My father believed the purpose of life was to make money. Well, I’m not sure he would have put it that way. But he did say that money gave you the means to do what you actually enjoyed doing. This meant to me that making money was a necessary evil to get what you really wanted in life.
The other thing my father always said is that you should always want 'more and better'. What he meant was more and better of what money could buy.
So what if what you enjoy doesn’t require a lot of money? What if ‘more and better’ isn’t about what money can buy?
My problem, with my father at least, was that I could never muster the ambition to make a lot of money. I think he saw it as a glitch in my character. And I believe it bothered him because somehow he saw my lack of financial ambition as a reflection of something he feared in himself.
My father was born in 1928 and grew up during the Depression, the youngest of 9 kids, 8 of whom survived. His father, Abraham, made a modest living as a peddler. He went door to door selling things on credit. Kept accounts in a ledger and would collect twenty-five or fifty cents per week from his customers. Half the time, when he went to collect, all he got were excuses. He was a communist at heart. So when he came home after an afternoon of collections empty-handed, and my grandmother Leah was upset, he told her, 'they need it more than we do'.
By the time My father hit high-school it was World War 2. All he'd ever known up until that point - the age he was getting ready to enter the workforce - was austerity. I can imagine how hungry and driven he must have been.
He jumped in with both feet, and his efforts were rewarded handsomely. The post-war period were boom years. The economy had nowhere to go but up. As my 86 year old mother-in-law Margie is fond of saying, 'In those days any shmo could make a buck.'
I'm not sure that's exactly right. But if you had a little family support, which my father had, and a bit of drive, the opportunity was certainly there.
I can't help but contrast my dad's upbringing with my own. I was raised a child of privilege. I enjoyed all the dividends of my parents and grandparents hard work. We lived in a large house in an affluent neighbourhood. I went to a private school, and we took family vacations to Florida twice a year. We had a chalet in Vermont, and went skiing every weekend.
When I graduated high-school in 1981 the world was in the most severe recession since the war years. And a few years later, when I was ready to enter the workforce, it was like my father's experience in reverse. The economy was struggling to emerge out of recession, the unemployment rate was hovering around 8% in Canada, and it was much worse, above 10% in Montreal because of the uncertain political situation in Quebec.
It's commonly said that wages have not kept pace with inflation since the 1980s, coincidentally the period of my entire working life. While the economy grew at an average annual rate of 5% in the 1950s, by the 1990s that was down to an anemic 2.4%. And the middle class, which had exploded in the post-war boom years, was now in the process of shrinking for the first time.
Nonetheless, I was lucky. I was able to buy a house in the mid 90s and support my family well enough because I had financial backing, beginning with an inheritance left to me by my late grandpa Sam.
But here's the thing about money - it represents so much more than just financial security, which of course is significant enough. Money is also (and perhaps more importantly) emotional currency. Money is a metaphor, chiefly for anxieties and fears. It's also about memory and dreams, self-image and self-loathing, meaning and purpose.
For me, money also represented unhappiness. All the people I knew who had a lot of it, and seemed to care about making it as the focus of their lives, namely dad and grandpa Sam, seemed very unhappy. I don't think I ever thought money was the cause of their unhappiness, but having a lot of it certainly never did anything to cure their unhappiness either. Money was never a panacea for whatever troubled them.
And I think that's why I never cared for it very much. It's true that I already thought I had enough. But what I saw was plenty of people who had a lot more, but never had enough.
What was the point of killing yourself to get more money if, after a certain point, it didn't liberate you but rather, seemed to become a burden. A spinning wheel you were trapped on that went nowhere fast. There had to be a better way to spend your time than to devote it to making more money.
Sometimes I regret not accumulating enough wealth to be able to help my children in the same way that I was helped by my father and grandfather. On the other hand, we have invested our generational wealth enough to be able to help each of them a little. Anyway, it may not matter all that much since my kids seem to be making different decisions with their lives. Decisions that don't put the accumulation of wealth and acquisition at the center. And that might be our greatest gift to our children - pursuing a different set of values.
Grandpa Sam had a favourite saying - "The journey is greater than the destination." We put it on his gravestone. It's a reminder that spending money is not the measure of 'more and better' in life. How you spend your time is.
