Wednesday: I hate talking about money

Kind of crazy Huh? A business major, someone who supposedly will end up spending 8 hours of every day for the rest of their natural lives surrounded by the topic hates discussing money. By the way, what is an un-natural life? You always hear about people living the rest of their natural lives, but never the other side of that coin. Anyway back to reasons I hate talking about money.

There’s a ton of reasons really. I read that money is the most divisive topic in every relationship; it causes the most friction, and aggravation. Because 99% of the time that money comes up, a happy conversation does not ensue. I’ve never seen it do too much damage to anyone I’ve personally known thankfully. I do remember my parents talking about finances very sparingly in front of us kids when we were small. When they did “discuss” money though it never really sounded like a something they were thrilled to be talking about. Always a kind of helplessness about the situation this stupid thing called money had put them in. They always figured it out, but that really put a sour taste in my mouth about the subject.

Also, money kind of drives me nuts on a more psychological level. It’s the quantification of all my time, effort, and knowledge. The worst is when you start to measure your purchases or bills in relation to your time like “oh man that trip to Target just cost me 4 hours of my life” (to explain, if you make $8/hr and spend $32 bucks on a trip to Target, you just spent 4 hours at Target, hours you’ll never, ever get back. I hope those picture frames were worth it.) So I’ll start thinking this way, and I start looking at things with this concept in mind, and to make it worse I have the realization that for other people it's possible it costs even more. Dinner might be 1 hour to me, but it might be 3 hours to you, or possibly vice versa. It makes me realize that to ask a friend to a movie or lunch I’m really asking that friend to spend 2 hours of their life doing some menial task, so that they can spend a couple hours with me watching that movie or catching lunch. That kills me.

Suffice to say, it’s a troublemaker. Obviously the bible warns about it numerous times, (Pro 11:28, Heb 13:5, Eccl 5:10 et al). So it doesn’t sound like it’s a bad thing that I don’t really enjoy talking about it. Except, I hate it so much I will ignore the subject completely at times. That, I think is the reason I wanted to become a business man, or at least get a handle on the business thing. Ignorance is a huge step towards fear, and fear as we all know leads to anger. I’m not really a fan of anger, so hopefully this college thing will help out with the ignorance piece. I wanted to be able to take care of this problem early on for myself and hopefully other people to the point where the subject is assigned the meaningless-ness it should be.