Narratives of Scarcity and Scarcity Itself: What Friends Conceal. (Money, Part 3)
Memories of tough times, visions of how to soldier on through them... and the inescapable habits that follow us around afterwards.
This is the 3rd post in my first series on how little we know about the secret corners of others’ lives: money, health, family dynamics, etc.
First post in the series here.
Previous post in the series here.
I’ll write them from a protracted viewpoint—centered on the realm of the personal and relational.
I. Narratives of Scarcity, Gifts of Self-Reliance
In “Clout,” author Jenni Catron recounted an undercurrent of anxiety in her family home when she was a child:
“Will there be enough?” It was a question that was asked almost daily at my home when I was growing up… Making ends meet was challenging, and my parents found it impossible to shelter me from that reality.
Her parents and their neighbors in that small, blue-collar town in Wisconsin fretted over factory layoffs, and minimum wage was what they’d expect even when the “going was good.”
A decade or more later, though, she remembered the good along with the bad:
My early life experience with scarcity taught me valuable lessons… to take care of what I had… to maximize everything. I took very little for granted because I knew what it meant not to have it. I learned the value of hard work… the rewards of a little sweat equity.
“What exactly did that look like?” you ask? “What did she think of it?” She seems to have remembered even the work as wonderful:
Nothing was more fulfilling than toiling with my grandmother throughout the summer to plant, weed, water, and harvest our garden, which provided hundreds of jars of vegetables to last us through the winter.
We see a sort of “silver lining” to a haunting cloud of family worries. As a child, this woman had discovered that her contribution to her family was needed. Wow! That’s the sort of thing that can’t be faked. It’s an experience that many parents yearn for their kids to have. (See Amy Chua1… sort of.)
It’s gratifying to imagine all the members of a family working hard to take care of each-other. But the younger brother of hard work, frugality, is just as powerful in some circumstances. (Though perhaps less glamorous. Who wants to think about scrimping, saving, and making do with very little?) I fondly remember the way my family praised my mom’s “coupon clipper” habit—hinting that it was a bit of an addiction. When the big grocery store near us closed down, my dad, grinning, insisted that it was because of Mom. She was, he joked, SO keen on the double and triple coupon deals that she single-handedly put them out of business! That’s dedication.
Add endurance and patience to that dedication. I think of the archetypal narrative of the immigrant family that worked hard, lived on almost nothing and “stuffed the mattresses full of cash” back in the day. Or the story of the courageous mother who, during the Great Depression, had nothing left in the house but a bottle of ketchup, “so she made ketchup soup and served it to everyone.” These sorrowful memories can be re-painted and re-interpreted, tinged with heroism. “Waste not, want not” was the motto, and people who lived through these things, and survived—or even thrived—are often praised for their resourcefulness.
II. Scarcity as a Mindset.
Sometimes, though, the expectations of scarcity outlast the expiration date of the crisis or life situation to which they were suited.
We’ve heard of the trope of “she-survived-the-Great-Depression-and-so-now-she-hoards-things.” Nobody in the family bothers to try to deter that grandma from her hoarding. Maybe it’s because she’s been declared a “lost cause.” Or maybe it’s because she tends to dredge up uncomfortable memories! And indeed, she would have seen intense suffering—and at a very personal scale. The risk and despair of daily living she knew might be impossible for most of us to imagine from behind the comfortable glow of our smartphones. What happens if you try to say she doesn’t really need the 300 empty sour cream containers that are squirreled away in her basement, only to be reminded, “You never know what will come in handy in a crisis”? How can you argue with someone who has suffered in ways that you don’t quite comprehend?
From a different time and place, the voice of a Korean mother resonates with that grandmother’s fears, as she replays the terror of not being able to feed her own family:
You were all such good eaters that when you were growing I was sometimes afraid. If I left a pot filled with boiled potatoes for your after-school snack, the pot would be empty when I came home. ...the rice in the jar in the cellar disappearing day by day.... When… my scoop scraped the bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my babies tomorrow morning? ... Now, you probably can’t even imagine it, but in those days we were always worried that we would run out of food. We were all like that. The most important thing was eating and surviving.
-”Please Look After Mom,” (fiction) by Kyung-sook Shin.
That’s extreme. You would do anything to prevent going through that again. So even when expectations of scarcity are no longer appropriate, the griefs it inflicted “stick around.” And the habits of both thought and action.
Back to examples from “Clout,” we have the other side of a confrontation with scarcity:
…scarcity also taught me darker things. It taught me to hoard, protect, and defend. It taught me to be skeptical. It taught me to play it safe and minimize risk. At times it has robbed me of having a generous heart, and it has often convinced me that I’m all on my own...
This description of a scarcity mindset really got my attention! I wondered how much that way of thinking had a hold on me. How much pride had I built up in being able to “do without” things that would be convenient or pleasant? What if that was getting in my way, preventing me from taking risks for the chance of great reward, cutting me off from helping others more extensively, and (ironically!) even throttling my productivity?
As one example—there has to be some margin between “an unnecessarily-expensive new kitchen tool” and “a kitchen tool that would be demonstrably more effective than what I have, yet which would also cost money.”
In my own life, things I’ve said about my scarcity-mindset look like this:
It's like I'm doing much of my decision-making based on "Well, I -can't- spend money to take a class / well, I -can't- spend a lot of money to fix this problem, well, I -must- conserve this resource I have as carefully as possible.
Sounds like the things I fear have indeed been holding me back:
Not taking that one class I want to—whether it be for my professional life, personal life, or just for the sake of sheer curiosity—walls me off from an expanded capacity for excellence in my work, from increased capability to help others flourish, and also from the joy of learning.
Not fixing a problem because I would have to spend money leads to ineffectively “limping along” in some area of my life, wasting time and energy fretting. (And often large amounts of money, to boot!)
Carefully conserving a resource (e.g. money, food, possessions) can “burn through” other valuable resources.
(For example, when I have projects that I never finish—like refinishing those old chairs I got for free to save money—they linger around the house in an unfinished manner, sucking away my attention, and commanding my anxieties every time I cast my eyes over them. Or every time I have to move them out of the way!)
So ironically, fear of scarcity--and a consequent attempt to avoid all “waste”--causes an enormous amount of waste. Instead of clear-mindedly assessing the usefulness of a possession as a tool or resource, I seem to become a slave to my own instincts of self-preservation.
Fears of scarcity, poured through a personality like mine, looks like:
Fretfully feeling I need to spend the least amount of money possible,
Planning to make the least inconvenience for everyone around me,
(This doesn’t exactly match up to some people’s definition of the word “plan,” mind you: Eventually, my worries leak out—or explode out—of me because can I really keep them all bottled up, at all times, for life? No.)Worrying excessively when deciding to commit to a time to meet with someone. (Maybe there will be something “more important” I could be saving it for!)
I’m convinced that in a situation of genuine scarcity, these same actions would have a different resonance… a different experiential flavor.
There could be a note of hope and heroism to them.
(There wouldn’t always be that, but the point is that there could be.)
So you see, I’m weaving back-and-forth between conscientious responses to actual scarcity and maladjusted responses to imagined scarcity.
When I got really worried that fears of scarcity were damaging my ability to get things done, I had a great idea. “I know what I’ll do: I’ll ask the person I know of who went through his first year of University classes while homeless. When I tell him some of these things he won’t think I’m crazy the way most people would.”
He responded by characterizing a decision on whether to spend money as a trade-off between one kind of comfort (improving something in my home) versus another kind of comfort (such as having more savings to fall back on, or, I add, possibly working fewer hours). His questions got me to look at my financial situation more directly. Since my family’s work is tutoring, our weekly income varies, and our number of students can increase or decrease. In light of that, it seems inexplicable that I was avoiding even creating a weekly schedule to refer to--but that was the case. (Somehow, my friend even had the power to get me to make one of those right then and there!) He even asked, “Do you need more work and do you like writing?” (As he explained, he did technical writing for a company that seemed to have more work than employees2.) He assumed nothing.
After I’d responded to some of his questions and avoided others, eventually I heard what he was getting at:
Right now I'm just trying to establish how much of your scarcity mindset is justified before giving too much specific advice.
And maybe it was the fact he bothered to seriously ask the question “Well, is it justified" that made him so effective at helping me. Even though some part of my soul was constantly asking “Do I have enough?” I hadn’t expected someone else to ask me “Well, do you have enough?”
III. Conclusion: Often, one sticks with a scarcity mindset because of a reasonable fear of losing one's grit.
Why can’t we consistently be objective about the distinction between unjustified expectations of scarcity and justifiable expectations of scarcity, like my friend guided me to?
(Actually, I have no hope of answering this question: the answers probably exist on many layers and interact with many issues besides scarcity alone. My first shot at one cause is that the problem is about habitual fear, and fear makes it harder to think.)
Maybe the pride and heroism of holding back real scarcity have an emotional pull as well.
A narrative of someone who’s successfully fought those fears could look like this:
Your mom never paid full price for anything. Most things she did herself, so her hands were always busy. …sewed and knitted …tilled the fields without rest. Mom’s fields were never empty. In the spring she planted potato seeds in furrows… lettuce and crown daisies and mallow and garlic chives… peppers and corn. Under the fence around the house she dug holes for zucchini… She was either in the kitchen or in the fields or in the paddies. She plucked potatoes and yams and zucchini, and pulled cabbages and radishes from the ground. Mom’s labor showed that nothing would be reaped if the seeds were not sown. She paid only for things that could not be grown from seeds: ducklings or chicks that ran around in the yard in the spring, piglets that lived in the sty.
-“Please Look After Mom,” (fiction) Kyung-Sook Shin.
What does this describe? Unimaginable productivity in the face of poverty. Here is the story of the brave soul who can tell of building—if not an empire, at least a home—“with my own two hands.” While some of these stories are merely legends, others are about real people who are worthy of legends.
Here, too, are virtues that often go un-praised—strength and quiet persistence in the face of daily boredom, physical labor and discouragement.
Such courage deserves dignity and honor.
Some months ago, a friend who, like me, grew up in Arkansas, shared an article about the struggles of a small rural town that absolutely screamed “scarcity mindset.”
What caught my attention most was not the article itself, but her sympathetic response:
I can really see all sides of this. Self-reliance is a really important value that a lot of urban people could use more of... Traditional economics and policymakers greatly under-value the importance of community and having a certain way of life that you don't want to change.
And why should you be forced to change just because other people want to?
Maybe it means more because I know this friend. I know that she decided to learn how to darn her socks and that she bothers to mend and re-mend certain clothes instead of throwing them away, even if others consider those efforts not “worth their time.” And yes, like me, she eats the last bit of food she doesn’t feel like even when it would be convenient to throw it away. (whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing!) I just know she’s seeking to be prudent with her possessions in ways that would baffle some of the people around her.
And when I think about it, I see in this a clue as to why people won’t “ditch” their scarcity mindsets.
They talk about not wanting to become “soft” or “weak.”
Maybe their responses to a particular type scarcity became a piece of their vision of wise stewardship. And strength. And courage.
If maintaining a policy of austerity was how you relieved your family’s troubles and anxieties at one time, it could certainly become a symbol for “how you live out loyalty to your family.” And how you love.
Maybe you fear losing your resourcefulness, resilience and strength… losing a virtue... losing a piece of yourself... worse, letting down your family heritage. (What if your family heritage yielded a group ethic you feel you are failing to maintain?)
Then all those past legends of overcoming struggle would become good for nought.
In “Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua wrote:
One of my greatest fears is family decline. There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.”
Chua goes on to describe her analysis of each generation’s tendencies in detail:
From the vigorous, hard-working and rabidly-thrifty first generation who immigrated,
Through their high-achieving, highly-educated, highly-paid children in the second generation, and
On to the third generation who “will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses” and “expect expensive name-brand clothing.”
This last generation Chua describes as the one she spends nights lying awake worrying about.
When thinking about how she wanted these kids to “turn out right,” it’s no surprise that Chua looked back longingly at her own youth. She wanted the benefits of the kind of striving she’d seen in her own childhood, but reasoned:
I knew that I couldn't artificially make them feel like poor immigrant kids. There was no getting around the fact that we lived in a large old house, owned two decent cars, and stayed in nice hotels when we vacationed.
A friend who reviewed my draft jested that in every situation in which there is technical writing being done, you will find more work than technical writers! (I’m noticing a pattern.)
I’d love to hear things that come to mind when people read this!
Two things I would love to ask is:
1. Are there other ideas people have for how to deal with fear of losing “the virtues gained in the hard times”?
2. What narratives do you know of people handling themselves in a crisis of scarcity? (from a family story, a novel, historical anecdote, etc.)
I’m taking one week off from publishing new posts because of the holiday… or at least that’s my excuse! :)
You paint an interesting picture.
On the one hand, I'm thinking of the meme of the prepper who's supposedly hoping for an apocalypse so his efforts will finally be worth it. Usually, it'll never happen - or when it does, it might not be as bad as they thought. I knew some semi-preppers who were talking about a coming economic collapse - and the 2008 Great Recession proved their forecast partly correct, but the economic system survived and most of their prepping was useless.
On the other hand, for people who tend toward the opposite extreme and might forget the hard times, I'm reminded of the Jewish Feast of Booths (aka Feast of Tabernacles). The tradition dating back to the Law of Moses is to sleep in temporary shelters for a few nights in memory of their ancestors not having permanent homes. Similarly to a smaller extent, Jews even eat unleavened bread at Passover in memory of their ancestors not having time for the bread to rise. Perhaps customs like these might be helpful?
Interesting insights. The distinction between having enough and over abundance is so often in relation to comparison to those around you. It’s almost so tightly woven together it’s mind numbing. Need to think on this some more…