Financial nihilism on layoff week
If your algorithm is anything like mine, you know financial nihilism is taking hold.
Originally, I wanted to write about financial nihilism and growing up in a doomsday religion, but then another kind of doomsday stole my attention: layoff week. Everyone lost their job this week, right? In my house that’s true, at least. On Thursday, my partner was told that his and many other positions were being eliminated and we told ourselves, as long as one of us is employed at any given time we’ll be fine. On Friday, I was told my job was disappearing in a company restructure. And with tens of thousands of jobs eliminated in tech and media last week, I started to wonder if an apocalyptic approach to money management was becoming more mainstream, or was about to.
If your algorithm is anything like mine, every 10 or so videos on your For You page is a dimly-lit, up-nostril shot of a war-ravaged millennial whispering to you that money is fake, debt isn’t real, you’ll never own a house, buy yourself a little treat, etc. A starkly different mindset than the online response to this Money Diary Refinery29 published just last year.
As I remember it, no one commenting on the article could understand why someone with so much money at their fingertips could not save ANY OF IT AT ALL. My mind was boggled too until I read that she was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, like I was, and it started to make sense.
Being told growing up that you’ll never get old, never die, maybe never even graduate high school, because Armageddon is certain to come before then, doesn’t exactly encourage sound financial planning. When you take into account that Witnesses heavily discourage higher education, making them one of the least-educated religious groups in the United States, as well as one of the poorest…let’s just say born-in Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t set up for financial success. Few save for retirement, because they don’t really believe they’ll get to retirement age before Armageddon comes. They’re tempted to use too much credit, because what are the chances they’ll even have to pay it back, when the world is about to end?
My parents were better planners than most, if only because they learned from the example of my mother’s parents who sold all their belongings in 1972 when the organization was insisting the world would end in 1975. “Stay alive ‘til ‘75” was the motto. They moved the day after my parent’s wedding to Kentucky and then Florida to “serve where the need was greater”—Witness-speak for moving to a place with few Witnesses, and maybe not even Kingdom Hall, to preach full-time. In Kentucky, what little belongings they kept were lost in a flood, and they lived in poverty until their deaths.
So it was partly their example that made my parents value security, and my dad’s union pension that made it possible. But they were always stingy. Vacations meant driving somewhere most tourists avoided to camp. They’ve never flown on a plane (except for my mom’s trip to Jehovah’s Witnesses world headquarters as a teen). They use burner phones. They didn’t pay for me to go to college, even though the good people at FAFSA said they could easily afford to.
Once I finally started making enough of my own money, I could give myself the things I’d always been denied, and while still a Witness, buying clothes or traveling were some of the very few joys such a rigid religious lifestyle allowed. And even then, appearing to “flaunt” your money or belongings could get you counseled if it “stumbled” someone else—or just made them jealous.
All that money baggage was made heavier by quarantine, when buying things online was one of the few ways to get in touch with the outside world and introduce something novel to your pent-up day. Not to mention the dopamine hit that helped with the sting of leaving a cult and losing most of your friends and family in the middle of a pandemic.
All of this is why I had been planning a low-buy year this year to finally get a handle on the spending habits that I worried could one day have me spending $3000 a week with an overdrawn checking account and no savings, if left unchecked. I would get control of my shopping habits. I would save more. I would pay off all debt. I would listen to financial planning podcasts!
As they say: We plan, god laughs. What was going to be a low-buy year will now be a buy-nothing-at-all-until-one-of-us-gets-a-job-with-health-insurance year.
Neither of our job losses were surprises. My partner’s vertical had been recently sold off and acquired by a new company and his immediate thought was “I wonder how long before they lay us all off?” because isn’t that what we’ve come to expect in media? My role will be replaced by two new, completely different positions, which only validates my belief that I was a) being given too much work for one person and b) very little of it had anything to do with the job I was originally hired to perform.
So at least we can both revel in our rightness. But isn’t it nihilist to believe no job will ever last, that no one who hires you knows what they’re going to want in six months, let alone a year? No one at the top seems to be able to plan even twelve months ahead and there’s nothing we can do but cross our fingers and hope that our next stint of unemployment won’t completely wipe out the moderate financial progress we managed to make while drawing a paycheck.
So if you also lost your job this week, try not to worry. Money is fake. Debt isn't real. Buy yourself a little treat.