Reclaiming our Citizenship

I recently started reading The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist and then had the privilege to hear her speak at a conference on Forbidden Conversations hosted by Esther Perel. Lynne Twist has so much wisdom to share on how our relationship with money is formed and the evolution that is available to us.

She reminds us that we often forget that money isn’t real. It’s something we humans invented. We originally invented money to help us navigate exchange relationships with each other and to ensure that everyone has equal access to the resources they need. However, when we invented banking and we started making money from money, money morphed into something to be chased and desired, and it became one of the biggest sources of stress, worry, anxiety and shame for many of us. Money went from being a tool that enabled fair exchange to that which ultimately defines our success in life.

Think about it. What do we use to measure how successful someone is in life? How are the most successful people in the world rated or ranked? By their accumulation of money and wealth. When we say someone is successful in business, we mean they make a lot of money – regardless of how much harm they might be causing to the environment or how engaged or disengaged their employees are.

When we inquire about someone’s adult children and how successful they turned out, we are asking how much money they make and what jobs they do. We are not interested in whether they feel happy and satisfied with their life, or whether they have healthy and meaningful relationships, or whether they are physically healthy and practicing regular self-care. We are not interested in their hobbies and passions, or in whether they have children or pets. We only care about how much money they make, because that tells us whether they are successful or not.

Lynne Twist uses the most striking and beautiful distinction in terminology to illustrate this point. She says we used to be citizens of the world. A citizen is someone who takes responsibility; someone who takes pride in what they do and who works towards the wellbeing of themselves, their families, and their communities, and who wants to make a difference in the world, because it matters.

Now we’ve devolved into consumers. Consumers consume, which mean they use up, deplete, or destroy resources. They only care about what they can use and not in how they can serve or be of value. Our entire system is set up to create consumers and to make us believe that we are consumers. We are spoken to in that way, we are marketed to in that way and we are often told that we need more stuff to make us happy.

The result of this devolution from citizenship to consumerism, is that we no longer take responsibility for our own happiness and we keep looking for things outside ourselves to make us happy. We also buy into a really big and debilitating lie – the lie of scarcity.

The lie of scarcity is held in place by three toxic myths that render us powerless if we believe them…

The first myth is that “there is not enough”. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough resources. We wake up in the morning and the first thing most of us tell ourselves is we didn’t get enough sleep. Then we look at the clock and tell ourselves we don’t have enough time. We look in the mirror and we say to ourselves we are not young enough, attractive enough, fit enough, rich enough etc. Even our business meetings are about what’s missing and what we don’t have enough of. We didn’t make enough profit. We don’t have enough time, people, resources, dividends etc… Then at night before we go to sleep, we think that we didn’t get enough done for the day. In this way, we bookend our days into the lie of scarcity or “not enoughness”.

Now, you can imagine that if you feel like there is not enough of anything, you end up living in a constant state of fear and worry that you will be caught without, or that you will run out of time, money, resources, love, energy etc. You worry about getting enough and you complain constantly about not having enough.

Here is how Lynne Twist describes it in her book:

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didnt get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of… Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack… This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life”

So, the second toxic myth we buy into that we see as the anecdote to not enough, is “more is better”. So, we tell ourselves that we need more. More money. More time. More clothes. More shoes. More square footage in our houses. More space in our cars. More qualifications or degrees. More toys for our children. More gadgets. More stuff. And we compare our stuff to other people’s stuff and ask ourselves whether ours is good enough. We question whether we should perhaps upgrade to a better house, car, phone etc. Maybe bigger and more will solve this constant feeling of “not enough”, this emptiness that never leaves us.

Lastly, the third toxic myth is how we keep the other two myths going and how we keep expanding the lie of scarcity. We tell ourselves that “that’s just the way it is”. It’s just the way it is and there is nothing that can be done about it. We relinquish our citizenship, and we resign ourselves to playing the game. Until we die. Always chasing, always wondering when we will have enough, always feeling like we simply cannot fill the void.

I think what stood out most for me from Lynne Twist’s message is that we have devalued our humanity. We value money and stuff more than we value the worth of a person. If someone’s bank balance is low, we deem them as not valuable. We disregard the whole of their being and what they bring to this world, because they don’t measure up in financial terms.

Here I want you to pause for a second and think about the people who have had the biggest and most direct impact on your life. Were they all incredibly wealthy? Did you ask to see their bank statements before you allowed them to show you compassion, love, acceptance and care? My guess is no. Now, I’m not discounting that people sometimes have role models that are wealthy, and these wealthy individuals inspire them, because they represent what it means to be successful in the world. But how often do we ignore serious character flaws in people when they are wealthy and successful? How often do we look the other way when businesses destroy the environment and cause harm to people in the accumulation of wealth? We excuse it, because they are wealthy and “successful”.

When I think about this, I am reminded of the profound quote from Ralph Waldo Emmerson: