Money memories (and how they form)
A short essay on the way emotions and memories can infuse together to influence behaviors and attitudes for decades.
“Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
— A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
While I was working on one of this week’s episodes for my Poems for the Speed of Life podcast I had a small realization about the way memory works.
The poem was “Weakness” by Alden Nowlan about a moment, presumably when Nowlan was a boy, when he witnessed his father preparing a sick horse to be euthanized.
I won’t expand here on the specifics of the poem itself, or the teaching it might offer (if that’s something you’re interested in, you’re very welcome to check out the podcast (Spotify / Apple / Substack); the current series is on the theme of “Fatherhood”).
What did present itself in the reading, though, was something about the way memory works. Poetry often works like this. Memory, in many ways, is the essence of poetry — the fragility of memory, its tenuousness, its power to bring tears to the eyes years or decades later, or to wreak havoc in the present moment by resurfacing a traumatic experience from long ago.
The important thing is not just the memory.
The important things is the emotions attached to the memory.
So when I then read the paragraph that started this piece from John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany it double-underlined this new knowledge of the way memory works.
Memories of money — memories of money infused with emotion, and typically a very negative form of emotion: guilt, shame, envy, anger or fear — often form the bedrock of our relationship with money.
In the interviews I’ve been working on, memory has been a recurring topic of conversation.
Josh Forti, recalling his childhood in rural USA, said that “money was certainly one of the areas that [my family] struggled to understand. My relationship with money growing up was that every decision revolved around money, and mostly the lack of it.”
Remembering her childhood in Scotland, Eloise Leeson-Smith said, “My father never ever, ever told us his salary. And I never asked ... In terms of how we talked about money as a family, I think it was probably something our parents didn’t want us to be overly aware of … [Money] was never taken for granted. It was never assumed that you'd always have it … We always valued spending time together, and money was a way for us to spend that time together. “
In other interviews to come in the next few weeks, I hear from bright and successful entrepreneurs on their own formative experiences and money memories, including one whose hugely successful father gambled most of his money away, leading to an acrimonious separation and the traumatic memories of watching her newly single mother try to make ends meet, leading to situations where “no one talked about money — like, no one talked about it! It was all a secret.”
There’s no how here. There’s just what.
This is the what: the often tiny moments that are forgettable to all but you, and — weirdly — forgettable even to most of your conscious mind but molded forever on your psyche.
This is the what: that these tiny moments, the emotions they create and the way those emotions (and the situation that caused those emotions) are lodged in the deepest recesses of your mind, might unconsciously influence — even control — your behaviors and attitudes even many decades later.
This is also the what: that changing these behaviors and attitudes, wrought over years by the unconscious workings of your mind, might be the single biggest lever you can pull to positively influence the rest of your life and the lives of those you care most about.
You might ask, there must be a how?
I have no certainty about that.
The only certainty might be that whatever the how of changing this is, it’s very likely to be a different how for you, for me and for anyone else reading these words who feels like they’ve got some behaviors and attitudes they’d like to change, especially around money and the way they think about it.
It’s also, almost certainly, something that might take a few months or a few years to work through.
Thanks for reading.