Preface

Few subjects feel as far apart as zen and money. This is unfortunate, as bringing a zen approach to our finances can provide answers for many of our money worries. That's what I hope this book can provide.

At one extreme, if we never needed money again, we would have infinite financial peace of mind: we could be blissfully zen about money. At the other, spending every penny, cent or peseta that passes through our lives ensures we will never know that peace.

While never needing money may be as impossible as any zen riddle, or koan, the path in that direction offers greater peace than the more travelled one of non-stop spending. I hope this book can help you find your path.

Money

There are simple routes to financial awareness, knowing what money is and the things it can do for us, that can help us all live better lives, and yet so few of us are ever shown these pathways.

We all handle money, often devoting more of our lives than necessary to earning it and then spending it, and yet so little time learning about it. We could be so much more aware of how to use it effectively, how we could make it work for us, and not the other way around.

This simple change in understanding could have a huge impact on the world: on happiness, on mental health, on inequality, and even on the planet itself.

I hope this book can become a gateway to understanding for you, to a simple path without the stress that we so often attach to money.

Zen

As I understand it, the ideas of Buddhism moved from India across China where it became known as "chan" and may have been infused with Taoist ideas before landing in Japan 800 years ago and getting a name-change to "zen". It is argued that the word "dhyana", meaning deep meditation in the Indian tradition, is roughly the same root.

When I think of zen, perhaps like you, I think of that Japanese word as it has taken on a meaning of its own in the West: an exquisite expression of minimalist beauty.

We see it in a perfectly raked rock garden, a broken kintsugi pot mended by strands of gold, or any other wabi-sabi arrangement, the "beautiful sadness" that Nobuo Suzuki describes so perfectly in the subtitle of his book Wabi Sabi: The Wisdom of Imperfection.

It is there in the enso, the ink brushstroke circles that artist and designer Soo Peng Koh so graciously provided for this book. The idea is so simple, to paint a perfect circle, and yet impossible, every single one is different. They are the result of strenuous practice, but a quiet mind. Looking like they show a zero and yet representing infinity, a circle starting back on itself. Almost.

I also gather into this word "zen" one other concept from a quote attributed to Buddha when asked for his most important teaching: "Nothing whatsoever should be clung to."

This is such a powerful phrase that while perhaps not exactly zen in tradition, the emphasis on "nothing" makes it appear very "zen-like" to me, if zen also means minimalist. What could be more minimalist than nothing, after all?

A Little Light

Alan Watts described zen beautifully, and minimally, as "seeing reality directly".

If we see reality directly, at a global and personal level, we must admit that we have real problems with money.

While the number of people in the world living in poverty has dropped significantly over the past few decades, many developed countries still have levels of poverty that are surprisingly high, considering their wealth elsewhere. In some it is even increasing.

The US Census Bureau estimated in 2019 that 10.5% of the population there was living below the poverty line, while the UK government, using a different definition, classified a staggering 23% of households as low income in 2020, up from 18% just a few years before.

People below this line have money stress caused by real money problems, which will mainly be answered by more money. This book, sadly, cannot provide that. If only.

I hope it may provide other answers that will help those people in their journeys: ways to deal with the stress their situation is causing, and some guidance for avoiding these problems in future once they hopefully do have enough money.

For the rest of us, above those lines, our financial stress can perhaps be termed "money worries" or "anxiety" more than "money problems". These worries manifest in many ways, from all kinds of different roots, and range from just uncertainty that delays a positive action, to bad debts built on subsequently regretted decisions, to longer-term disquiet and even shame, among many others.

An almost global lack of formal financial education isn't helping this.

While this financial stress is not as financially restrictive as poverty, it doesn't feel any less real to people suffering it, but rather than insufficient funds being the cause, the biggest problem is that we have never been taught about money. It's like we're in the dark.

As we all know, when the lights are turned on, there's nothing inherently scary about the dark. We can be in a familiar place, but because we can't see everything else as well, we are uncertain. Perhaps even a little frightened. When we try to think about money, we often feel that same fear.

We need to start shining a little light on to money, what it can do for us and what we can do about it. A little light can go a long way.

On a Cliff Edge

Unlike the dark, there's a good reason for our money stress. The persistence and even increase of poverty in the developed world stems in large part from decades of steadily increasing inequality: the Economic Policy Institute calculated that the income of an average CEO increased more than 1,000% between 1978 and 2018, while that of an average worker increased by just 11%. If we assume around 2% inflation, the average CEO's standard of living will have improved by 5 times, the average person's will have halved.

In most English-speaking countries, annual income of the better-off has grown faster than people below them on their income curve. The rich really do keep getting richer.

Income curves and resulting wealth curves have become perilously steep as a result, with fewer people earning good salaries, and a very few owning huge riches: literally stratospheric wealth as they fly into space leaving the rest of us behind.

A curve in a graph is an abstract thing, and when we call it that it might not sound like such a big deal, but it is. This curve is where we all live our lives, earn our incomes and save for a rainy day.

If we visualise the curves we see in the physical world, we might see a nice straight, flat road ahead. It will be easy to get where we want to go.

What cyclists call a "false flat" might be harder: it looks easy when you're in a car but takes a bit more effort to get up when you're on a bike. It could be a gently rolling hill, where you can see there's some effort to get ahead, but you can make that effort.

To bring this back to our income curves, a drop in salary or status in that environment might result in a little fall, but we won't face too big a climb back up again if we need to. These income curves don't necessarily protect weaker or less fortunate members of their societies, but they don't punish them for the smallest mistakes either.

Income curves have tilted up much further, however. In the US, United Kingdom, Australia, and many other countries around the world, most economic growth of the past 40 years has been captured by the wealthy, not the poor. This means the curve has kept on getting steeper.

These forces feel nearly geological in power, and the road ahead is no longer just a sloping curve, it's going almost vertically up a mountain. It might sound like fun if you are at the top, holidaying in a ski villa with a panoramic view beneath you, but living on that curve, day-in and day-out, can feel like standing on a cliff edge.

A lost job, a little crazy spending, or some savings stolen in a scam, and we might run out of money, needing to borrow to make ends meet.

That debt grows quickly, compounding even faster if we have had to resort to non-traditional lenders, and might soon become double or even quadruple the amount we borrowed. It will be hard coming back from that. It could take years. It could take your whole life.

The stress of living on the cliff can make us dizzy, leading to bad decisions, be it gambling on too big a risk, or even just avoidance or denial of the problem, hoping it will go away. Too many people fall foul of "zero-risk fallacy", a cognitive bias that tells us it is possible to have no risks, and that doing nothing may be better than doing something. Doing nothing just leaves us out on the cliff edge. We need to move.

Deep down, everyone on a steep curve feels this stress, from the top of society to the bottom. At the top, there is a pressure to look like your peers, which means spending like the people around you, even if you can't afford it, which can step you out closer to the edge. High performance jobs can lead to stress and over-spending: we see insane competition to get children into the best schools and colleges, leading to scandals, because parents are so worried about their own children on this...