One of the most natural inclinations people have is self-justification. Do something odd or questionable? No worries: your brain will happily develop some narrative about why it's perfectly reasonable or at least not your fault. This narrative can be particularly sticky if you're justifying some trait that you never consciously adopted but seemed to be always present.
Of course, a good counterpoint is trying to live with other people. Then it's in your face that they think or behave differently, and if you're behaving well you are forced to question your narrative. Or if you're behaving badly you try to impose your narrative on them.
What I didn't properly question about myself for many years was my attitude to money. I have all the instincts of a miser: accumulating money, obsessively optimising for 'bargains', and evaluating every purchase in terms of long term value, as if I were trying to achieve some kind of high score at the end of my life. Intellectually, I understood that other people behaved differently, but the way I behaved was implicitly good and the way they behaved was therefore somehow worse.
Now I not only live with my partner but with our children, so a few years ago I finally grew up enough to try harder to reframe how I thought. Approaching it from the theoretical perspective didn't immediately give me much insight, aside from reinforcing that I shouldn't treat money as an end in itself, since it was in some sense a shared societal delusion (what, this piece of plastic or paper has value? Money is 'created' and 'destroyed' on bank ledgers as a matter of course?). But if I treated it as completely a means of exchange, I didn't want to use money to optimise away my life (why cook if I can pay someone?) and still wanted to avoid being careless; after all, one advantage of my miserly instincts is that I've always had plenty for an unexpected expense. Dickens is worth a quote:
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.
One approach would be to stress the external rather than internal value: i.e. think not what money can do for me, but what it can do for others. I do find the idea that with money you can use your skills to allocate society's resources in impactful ways compelling, and if you're unfamiliar with this consider familiarising yourself. Rationally hard to argue against, and I feel like a large part of people's often incoherent objections are that they want to avoid the inevitable guilt: if you truly believe that your charity is this valuable, every time you spend anything in a discretionary way is waste. Fair call: if this is your only motivation for fiscal conservatism, every purchase for yourself is tinged with shame. Not exactly a recipe for happiness.
The other problem with assigning value to money based on its charitable worth is that it doesn't address the problem of loss aversion. Every purchase ends up being a negative, a loss for charity, and that can easily lead to as much overthinking and hoarding as if you were valuing money as an end in itself. Ultimately, from an economic perspective, having a large number in a bank account does very little on its own. Money has actual value when it moves rather than when it stands still.
However, what makes charity hard - its distance from oneself - obscures that all money transfers have just as much impact or more on the recipient. Perhaps it sounds obvious, but every time you purchase anything you're telling society to optimise for that thing, to place value on it, to employ people to work at it and to think about it. Take a simple interaction like getting food delivered from a restaurant. In terms of the immediate impacts on other people, you're effectively employing people to cook food, deliver food, and develop food delivery platforms. You're saying that this is a good use of their time and society's time.
I find thinking of every personal monetary transaction as two-sided, and focusing on the role of the people on either side, helps clarify that purchases are not simply save vs spend from your personal perspective, but a selection from modern society's smorgasboard of possibility. My money causes people to spend their time making clothes, working in factories, engineering fancier phones, writing articles about politics... every use of money is effectively a vote for what people should do, and can be more directly (or at least provably) meaningful than my vote for a politician.
So rather than think about money as something concrete that I've accumulated, I now like to think of money as votes I'm awarded by someone else for doing something they value. My work values me messing around with computers: they give me some of their votes, which I can pass on to others for things that I value. And as an individual, rather than a soul-less company, its even more incumbent on me to consider the perspective of those I'm 'employing' with my votes.
Internally relabelling money as votes really helps me deal with loss aversion and encourages me to realise that accumulating too many votes for no particular reason is ultimately pointless. It also makes me happier about not spending the absolute minimal amount of money on something; e.g. maybe it's ok to spend more if I do value that thing! If I frame a monetary decision as 'I got something' but 'charity lost something', there's no subtlety or gradations, and the natural other state is not to spend at all; if I frame a monetary decision as 'I got something' and 'the recipient got something', then it's far more pleasant pondering whether that was worth it for all parties.
The other side effect of thinking of money as votes is its relation to inequality: we're all very proud of our 'democracy', but if it's one small vote amongst many unequal voting situations, it's clearer that it's not some optimal solution but merely a messy compromise, and it may be possible to redraw that compromise to make our society a better place.
In short, I guess this post is just an explanation of my new narrative, which may be just as flawed and questionable as the old. I'm not brave enough to deviate dramatically from societal norms, so I'm going to go out to restaurants, to shop at supermarkets, to participate in an incredibly wealthy first world society. But rather than mindlessly accumulate a score in my bank account (old me), or use charity guilt as a stick to restrain me, I now strive to better consider the people on the other side of my purchase.
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