven choice in how she sought help? Maybe a little, but not in any real sense of the word “choice.” In that impossible situation, most of us would hop into the nearest wee-woo-wee-woo bankruptcy bus and allow some private-equity-owned hospital chain to strip our checking accounts for parts, because that is the only real option. 

This is the complex duality we must navigate: You might not live to enjoy the money you’re saving, and if you do, you might need all that money and more to pay for your care. A scary medical experience can be both proof that life is short and that the UnitedHealth appeals department hold times are long. 

If you’re navigating medical bills right now, I’m sorry. It comes for all of us at some point. We did an episode around this time last year about how to negotiate costs and who you can engage to help. If you’re interested in imagining how our system might improve based on the model set by countries that are crushing this problem that all societies face and earning better health outcomes as a result, we covered that in depth in early 2022. 

But I have to go—I have a follow-up appointment that bears a secret cost known only to Blue Cross Blue Shield and God almighty, so expect a follow-up report in 6–18 months when the bill comes.

Would it make you think differently about your accumulation phase—hell, about your life in general—if you knew this information?

Would you even want to know?

Normally, we think about our money’s relationship with time in the opposite direction: The present is the most valuable time to invest, because it gives our assets the longest runway to grow. Most of us—and by us, I mean the type of people who engage with financial content for fun—are really good at understanding that when it comes to accumulation, there’s no time like the present.

But in a 2018 white paper (from a firm that, to be fair, sells annuities) called “The Decumulation Paradox,” the authors investigate a strange behavioral pattern in “affluent” and “mass-affluent” retirees, defined as those with more than $200,000 in assets, not including their primary residence: A lot of retirees aren’t spending their money. 

“Actual retiree spending behavior appears to contradict [the 4% safe withdrawal rate research]. Greenwald & Associates (2017) shows that only 31% of retirees across all wealth levels withdraw from their portfolios on a regular, systematic basis; 17% do not withdraw any money from their accounts. Only 25% of the most affluent retirees—individuals with assets of $2.5 million or more—withdraw from their portfolios on a systematic basis.”

It would seem those who are best at systematically saving aren’t so good at systematically spending. 

You might assume these people are just irrationally devoted to leaving behind large nest eggs for the aforementioned stepson or other charitable causes, but the survey data indicates the opposite: Only 1% of retirees reported charitable giving as an important financial goal, and barely more (3%) stated “leaving an estate to heirs” as a major factor in their decisions. 

What did they care about? 48% said their number one priority was an assurance of a comfortable standard of living, while 28% said their number one goal was to protect their current level of wealth. Behaviorally, this manifested in a few ways:

1. Rather than creating “dynamic strategies” to fund the lifestyles they wanted to live using their investment gains, many appeared to fit their lifestyles within the confines of their “guaranteed and steady” incomes (their pensions, Social Security, and dividends), leaving much of their life savings intact. 

2. On average amongst this cohort, the researchers found that 40% of required minimum distribution withdrawals were reinvested. In other words, retirees were saving their retirement income.

Accumulation is the phase that should be challenging: It involves working and sacrificing. Boo! But decumulation? That’s the party you spend your whole life planning, baby! Why not take your bra off and stay a while?

Maybe it’s because to do so would be an acknowledgment of something far more existential and terrifying than running out of money. 

The other night, I was enjoying Season 3 of Hacks, a show that’s getting improbably better as its storyline progresses. In Episode 4, Deborah, a comedian in her seventies, contends with her age in a conversation with Ava, her mid-twenties writer: “You know, your whole life, you say ‘One day. One day, I’ll do this. One day, I’ll accomplish that.’ And the magic of ‘one day’ is that it’s all ahead of you. But for me, ‘one day’ is now. Anything I want to do, I have to do now, or else I’ll never do it. That’s the worst part of getting older.” 

Accumulation is the magic of “one day.” Decumulation is the pressure of “right now.”

To contend with your lifelong approach to money is to contend with your own mortality. The spreadsheets animating drawdown strategies and potential portfolio outcomes end, abruptly and anticlimactically, at the point in which you’re presumed to be no longer living, and holy Google Sheet, if that isn’t an uncomfortable and unwelcome elephant in the Excel file. To continue to accumulate is to reject the reality that the future you’ve saved for is already here.

And sure, we live in a late capitalist hellscape—so when I inevitably slip into this same, irrational trap someday, I’ll probably cite fears about astronomically expensive long-term care needs as justification for my decisions. But there are insurance products for that! (…as the white paper so generously reminds me in its concluding takeaway, buy an annuity.)  

Still, this would explain the tendency to fixate on financial minutiae (small spending decisions; whether our high-yield savings is earning 4% or 5%) in lieu of asking the bigger picture questions (Am I cultivating a life I want to retire to? Am I pursuing meaning and keeping things like money in perspective?). It’s not because we think an extra percentage point is the linchpin on which our future depends, but because those are the concerns that feel manageable. 

Maybe we only ask the questions we have the courage and capacity to answer. 

There’s probably something—some career shift, some family trip, some big move across the country—that lives in your proverbial “one day.” But you know what they (we) say: There’s no time like the present.

Your calculation for purchase decisions graduates from the realm of second-grade subtraction (is there enough money in my checking account to pay for this?) to future value formulas and exponents (if I don’t spend $23 today and invest it instead, in 40 years it’ll become $Y—do I value that money in an uncertain future more than this plate of baja shrimp tacos?). 

When you begin to think this way, you become too tired from running constant cost-benefit analyses to fully enjoy buying anything (which, I suppose, is a solid strategy if your goal is to spend less). Sometimes I yearn for those more freewheeling days, when I’d sign my bar tab at the end of the night through half-shut eyes and make a run for it before the barkeep could inform me that my card was declined.

Concluding that “it’s about balance!” or that you “should spend money on things you value!” feels insufficient to me, even if the sentiments are true. This particular brand of balance allows maladaptive financial behavior to stick around for as long as it serves a purpose (read: making you richer), then employs category-specific spending like a burn salve. Sure, you’re blistering in the hot sun of your own mental accounting, but at least you’ve got some discretionary aloe to soothe the pain!

Alternating between operating like a human calculator and a selectively wild spender conjures a similar dilemma to the person who discovers the magic of healthy eating and exercise, then quickly descends into extreme dieting—but decides a “cheat” meal will make their restrictive habits more sustainable. 

My approach to responsible money management often looks a lot like the cheat meal framework: As long as I aggressively save and invest most of the time, I’m permitted (encouraged, even) to splurge—but only occasionally, and only on things that I’m certain I value. There’s little room for more experimentation, play, or error, beyond the occasional anomaly. 

On that note, “value-based spending” feels like it falls short as a practically useful outlook for money management, because it’s a lens that’s relevant to a relatively small portion of your financial choices each month. The vast majority of my spending is just the stuff that keeps me (or my family) alive—like our godforsaken PG&E electric bill that charges 52 cents per kWh (jail!) or biweekly bags of groceries. I tallied our April spending to see how much of it was purely discretionary—like buying books, getting haircuts, paying for streaming services, or going to restaurants. The total was 11%. The other 89% of our outgoing funds went to things like car insurance, medication, utilities—stuff I certainly value, but by default. I didn’t have to think very hard about whether or not I would pay for trash pickup or abide by the state of California’s laws around vehicular liability.

If you, like me, find yourself flinching with every purchase or undermining your own joy in even the smallest of indulgences lest they shave $32 off your net worth, is your metaphoric “cheat meal” really having the desired effect? Even if your results are rapid wealth accumulation, is relating to money in that way healthy? After all, you can have a really high net worth and a bad relationship with money at the same time.

I wonder if a better balance might be striving for an attitude that doesn’t analyze every insertion of the chip; maybe a personalized threshold below which you decide not to second-guess your desires. My friend (and COO of Ritholtz Wealth Management) Nick Maggiulli recommends .01% of your net worth—for example, if your net worth is $250,000, it’s a waste of time to think twice about any purchase that costs less than $25.

But what I think I’m really looking for is a broader orientation for relating to money that’s prosocial, playful, and generative, as opposed to operating from a defensive crouch. I want to build the muscle of knowing exactly how money can deliver the highest and best use in each moment—even when the highest and best use is ignoring it altogether.

Tonight, I ordered a $31 to-go order of trash sushi (read: deep-fried and stuffed with cream cheese). As I drove home eager to eat it while watching Sex and the City reruns away from other diners who may judge my inability to deftly operate chopsticks like the grungy little couch gremlin I am, I felt a pang of guilt about my purchase. Carrie voice: I couldn’t help but wonder, Do I really value takeout, or could this money have been better allocated? 

Clearly, I still have some work to do.

It was about a woman named Dr. Becky Kennedy and her 2.4 million followers on Instagram (a number that’s now 200,000 higher since the story was published, me among them). Kennedy is a child psychologist-turned-parenting icon, and like Huberman, she possesses the charisma and institutional credentials that make her easy to trust. She’s known chiefly for her theory (method?) of, among other things, “sturdy parenting.” Her business, Good Inside, provides parents with resources and community—with answers—in one of the most uncertain aspects of human life.

From what I could discern during a close read of the story, sturdy parenting is different from traditional parenting in the sense that it doesn’t emphasize discipline and consequences, and yet it’s different still from the new-age “gentle parenting” because it emphasizes enforcement of boundaries. Her business model is enormously profitable: She has 48,000 subscribers who each pay $276 per year, which I—you already know—calculated to mean $13M in recurring annual subscription revenue.

Despite my child-free status, I consumed an unspeakable number of her videos with great enthusiasm. She’d set up a scenario (“Your kid won’t get off the shed!”) and play-act the wrong response (mostly yelling). And? I’d think, anxiously awaiting the big reveal, What should I say instead?, ready to take mental notes of her response. (“I’ve asked you to get off the shed. I’m going to come over there now. If by the time I am there, you are not off the shed, I’m going to physically remove you.”) Noted. Her straightforward, highly specific advice was revelatory. Does she do adult interactions, too?

I perused her comments section where the volume and caliber of discourse stunned me—followers largely guiding one another, adding their own insights—and observed the way Dr. Becky always seemed to have a directive to share. The experience left me feeling as though I had been sturdy-parented.

But there was a passage in the piece that struck me as eerily similar as I basked in the afterglow of the Huberman piece: “[Kennedy’s parenting methodology as a] trend has grown in tandem with the increasing precariousness of everyday life…that nagging, unanswerable question of what constitutes enough is what has given rise to the Dr. Becky phenomenon. Among many of today’s parents, there is a twin desire: for reassurance that they’re doing their best and for guidance on how to do better.”

My comparison of these two is not to imply there’s anything sinister going on with Dr. Becky, of course, just that both Huberman and Kennedy educate acolytes numbering in the millions about specific ways to engage with some of the most “I don’t know, it depends” areas of our lives: health and parenting. 

Even before the Huberman Harem was revealed, the (very little) public scrutiny he did face mostly pertained to the conclusiveness with which he presented information. His scientific claims were sometimes backed only by “limited animal studies,” and his critics pointed out that he had a habit of “posit[ing] certainty where there is ambiguity.”

My husband was at work when he read the Huberman piece, and we were texting about the claims. I asked him how he felt about religiously following directions that may or may not be truly scientifically proven.

“BORING give me a protocol you nerd” is how I’m going to begin responding to ambiguous emails.

The problem is, we—the masses—don’t like ambiguity. Not to mention the fact that ambiguity does not a hit podcast make! When it comes to high-stakes, low-confidence areas of our lives, we’re willing to cede total accuracy for certainty. (I’m sure you can see where I, Money with Katie, am going with this.)

We don’t want correlations. We want action steps! We want someone to tell us what to do. “Give us a protocol, you nerd” is the rallying cry of the content creation age.

In my own job, I often feel most uncomfortable in the moments where I sense my beliefs sound too dogmatic. Money is right up there alongside health and parenting with “things that really do depend,” but as ole’ Hubes, Kennedy, and one of the only personal finance influencers to have millions of subscribers, Dave Ramsey, know, there’s great economic value in prescriptive certainty. Ramsey’s “Baby Steps” are an iconic example of this formulaic approach.

These experts are comforting and magnetic because they have a solution for everything: Morning, low-angle sunlight as a way to “promote early-day cortisol release” (content warning: The linked citation features unsettling illustrations of a younger Huberman smoldering through his morning routine and is laden with AG1 ads; proceed with caution). “Sturdy parenting,” rather than punishment, as the correct way to enforce boundaries and discipline. Saving $1,000 as your beginner emergency fund as the step you must take before doing anything else.

These are things that can be easily summarized in a PDF (something I inadvertently realized while hunting for citable examples, only to find that the Google search suggestions often returned “pdf” with the keyword). 

As luck would have it, there’s even an episode of Huberman Lab wherein Dr. Becky Kennedy joins to discuss “parenting protocols!” (The first question he asks her: Can you give us some steps for determining how good of a parent we are?)

Part of this is just plain practical. People have looked to philosophers to make sense of the world since Ancient Greece. What are Huberman, Kennedy, and Ramsey if not modern-day philosophers with better ecommerce practices? There’s less functional utility in people with wishy-washy, sometimes-contradictory takes who just kick around ideas without making any assertions. We want the seven steps, not “the seven considerations you might want to consider if you fit this narrow band of circumstances.”

Our search for certainty explains why some people prefer to pay down a mortgage with a 2.75% interest rate rather than deposit extra cash into the stock market. These are nearly identical choices from the standpoint of how they impact your daily financial life (i.e., you’re sending money to an institution that you can no longer spend), but one promises certainty and the other does not. 

You know what happens when you pay down the debt faster—you save 2.75% in interest on each dollar of principal paid down. The stock market guarantees no such thing. You could make a contribution to an investment account and lose 10% that year, or make 30%. While we mostly know the average return is somewhere in the 7% per year ballpark, it involves more of a leap of faith than debt paydown. 

(This is my grand unifying theory about why some people are so good at paying down debt aggressively but struggle to flip the switch to aggressive wealth-building—it requires being comfortable with risk, with taking decisive action in the face of uncertainty.) 

In that sense, uncertainty is just another word for risk—and most of us are not keen on risking the wellbeing of our health, finances, and kids with a free-wheeling approach, so anyone who seems credible and confident enough is a decent candidate for the person who gets to tell us what to do. 

So what’s the risk? Perhaps a monoculture of sorts. If we’re all drinking the same synthetic health powder and parenting in identical ways and approaching our money with the same cut-and-dry blueprint, maybe we all really will be better off: living in a world full of healthy, well-regulated, debt-free automatons. But I don’t know—it seems like there’s a certain texture our differences lend us as a collective that keeps things lively and interesting; new discoveries and breakthroughs that can only be made if there’s not just one correct way of being healthy, parenting kids, or managing money. 

Conceiving of these experts and their suggestions as “take what you like, leave what you don’t” tools has always seemed the healthiest way to engage with these titans of ideas. But it would be pretty hypocritical for me to offer you a prescriptive takeaway here, so instead, I’ll conclude by saying this: I suppose the only difference between ancient philosophers and modern-day ones is that the ancient ones believed there were no answers, only questions.

I sat up a little straighter in the sweatpants I’d been wearing for three days. The “trick,” of course, was some to-do list management system that costs “just 62 cents a day.” In my moment of greasy, inferior weakness, I swiped up, filled with visions of myself in a committed relationship with an adult skincare routine and an uncanny ability to remember other people’s birthdays. In this future, not only was I crushing it professionally, but I was also bilingual, moisturized, and on top of canceling free trials before they charged my card for $9.99 plus tax. 

My hope curdled when I discovered it was just an app that mapped your time-blocked tasks onto your calendar for you. My problem wasn’t a lack of time or Google Calendar mastery—it was simply a lack of the juice. “The juice” is how I refer to the get-up-and-go-mojo that propels me through my to-do list like a heat-seeking missile. It is the joie de vivre that compels me to plug my transactions into my Wealth Planner, respond to texts, take out the trash, write words for a podcast that’ll (hopefully) make you laugh and think.

It had been rainy and cloudy all week, and I, evidently running an operating system about as sophisticated as a clearance Home Depot houseplant, had been moping around—unable to photosynthesize the juice. 

Reluctant to accept that I was doomed to juicelessness, I diligently tried everything to summon it: cold plunges, cardio, hydration, caffeine, weight-lifting, walks, affirmations, pointing at myself in the mirror shouting Get your shit together! I wished there were a hard reset button I could press on my brain and body to recalibrate the vibe and restore my patience with everyone around me, but short of psychedelic drugs (considered, but ultimately discarded, as too much of a wild card), I realized the juice cannot be manufactured from concentrate. 

I searched high and low for motivation, but all I found was irritation and indifference. I still feel anxious, she says, between her third and fourth shots of espresso. I checked my Oura ring app to see where I was in my hormone cycle, hoping that might explain it—only to spiral further upon realizing I was in the thick of the phase when energy, clarity, and motivation are supposed to be at all-time highs. Betrayed, I had nothing left in my biohacking toolbox to throw at the psychological discomfort. We had officially reached the bargaining phase.

In a particularly anxious moment, I recategorized my transactions in Copilot, an attempt at exerting control and order over something that felt consequential yet manageable. I was rewarded with a tiny drip of dopamine. 

The funny thing about this state of chronic agitation and analysis paralysis, I’ve found, is how interconnected our anxieties can be. They are not discrete figurines to be moved around our lives like chess pieces. They are more like primordial soup, and *game show host voice* you’ll never guess what latent fear is going to emerge next. What’s that? Oh, it’s a video of a bridge collapsing! 

As such, my anxiety about money (usually irrational) seems to crescendo when other things feel out of my control. When a trip itinerary gets scrambled or my laundry piles up and leaves me with no clean underwear or I miss a deadline at work, I find myself compulsively reaching for my banking app to quantify my security. 

Recently, I received an email from a reader who had finally gotten around to rolling over her old 401(k) into an IRA. She was surprised by the way completing this simple-but-annoying task shook loose a dormant motivation: “Doing it made space in my life to pursue other financial goals. I hadn’t realized the amount of low-level anxiety that had been running in the background because of this situation. Now I have a list of financial goals I want to tackle.”

In my suboptimal state, I found her desire to tackle things enviable—but her message made me think of a browser with a bunch of tabs open, each sucking a small amount of bandwidth away from the mainframe (now’s the part of the essay where I pretend I know how computers work). After a while, you become accustomed to the cacophony of buzzing from each open tab, and the louder it gets, the harder it becomes to focus on any one thing—but the diffusion of source material makes it feel as though there’s no “one thing” you can address to quiet the volume. You’re swimming in the soup of an overdue medical bill and a backlog of reading material and an unfinished grocery list and a partially planned birthday celebration and edits for the client and… Money becomes just one of the things contributing to a generalized sense of unease. This overwhelm has a flattening effect, making prioritization feel impossible and futile.

Entrepreneur and writer Chelsea Fagan shared in a recent TikTok how this two-way street flares up in a predictable way in her life: “If you were to chart my anxiety over the last decade, you could basically lay an identical chart of my external financial stress over it.” She revealed how, in an earlier phase of life plagued by a suspended driver’s license, wrecked credit, and seemingly insurmountable debt, she had been prescribed an anti-panic medication. Over the years as she gained her footing—financial and otherwise—she found her anxiety became curiously more manageable. She owns a place in New York City! She writes books! She has good credit! 

But last year, her company hit a rough patch, and she had to personally loan the business money to make payroll. Suddenly, she said, she found herself doggy paddling in the same panic-inducing overwhelm that characterized her earlier adulthood. She got an emergency prescription. 

Her story raises a question about our body’s natural fear responses to situations that are straightforwardly untenable. We might build up arsenals of self-optimization to help us metabolize lives that place too many “urgent,” competing, and complex demands on our brains (as I have, with my temperature-controlled mattress and biodata treasure trove), but what does it mean when our bodies begin rejecting the optimization and, by extension, the circumstances that necessitate it? 

In her recent essay My Anxiety, Lauren Oyler emphasizes “emotions as shaped by power structures.” Academics first began kicking around this approach with the term “Americanitis,” describing “‘the high-strung, nervous, active temperament of the American people’ in an 1898 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.” This timing is especially notable when you consider that historian Jonathan Levy pegs 1895–1904 as the “Age of Capital’s climax,” when “industrialization [occurred] on a scale never previously imagined.” And they didn’t even have TikTok to stoke their fears about all those new bridges!!!

Of course, it’s pretty easy to disprove the thesis that money is a cure-all for mental health issues—look no further than billionaires getting into pissing matches on Twitter with other grown men using their full government names for proof that even an endless supply of money won’t save you from yourself. 

But it’s obvious to me that the relationship is at least a little causal, and in both directions: Can a lack of money (and the subsequent sense of precarity) create anxiety where it didn’t formerly exist? Almost certainly. Can financial clarity and control ease feelings of powerlessness or chaos elsewhere? Again, my money’s on “yes.” 

Regardless, last week I found that when the mental chatter reaches fever pitch, there’s only one thing that can generate escape velocity from thin air: momentum. Muscling your way through any “tab.” As much as I’d love to tell you disengaging entirely and rewatching the last season of Love is Blind was the answer, avoidance tends to make things worse for me.

I assure you: It will be positively miserable! Just like submerging your body in cold water or, worse, waiting on hold with your 401(k) provider’s customer service center. But the momentum from closing the first tab is the only force strong enough to launch you out of the fray. I should know—finally doing the dishes was the only thing that gave me the juice to write this.