The 2008 First Week of January Test
Saturday, January 5, 2008 at 9pmBy John Friedman
From: John Friedman
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2008 9:08 PM
Subject: The First Week of January Test
Greetings all —
This is a group email, going out to clients and friends of JFRQ Consulting, about the First Week of January Test — an easy to use, quick as can be, test to help you determine how well you’re faring on the second prong of the two-prong definition of financial health I’ve developed over the years (described more fully below).
To begin, then — quick! — answer this question for yourself, honestly, unhesitatingly, and top-of-minded’ly:
How does it feel to be back in the saddle after the holidays? Are you feeling all charged up, rarin’ to go, and like you have a brand spankin’, perfect and all-shiny-new 2008 stretching out in front of you, together with oodles of goodies to fill it up with? Or are you feeling something other than all that?
Hmmm … and just what does that sort of thing, you might ask, have to do with financial health? For the answer, please read on …
* * *
The Test Described.
Financial health, as I define it, has two main components:
1. The Numeric Component of Financial Health (a/k/a the Balance Sheet or Money-Stored component)
The first component of the definition of financial health has to do with your stored-up wealth: is it of a scale that allows you to perceive your life and the lives of those whom you include within your life as being not overly encumbered or threatened or constrained by your financial situation?
Note well the use of the word overly in there, to account for the fact that most of us will never perceive ourselves as being 100% financially unencumbered, 100% financially unthreatened, and 100% financially unconstrained.
So the first prong is mostly about all things considered, do I have enough? And here, for most folks, more is better.
2. The Non-Numeric Component of Financial Health (a/k/a the Income Statement or Money-In component)
The second component of the definition of financial health has to do with how well your economic self coexists with all of your other selves: is what you’re doing to bring money into your life (or, if you already have enough, if what you’re doing with the money already in your life) giving you a grin, or is it giving you a grimace?
After all, if what you’re doing day-in and day-out to make your economic way in this ol’ world of ours is tearing away a part of your heart, ulcerating a rip into your stomach, and stressing-out a swatch of your wazoo (the most painful part of the body in which stress can reside …), how can that be financial health?
So the idea here is that, somewhere out there, each of us has within us a happy integration between all of our selves, where our money life is totally consistent with who we are, and in fact amplifies and reinforces the better parts of our selves, generating an ever-so-sweet virtuous circle.
The Roots of the Test.
I initially wrote about The First Week of January Test several years ago, in an essay on my not-really-a-blog blog, called (you guessed it) The Financial Health Blog at http://financialhealth.blogspot.com.
You can read pertinent parts of that essay down below my signature, or you can read the whole thing — political comments and all — at
http://financialhealth.blogspot.com/2006/01/exquisite-balance.html
Or, for those with long-URL-not-happy-in-my-email-viewer issues, here’s the tiny approach:
That, then, is what the First Week of January Test is all about, and from whence it came. Now it’s on to a short section on how you can best use the test to further your own financial health, remembering all the while the tried and true MBA’ism that, that which is measured is more likely to be controlled.
The Test Applied.
The odds are that many people reading this email are doing so during the first hour of the first Monday of the first full workweek of 2008. That point in time, or thereabouts, is perfect for putting yourself to the test. You can do so by asking yourself:
How do I feel, now that I’m back from the holidays, looking out at a brand spanking new year — all shiny and new? How’m I doing in terms of balancing, on the one hand, what I love doing, and, on the other, how I spend my days?
And for those of you in a to-do frame of mind, here’s your to-do: please measure yourself on The First Week of January Test by (a) writing a paragraph or two about all the different financial health plusses and minuses you’re feeling this week, and (b) as part of that writing, assigning a number from 1 through 10 for how all of that feels, with 10 being sheer nirvana and 1 being the worst rut you’d ever dare let yourself be in. Do that every first week of January from now on, and, by gosh, pretty soon you’ll have yourself a nice little record of how well you’ve been doing when it comes to improving the balance between what you love doing and how you spend your days.
Those wanting to have a tool for drawing groovy pictures of your First Week of January Test results, please do let me know. Because, as many of you know, I’m always happy to teach a piece of dumb software how to draw smart pix of interesting numbs …
* * *
Cheers, all, and may your First Week of January Test test results start out great and get greater year after year after year after year …
John
Excerpt from An Exquisite Balance re: The First Week of January Test
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Now let’s look at how all of us economic beings feel in the first week of the new year.
It’s good to do so because, at this time of the year more so than any other, we can all judge how well we’ve aligned our economic selves with the other parts of our selves. We can do that by seeing how we feel as we climb back into the saddle — back into our working selves — after being mostly off work for a week or maybe even two.
So how’s it feel?
Many of us find that climbing back into the saddle after being essentially off work for a week or maybe even two is pure torture. We’ve realized how much more we like life when we’re not doing what we do to be economic beings, and even though we might wonder whether we would find it as much fun if our lives were always like one big holiday break, we imagine that we could figure out how to make it great, and that, at the very least, we’d like to have the challenge.
Others of us find the climb back into the saddle tantamount to coming home, as, for us, being away from work is like being away from our selves — removed from that which is us. Those of us who feel that way probably figured out ways to be working here and there over the holiday, because not working is, in essence, not being.
A subset of us folks in this latter category feel that torture element especially strongly because for us the holidays means family time, and, in an unhappy twist, being with family is like being away from home.
A lucky few of us, though, are at home both when we’re at work and when we’re at play and everywhere in between; we’ve aligned our economic selves with the other parts of our selves (Schedule C filers and business owners note: when it gets harder and harder to distinguish between personal and business expenses, you are accomplishing something that is very good medicine for most people).
So as we climb back into the saddle after our time off, and as we stare at a brand spanking new year ahead of us, all shiny and fresh, we feel good on all accounts: we’re happy to be back at work because there are so many exciting things to look forward to, and to accomplish, in the coming year, just as we’re happy to have had wonderful time off with family and fewer accomplishings to check off the old list. Both are good; both are in balance; both feed the other; both make our world go ‘round.
If you are lucky enough and smart enough to get to that lofty state (methinks it takes both), then retirement takes on an entirely different meaning. Indeed, for those few who find the balance described above, the whole idea of a cliff retirement (i.e., the kind of retirement where one day you’re working full time and the next day you’re never going to work again for the rest of your life) looks risky, fraught with peril and just plain ol’ out of balance. Why come to think of it, it could even kill ya!
So as you sit there in your particular saddle the afternoon of January 5, 2006 (or whenever it is that you might be reading this), here’s hoping that you feel both (a) reluctant to be back in the saddle (because you had such a great holiday and want more more more) and excited (because you are so very much looking forward to making the year a wonderful one for your economic self, with much promise, lots to do, and lots of creation and good to be accomplished).
Here’s hoping, then, that both the rearview mirror and the forwardview window make you feel equally (precisely equally) smile-ful, that you feel equally (precisely equally) smile-ful when you contemplate both the social parts and the working parts of your days to come, and that your only regret (not often contemplated, but necessarily contemplated as you go along on your merry bliss-ninny way) is the fact of your own inevitable mortality. But that regret is for a day not today!
Cheers, all.
One Smidgen of Rant, Two Dollops of Can’t, and a Cup of Alignment & Transparency, to Illuminate and Praise Peace and LUV
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 at 11amBy John Friedman
The Internet is filled with rants. There are sites devoted to nothing but. And many blogs, of the “this is my day” variety, have virtual reams of rants.
My guess is that most of those rants are for venting steam, pure-and-simple, and done out of self-interest only, rather than done for illuminating some grave injustice for all the world to see, but my guess is also that there is a certain entertainment value to a well-done rant if the rant is easy to relate to. So people are drawn, let’s say, to well-drawn rants.
To the best of my memory, I haven’t ranted in here before. But that changes now, at least a smidgen, as, purely for the purpose of illuminating a very important financial health concept having to do with pricing and the structure of commercial relationships, I’m going to talk about something that made my blood boil. Hopefully it will entertain as well as inform, because, believe you me, it is a common thing I am about to slightly rant about. And, if not, at least I got vented.
Years ago, in JFRQ Consulting’s Backgrounder FAQ, I wrote this:
that, among other things, minimizes conflicts of interests
between the client and the person providing services to
the client. Our further general belief is that the two most
important factors involved in accomplishing that goal
in the financial services arena are (a) alignment,
which means that compensation under the revenue
model closely tracks delivery of value to the client, and
(b) transparency, which means that the general
workings of the revenue model are well-known to the
client in the first place, and simple enough to be easily
understood.
I have since come to believe, with my heart of hearts, that this Alignment and Transparency framework can apply in far more settings than just the financial services arena. In fact, I see the framework applying to most relationships — commercial, social and, yes, even spousal.
But there’s no time to go into all that today. Instead, as a result of two interactions I had as a customer, I want to talk about that A&T framework from the customer’s perspective.
From the customer’s perspective, the two prongs of the A&T framework are: am I paying a price that corresponds with the value I am receiving (alignment), and do I understand what’s going on with the transaction, including what I’m paying (transparency)?
United Airlines is a company that I have sworn off doing business with, over and over again, because I find the culture there to be among the worst commercial cultures with which I’ve ever interacted. But somehow we use them because they are huge at SFO and, yes, because they got their hooks into us with those non-transferable miles (note: there are plenty of agnostic mileage programs out there, where your miles work with many carriers; do not get hooked into a single-carrier if you can help it!).
Without reciting the whole sorry story of United’s culture, I’ll encapsulate the whole thing by saying that years ago United and its employees worked out a deal that looked like the proverbial win/win, in which the employees would have a big ownership stake in the success of the company. But, as it happened, the employees bought in BigTime at pretty much the WorstTime ever (note: never buy into any large position all at once!). One big humongous bankruptcy later, with the employees having taken it on the chin over and over and over and over again, the company is back on its feet making some money. But the people inside are very, very wounded.
Now, I can empathize with that story, and feel their pain. These employees saw so many of their hopes dashed, and so much of their financial health battered by a seemingly simple, but hugely transforming, career choice of “United” rather than, say, “Southwest” (Southwest is the success story in this field, with a ticker symbol of LUV (I kid you not), and a culture that is generally thought to be among the best in corporate America).
But, sorry folks, my empathy is not the sort of thing that knows no bounds. Financial health abuse aside, somewhere along the way the culture that is United became a culture that almost always ends interacting with me in a way that ends up with my blood in a boil.
So last night and this morning today I had a a classic non-aligned, non-transparent interaction with United. Thankfully, it was preceded by something of a much happier sort. First, though, it’s on to the decidedly unhappy United interaction.
United’s online purchasing system was broken last night, which meant that after probably a dozen attempts (Maybe I punched the number in wrong? Maybe I need to put “street” in my address? Maybe maybe maybe . . . ) I simply could not purchase the itinerary I had saved at United’s site the day before. I kept getting error messages. And so did my wife when she tried to do her own rezzies, on a different computer with a different log-on and everything. So it definitely looked like United’s online credit card purchasing system was on the fritz.
So I went to Orbitz, where I ended up paying a bit more. But we just wanted to get the damn thing done and out of our hair.
Then lo’ and behold this morning I find an email telling me that , even though United’s website indicated I hadn’t made the purchase, it had in fact worked. So now I had two rezzies, one with Orbitz and one with United, for essentially the same travel.
I say “essentially” because there’s a twist to the story: I had wanted to tweak the itinerary I had saved at United’s website the day before, so that it better lined up with my wife’s schedule. So as United’s website had been acting up, one of the things I had tried to do was to see if I could buy the itinerary as-is rather than the tweaked schedule, or vice versa. But neither worked.
Seeing this surprise email this morning, I immediately looked to see which schedule had, in fact , mysteriously and arbitrarily worked — the first one or the tweaked one?
Ah, but of course, mais d’accord, it was the first, non-tweaked version. It was not the one I needed. The luck of the draw . . .
Now, I’ve had some great success with offshore customer service folks. In fact, I’ve had fairly many calls with offshore CS folks that were not only exemplary on the CS front, but that also made me feel the global community of peoplekind in a way that I have only rarely felt it. Bravo!
But if I have to do the equivalent of ear-squinting every time the CS person says something, well, that’s just not gonna work, especially with a bit of a language barrier thrown into the mix.
So I hang up and try again by calling back. This time I have a better connection, and the person seems to have better language ability. But what he has to say to me, quite patiently and quite politely, puts me into a Kafkaian Catch-22-ian box, from which I can merely mime my way against the nonexistent, but quite insistent, walls.
My choices are that I can cancel the errant rezzie, or I can keep it, but I cannot do the tweak. If I want the tweak, it’ll be a hundred bucks.
But, I say, I tried to buy both of these, and it just so happened that the non-tweaked one is the one that came through.
I’m sorry sir, our policy is that I cannot change the reservation once booked.
Do you understand how weird a result that is?
I am sorry sir. I cannot change the reservation once booked.
Do you all do anything other than say you’re sorry when someone has wasted an hour and a half of time because your website isn’t working?
I’m sorry sir. I cannot.
How about a . . .
I’m sorry sir. I cannot.
Now let’s see now . . . how’s the alignment on that one? OK, so it took . . . two hours of internetting and phone calls to end up paying more. Is that alignment? No. Not even close. If I go through that much effort, I should pay less. And if I go through a lot of effort because of their errors, I should pay considerably less.
And how about transparency? Well, the airlines have made their pricing harder and harder to follow over the years, haven’t they? Come to think of it, is there any industry, perhaps not even the financial services industry, that makes its prices so hard to follow, so much a game? How much is the person next to you paying? Half of what you paid? Double? What loop did he or she jump through/what hole did he or she fall into?
Now, as a good ol’ MBA, I am mostly OK with this pricing approach, which MBAs call “pricing discrimination” (the main exception being when poor people are forced to pay more than rich people). I am quite OK with a business figuring out which customers get more value from the business’s services and charging those customers more than those who get less value from those services (notice how mass produced goods are less easy to price discriminate? That’s the downside of assembly line business outputs . . . ).
But what I am not OK with is the arbitrary/game-like aspect of airline pricing. And the opacity. You can’t see what’s going on. It’s like spinning the wheel and seeing what you get. Yes, I understand what they are up to, but mightn’t there be a better way? Something that engenders customer loyalty (other than locked-in miles) with a carrot?
Two weeks ago I found myself having a similar interaction with another business, but this time the result was far different.
This is a business I use on a regular basis, nearly every day. Those who know me well know will know what business it is, but I am going to shove this story through the anonymizer because I do not want to post in a public place information about a private someone else. That t’ain’t right, eh? Pity those who end up on the Internet against their will. It’s different with public figures (thank you NYT v. Sullivan), but private is private, yes?
As a regular customer of this business, I pay a flat, “all you can eat” price for the business’s service (no, this is not about food or eating, but that’s a really understandable way to describe it, yes?). So all is well and good until early this year, when the business changed the way I use the service in a way that would impact how I use the service one day of the week.
But I thought I’d give the changed service a try on that particular now-mangled (from my perspective) one day of the week, to experience something new and take myself out of my comfort zone (always a good idea). So I did so and was glad that I did.
Then, three weeks into the changed service the proprietor mentioned that there was an extra charge for my using that service on that day, over and above what I had already paid. I was quite surprised to hear that, and was pretty sure that, had I known, I would not have used the service that day of the week, and not paid the charge. Taking one day a week off, you see, fit in quite nicely with a change in my schedule I had been contemplating.
Long story short, the proprietor realized that it wouldn’t be right to charge me the extra fees for the past days. As for the future days? I will probably not use the service that day of the week.
Ah, but here’s the divergence: did the proprietor have nothing to say to me when the issue came up other than a robotic I’m sorry sir. I cannot help you?
No. Not even close.
Instead, when I took my credit card out of my wallet to pay the charge, the proprietor, with a grin and a wink and a nice smile said, “What’s that?” and then went on to explain the situation with the additional charges, and that going forward I’d pay the charge but that the past three weeks were on the house.
So, now that I know about the additional fee (transparency) I can understand what the additional fee is all about and make an informed decision about whether the service associated with the additional fee works for me (it is not aligned for me, and therefore I am opting out of it). YA&YT.
United, you are misaligned and opaque. United, I will get away from you. LUV, please start flying SFO (not a chance . . . ).
Proprietor, I am still with you.
So, in all relationships, look for someone who is willing to help you understand what it is that you are getting and giving (transparency) and who seems to be willing to go the extra mile to make sure that you feel like you’re being treated fairly and well, and that you are getting what you pay for (alignment).
This is true in business, but also everywhere else as well, yes?
And think about it: how many opaque and misaligned relationships do you have with friends, family, businesses, etc., etc., etc.?
Perhaps for 2007 you might choose one or two important relationships in which you’re going to endeavor for increased transparency and/or alignment? Today being 1/23, we are already 6.3% into the year.
Time’s a wastin’ . . .
Returning back to the business side of things, does all of this point in the direction of only doing business with small businesses? Well, there are some large and medium-sized businesses who are remarkably good at A&T, but, yes, as far as I can tell, A&T tends to be inversely related to size, i.e., the bigger the biz, the less A&T they have to offer up to you.
And to really take this to the end of the line, consider fostering commercial relationships in your life that allow you to (figuratively) look the other person in the eye and say, “Yes, I want to help this person and support this person’s efforts to put food on his or her family’s table.”
And to stick with the food analogy (and my belief that the ethics of business are no more salient than within the context of the food business), do you want to support General Mills and McDonald’s, or do you want to support the farmers who are growing healthy food and nurturing the land within a 100 mile radius of where you live (bodies of water excluded (mostly))?
If you’re a normal person, with some quid-pro-quo calculator going on inside of you all the time, if you can mock up that sincere look in the eye and the wish-you-and-yours-well, then that’s a great indication that that other person is thinking and feeling the same sort of benevolence towards you, but rather than measuring in dollars, he or she is measuring in terms of customer satisfaction and potential for repeat business. And that means mutual benefit all the way around.
That, then, is the real alignment and transparency. Humans interacting satisfactorily, in a way that makes each of them want to do it again.
Kinda sounds like the opposite of war, eh?
.
The 2007 First Week of January Test
Friday, January 5, 2007 at 2pmBy John Friedman
From: John Friedman
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 2:42 PM
Subject: The “First Week of January” Test
Greetings all —
So, with the first week of the year just about done, how’s it feel to be back from the holidays, looking out at a brand spanking new year — all shiny and new?
That’s the question I posed a year ago in an essay I posted to the Financial Health Blog. That essay talked about using the First Week of January Test to measure how we’re doing in terms of balancing what we love doing and what we do for a living/how we spend our days.
The idea here is that, for many of us, the first week of January is a very telling week. Are we feeling all excited with the possibility that a new year brings? Or are we feeling all crammed-in by being back in our normal routines? Similarly, are we feeling thankful for all the time we’ve had with family and loved ones over the holidays? Or are we happy to be done with all that and feeling like it couldn’t’ve been over with soon enough? Or a combination of all the above?
That’s what the essay from a year ago was about. You can read pertinent parts of it down below my signature, or you can read the whole thing — political comments and all — in the Financial Health Blog at:
http://financialhealth.blogspot.com/2006/01/exquisite-balance.html
Or, for those with long-URL issues, there’s the tiny approach:
If you’ve a mind to, please do measure yourself on the test by (a) writing a paragraph or two about all the different things you’ve been feeling this week, and (b) as part of that writing, assigning a number from 1 through 10 for how you felt this week, with 10 being sheer nirvana and 1 being the worst rut you ever dare to be in. Do that every first week of January from now on, and, by gosh, pretty soon you’ll have yourself a nice little record of how well you’ve been doing when it comes to improving the balance between what you love doing and how you spend your days.
Cheers
John
From the initial blog posting at http://financialhealth.blogspot.com
The First Week of January Test
Let’s look at how all of us economic beings feel in the first week of the new year.
It’s good to do so because, at this time of the year more so than any other, we can all judge how well we’ve aligned our economic selves with the other parts of our selves. We can do that by seeing how we feel as we climb back into the saddle — back into our working selves — after being mostly off work for a week or maybe even two.
So how’s it feel?
Many of us find that climbing back into the saddle after being essentially off work for a week or maybe even two is pure torture. We’ve realized how much more we like life when we’re not doing what we do to be economic beings, and even though we might wonder whether we would find it as much fun if our lives were always like one big holiday break, we imagine that we could figure out how to make it great, and that, at the very least, we’d like to have the challenge.
Others of us find the climb back into the saddle tantamount to coming home, as, for us, being away from work is like being away from our selves — removed from that which is us. Those of us who feel that way probably figured out ways to be working here and there over the holiday, because not working is, in essence, not being.
A subset of us folks in this latter category feel that torture element especially strongly because for us the holidays means family time, and, in an unhappy twist, being with family is like being away from home.
A lucky few of us, though, are at home both when we’re at work and when we’re at play and everywhere in between; we’ve aligned our economic selves with the other parts of our selves (Schedule C filers and business owners note: when it gets harder and harder to distinguish between personal and business expenses, you are accomplishing something that is very good medicine for most people).
So as we climb back into the saddle after our time off, and as we stare at a brand spanking new year ahead of us, all shiny and fresh, we feel good on all accounts: we’re happy to be back at work because there are so many exciting things to look forward to, and to accomplish, in the coming year, just as we’re happy to have had wonderful time off with family and fewer accomplishings to check off the old list. Both are good; both are in balance; both feed the other; both make our world go ‘round.
If you are lucky enough and smart enough to get to that lofty state (methinks it takes both), then retirement takes on an entirely different meaning. Indeed, for those few who find the balance described above, the whole idea of a cliff retirement (i.e., the kind of retirement where one day you’re working full time and the next day you’re never going to work again for the rest of your life) looks risky, fraught with peril and just plain ol’ out of balance. Why come to think of it, it could even kill ya!
So as you sit there in your particular saddle the afternoon of January 5, 2006 (or whenever it is that you might be reading this), here’s hoping that you feel both (a) reluctant to be back in the saddle (because you had such a great holiday and want more more more) and excited (because you are so very much looking forward to making the year a wonderful one for your economic self, with much promise, lots to do, and lots of creation and good to be accomplished).
Here’s hoping, then, that both the rearview mirror and the forwardview window make you feel equally (precisely equally) smile-ful, that you feel equally (precisely equally) smile-ful when you contemplate both the social parts and the working parts of your days to come, and that your only regret (not often contemplated, but necessarily contemplated as you go along on your merry bliss-ninny way) is the fact of your own inevitable mortality. But that regret is for a day not today!
Cheers, all.
On the Occasion of September the 11th, 2006: A Reflection on Power
Monday, September 11, 2006 at 11amBy John Friedman
Five years on, all of us remember back.
For me it is the sound of the sadly-NPR-departed Bob Edwards wafting up through my pillow speaker (a piece of technology that has vastly improved my marriage) saying in a very calm voice and not, apparently, as part of a breaking-in-to-tell-you-some-breaking-news sort of interruption, that a plane had apparently hit one of the World Trade Center towers. More info to come as soon as it’s available.
That has me kinda waking up, but mostly not, because it’s early, and because it sound like a little Cessna or something has hit the huge building that I had known well when I was spending a lot of time in Manhattan — it’s like a fly hitting a window on a three-story house; no big deal.
But then, after about five minutes, Bob is coming back into my slumbering consciousness, but this time, by changing the word plane to jet, he is getting a real rise out of me, so I wake all the way up and turn the tube all the way on (a piece of technology that has not vastly improved my marriage) and, within fifteen minutes or so of doing this I, and tens (hundreds?) of millions of other people witness, in realtime, a huge ball of fire — ten or twenty stories worth of fireball — engulfing the building. Initially the talking heads say nothing of this fireball, but I’m thinking, What just made that thing fireball up like that? That was not more of the same. That was something altogether different.
Then, within a minute or two, the talking heads are acknowledging the fireball, saying that it had apparently been another jet crashing into the building, and then, within another minute or two of that, most of the heads’ helpers are rolling videos of the second jet looking like a dark monstrous avenger thing in a bad sci-fi movie — hitting the second tower, not the first. So now there’s two jets crashing into two towers.
Oh my god.
Now I’m all the way awake — way awake. And I’m watching. Visually it’s quite awesome in the old sense of the word. How the hell they gonna get that put out?, I think to myself. Can a fire travel down a building as well as up? How’re they gonna fix that once it goes out? They re-skinned the Standard Oil Building in Chicago (a building that looked somewhat like a single WTC) because something went wrong with the first skin, but this is going to be a whole lot bigger than that.
Oh my god oh my god.
But never, not even close, does it dawn on me that both of these buildings have suffered a death blow, and are in their death throes — that they’re at life’s end.
So here I am, the son and grandson of architects, the husband of an architect, and a person who helped build big concrete things when I was young — and never in my wildest dreams am I thinking about the possibility of anything coming down. Thunderous death knells await each in a matter of moments, but to me and, I would surmise, to the rest of the world, the idea of all-fall-down is not yet within the realm of possibility.
Beverly is not here; she has something out in the Central Valley this morning, so she had gotten up early and was long gone. I call her but don’t get through (this is pre-Bluetooth; she had a clunky old Nokia that she never left on all that much).
Then, within another forty-five minutes or so, something very visually weird and incomprehensible happens. With eyes as bugged out as they ever have been, and hopefully ever will be, I crane my head forward toward the TV and say to myself did that fucking thing just fall down? Within another minute or so the talking heads come on, saying something that still seems unfathomable: we had indeed just witnessed the biggest building collapse in the history of the world.
I call my wife again. Voice mail again.
I watch more. I am not crying but I am mortified and numb and sad. Can the other one stand up? The first-one-down was the last-one-hit, so does that mean the first-one-hit will make it, or does that mean it’s inevitable that it’ll fall down?
And soon the other tower is falling. This one tilts a bit and then shrivels downward, like the Wicked Witch of the West, melting through the stage floor door, while the other had just shrivelled straight down. This time, with the tilt and with the new-found understanding of 100-story buildings being capable of falling down in toto, there’s not much doubt about what I’m looking at. I, and millions of other people, am looking at a lot of people dying.
I call my wife again and leave a voice mail: Those fuckers just fell down. Both of ’em. You would not believe what it looked like. They both fell down. There’s gotta be tens of thousands of people dead. Those fucking things just fell down.
* * *
Fast forward a couple of days. I have been glued to the TV. I, like billions of people, have a pit in the bottom of my stomach that won’t go away. I am supposed to be driving north for ten days to see my sister, but I am in no mood to be away from home. And then I see Bush with a bullhorn and I think, By god, he finally said something that didn’t sound idiotic and sophomoric.
Much like when I first turned on the TV on 9/11, never fathoming what I was about to witness, though, I now know that, watching that guy with the bullhorn talk about how the people who had knocked down those buildings were going to hear from us, I had utterly failed to fathom what we were all about to see unfold during the five years following the biggest sucker punch that’s ever, bar none, happened.
* * *
It’s been an absolute nightmare — not of Osama’s making, but of our own. Osama and Ayman and Atta and perhaps another dozen dozens or so of people pulled off an amazing feat. My guess is that they thought they would succeed, but were pleasantly surprised at how media-friendly the two-tower ah-one-and-ah-two (with apologies to Lawrence Welk) sucker punch proved to be, and how terrifying in an archetypal sort of way the made-in-America media presentation proved to be.
But I suspect that they never, in their wildest dreams, imagined how beautifully the past five years would unfold for them, as George Bush chose, time and time again, the kick-the-crap-out-of-’em, don’t-play-nice-with-others (allies and enemies alike) approach at every opportunity, and the whole thing just played in beautifully with Osama et al.’s agenda of growing their following.
You can think of Bush’s approach as the cram-down approach, as in, you’re going to do this because I’m going to cram it so far down your throat that you don’t have any choice. It is an ultimate use of unilateral power: the other side has no choice in the matter. You can also think of this in the Marlon Brando, tissue-in-cheek vein, and envision Bush saying I’ll just make them offers that they can’t refuse. As in, I’ll bomb them and everything nearby.
* * *
The first time Bush used the cram-down he used it against the Taliban in Afghanistan, immediately following 9/11. From my admittedly limited knowledge about Afghanistan, that sounded to be well within the margin of error of appropriate usage of the cram-down. After all, any group that knowingly blows up huge (175 feet tall) ancient (circa ~200 to ~ 400 A.D.) cultural artifacts of Buddha set into huge stone cliffs (the actions in March 2001 that first put the Taliban into most people’s consciousness) comes off as, to my way of thinking, pretty dern psycho. I mean, if someone/somepeople before you spent years building a huge statue to their god, and it was 1500 years old, would you purposefully beat the crap out of it by blowing it to smithereens? Now, that wasn’t enough to make us go to war with the Taliban, but then when you add in the oppression of the people and the support of Osama it seems like a pretty clear call (though you can always wonder if capture would have done better than annihilation) (and I would not be at all surprised if the wisdom of the initial Afghan skirmish is a lot more gray than usually portrayed in the media — even the progressive media).
And wielding that same kind of power against the real crazies, Osama and Ayman, seemed like a good idea too (though clearly something went wrong there because both are still free, both are still easily getting their message out, with Ayman, in fact, putting out a video press release today in honor of the date . . . ).
And indeed, conventional wisdom is that, all the way from 9/11 through the initial scrap in Afghanistan through to the failed Tora Bora, the world was a safer, healthier place. Al Qaeda was in tatters, spread all around, somewhat homeless, and they had few friends.
Power, then, had been wielded well. In the first blush of response, something at least not totally terrible had come from the use of power.
* * *
But from then on, the kick-the-crap-out-of-’em approach went woefully awry. Osama got away in Tora Bora and, by some news accounts this past week or so, anyway, is being given safe harbor in Waziristan in Pakistan. We took someone else’s bait and proceeded to alienate not only most of the Middle East but most of the globe as well, as we bull-in-a-china-shopped our way into Iraq, generating one of the most degenerated social contexts the world has seen in decades.
Power, the way Bush wielded it after the initial flush of post-9/11 success, has, then, exacerbated the situation, making us less safe and our place less healthy because beating the crap out of somebody/somepeople works in some contexts, but not all.
In this context, beating the crap out of pretty much the entire Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon, Iran-in-the-works, etc.) is making the Middle East all the more violent. That, in and of itself, should be reason to not do it. But, for those who need a selfish reason, it should suffice too, because that violence will work its way back to here.
Seeing it play out all over again in the Lebanon/Hezbollah war a month ago made it all the more clear: this administration still thinks it can fight its way to peace in the Middle East.
$300 billion has bought us a couple of hellishly nasty wars that have served mostly to escalate the hate, which, in turn, by the administration’s thinking, requires more exertion of power.
How about if, instead, we had showered the area with, for lack of a better word, love? How about if we had spent that $300 billion on, say, helping the children of the Middle East have brighter futures? Sure, there are lots of things that can go wrong when you try to be nice to people — unintended consequences and whatnot — but surely there’s less that can go wrong via the love route than via the cram-down route, isn’t there?
* * *
So what does all this have to do with financial health?
Just as Bush has chosen to relate to the Middle East by threatening everyone with I’ll-kick-the-crap-outta-you, so too do we have a choice about how we relate to the world out there.
We can interact with the external world via cram-down, or we can do to it via something more akin to love.
More narrowly, we all relate to the world, at least in part, and for some in great part, as financial beings — through our economic selves, and we can do that via cram-down or via love as well.
Does that seem like a shocking idea? Well, think about it: do you have a greater number of commercial relationships with businesses than you have social relationships with people? Even if its one-third/two-thirds, that one-third is still a big chunk of how you relate to the world out there, isn’t it?
And what if, rather than trying to maximize your advantage every time you did a commercial transaction with someone, that you tried something else?
There’s a question of scale here. When we buy, say, electricity from a utility, we can shove all the love we want into that transaction, but it isn’t going to register anywhere. But when you talk to someone at the utility, now you are getting to a scale where being kind and/or loving is more feasible and register-able, and when you buy something from a local, one-store only merchant, you can definitely interact as two human beings.
From what I’ve seen, that kind of transaction can be one of the most human, one of the most loving transactions around. Why, come to think of it, if every business transaction we all did was imbued with something other than maximization, we might be happier and the world might be a better place.
Or we could just go around beating people over the head with our ape’y ways and our bone-clubs.
About 2300 words (maybe a twenty-minute read sans linked-to content)
A Tale of Different Deaths
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 2pmBy John Friedman
Death hovers nearby always, and in all ways.
The body keeps working, proving over and over again that it is nearly always impervious to perturbation, until it doesn’t, and then it simply let’s go — let’s go of the spark, acquiesces into hardness, entropies its perhaps-not-so-merry way toward the cold: lights out, thoughts no more.
Death has been closer than usual this year. Age makes it so, yes, but also circumstance.
February brought the murder of Paul Rogers. Of all deaths, none can be appreciably worse than that of a father and mother being bludgeoned and knifed to death in the middle of the night by a deranged breaking-and-entering brother-of-the-mother, with two of the three murdered couple’s children there to witness the foulity. Or at least so it is told and so it is alleged.
More recently come stories of the death of two people close to my family, both in their 80s. One, after dancing the oncological dance that many dance at life’s end, died willfully and designedly, at home, surrounded by family and friends, echoing the death of her mother, stopping weeks and probably many months short of a run-in with her ultimate onco day. It is my time. Extending my time will not add to my life in a meaningful way. The party must end. This party ends now.
This was a proactive death, a righteous death, a beautiful pirouette at the end a beautiful life.
The other was a reactive death. The body screams out once, saying Now is the time, you have a few days at most. Body gets transported to hospital. Hospital staff gets mobilized. People rush in from far reaches. Schedules get changed. Classes get missed. Tubes get inserted into noses and run down throats. The body habitates near other sick bodies within a structure that many bodies only leave after their body-hardening and body-colding has occurred.
Good-byes get said, but memories of tubes and beeps and readouts, and of doctors who can’t help but qualify and jargonize everything said, loom large for long days to come. It’s Visions of Jonah and Johanna when Jonah and Johanna were not at all beaming.
No blame here. Many of us will never have choices about this. Paul did not. Luck, both good and bad, plays a role.
But we play a role here too. Many of us will get to decide some things some of the time about some of our final days. A lucky few will get to decide considerably more than that. Many will get rooked and have no choices at all. But most of us will get to have a say about something.
Decades is what it took for me to learn the beauty of the cut-off. The cut-off, once learned, adds to the quality of life, whether it be applied to a conversation with an attractive stranger, a relationship that isn’t what it once was (or, unfortunately, never reached the hoped-for place), the sugar/alcohol/TV/drug-of-choice that over-occupies at least some of us some of the time, and, yes, the cut-off of a life that has been lived and can no longer function in an acceptable way.
May we all be so lucky as to be able to call the cut-off that is our last call to call.
A distant acquaintance tells me of her mother-in-law’s oncoming death. Inoperable cancer on top of heart disease, the acquaintance and her husband, abetted by the mother-in-law’s doctors and nurses and undoubtedly a whole host of players, decide that the mother-in-law is not to know of her prognosis. It could kill her to know, the acquaintance says, so we’ve decided that she will not know.One reaction denies the other proaction. Your cut-off, they seem to say, is my decision.And here I step out from behind my death-poetry platform, from third to first person and, looking you squarely in the eye, announce: not for me. Never deny me this right. Ever the information absolutist me, I will detest anyone who denies me information that is so uniquely mine. Is that clear enough?
Another death lately, via accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Sleep followed by death. All’s well that ends well — kinda. Better than tubes and antiseptic smell, yes? But not as righteous as a beautifully designed departure, no?
And oh the sorrowful sorrying sorry of a life lost so young and so accidentally, as the young body succumbs to an always-insurmountable perturbation, to a natural-born killer: if x, then y.
And the first death that taught me, as an adult, about cut-offs, that of the kitty (yes, my adult life has been pretty free from direct experience of nearby death). Now I lay me down to sleep. This time, for all times this time.
Again, I come out from behind the death-poetry platform, now for the rest of the piece:
So what does all this have to do with financial health? Clearly, planning for death plays a big role in financial health, especially when our financial health includes people other than ourselves (e.g., kids, spouses, etc.). Because when we die our financial health, in a very real sense, becomes their financial health, as they, in a very real sense, inherit our financial health from us. Our ultimate financial health success, then, is theirs.
But does the circumstance of death have anything to do with financial health?
Of that I am not sure. But this much I might know some time: the odds that you will have a righteous death increase with increasing financial health. The first two deaths mentioned above all involved presumably very financially healthy people. One got lucky and had the opportunity for a righteous death, the other did not get lucky and did not.
But what of the odds of having a righteous death if you are financially unhealthy? It takes yet again more luck, I suspect, for a financially unhealthy person to have a righteous death and maybe, quite possibly, there is a certain level of financial ill health at which no amount of luck can jimmy the financially unhealthy person’s way into a righteous death.
After all, people who are financially healthy have, generally speaking, a greater number of options in just about every facet of their life than those who are not, don’t they? So mightn’t it be possible that financially healthy people have more options when it comes to their life’s cut-out as well?
May we all, then, have the good luck and enough financial health to be able to design a beautiful cut-out from the mortal plane we so cherish, and may we all be wise enough to know that our cut-out will just about never be the one we would choose if it were entirely up to us. Because that death would involve living to be, say, 123, with nary a physical or mental deficit in sight, and to then come to know, one day, with certainty and calmness, that a given sunset would be our last sunset, that the following sunrise would be out last sunrise, and that our dance following that sunrise following that sunset would be our last dance, as with a kiss and a hug to all, we smile and say, It’s time for me to go . . .
.