There is something really weird about not including your ability to afford consumption – which costs money – as part of your “financial situation”.
that’s well put!
Similarly, politicians often only care about the payments that have to be made on a debt while they are in office. They aren’t planning on paying it all back out of the budgets they control.
Fair point fair point.
Meta request: Have I been approaching this discussion pretty reasonably so far, and in a manner consistent with the spirit of the Unbounded category? Is there anything I should try to do better at? (Anyone should feel to weigh in, not just people who’ve already been participating)
I don’t know how to make an overall judgement.
You aren’t replying with a bunch of mis-framings and attacks meant to make the other person look bad. So that’s good.
But you also don’t seem to really be engaging a lot with the points. You’ve said something like good point or well put to some things, but you haven’t really made it clear if your opinion has changed anywhere, if you’ve actually re-thought anything, what reservations you still have and why, what you think is going on, etc.
I think there is something more going on here than just you having bad ideas about what “financial situation” means. Your definition of it was biased in such a way to put yourself at the bottom. It wasn’t just an accident that your understanding of the term happened to put you at the bottom: that sort of thing is usually by design, not just a random misunderstanding. You haven’t really engaged with that part or really engaged with the arguments against your position.
I’m gonna focus on this part of your reply cuz I think I have something to say about it. I have a suspicion that maybe there’s a connection here to my general self-esteem issue, which seems to involve putting myself down in various ways. So defining “financial situation” in a way that made my own situation look very bad may be an illustration of that.
I also think there maybe some second-handedness coming in - comparing myself to other people or how well off I think I should have been had I not made certain mistakes or something, rather than looking at the objective situation. I wonder if that just ultimately “reduces” to the self-esteem issue though - like thinking about that stuff is just another way to beat myself up.
Yeah! That’s better than some people do. (Acknowledging this sort of thing explicitly will perhaps help me with the self-esteem stuff)
So you should “discount” the debt to the extent it’s phoney-baloney “debt” rather than carry the full retail balance on the books like it was real debt.
I think there may be a connection to your self-esteem issue, but not quite in the way you think.
People often use poor self-esteem as a way to block or evade criticism and progress. Instead of correcting mistakes, they say that they are just stupid, bad, incompetent, etc, in this particular area, and they just can’t do it. They just aren’t good at this, their brain doesn’t work that way, they are always a failure in this area, etc. This low self-judgement gives them an excuse to not even try: why try when they are just bad at stuff and will fail?
You said in your first post:
So it sounds like you have been using you negative judgement as a reason to block your own progress. You haven’t been optimistic about what you could accomplish, and saw the situation partly as your bad financial situation standing in your way.
So I think that that judgement is similar to and related to your other self-esteem issues. But I don’t think that bad self-esteem is actually the root cause here.
People don’t want to do things, and then they make excuses for why they don’t do them. Low self-esteem helps give them a reason to not make progress. So do poor life circumstances, like a bad financial situation.
I am NOT, by the way, meaning to imply that no one has bad life circumstances, that everyone is on an even playing field, etc. I think it is possible to have circumstances that do make things harder for you. But it is also possible to systematically misconstrue your circumstances as being worse than they really are, in order to give yourself an excuse.
Also, this can be a cycle: when people are told that they are doing it to themselves (blocking their own progress through low self-esteem excuses) they can create a different kind of low self-esteem, where now they aren’t beating themselves up for being bad at, say, their career. Instead they start beating themselves up for blocking their own progress by having low self-esteem too. But that’s not helpful either. It is just more time spend avoiding working on the actual problems, and avoiding making progress.
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That actually makes sense to me. I think I’ve had some similar thoughts but not very coherently - like the idea has occurred to me that beating myself up kind of “lets me off the hook” in a way, but then OTOH I do think I’ve viewed the self esteem stuff is more of a root cause, so I didn’t have a consistent view.
Yeah that’s a good point/catch. I don’t think I realized quite what I was admitting there.
I mean, if you are never actually going to be made to fully pay the debt off, it’s not the same as what people normally think of as debt.
That doesn’t mean it should necessarily be fully disregarded. If you have another person in the exact same financial situation otherwise – like same income, assets, earning potential, etc – then the person with no debt is in a better financial situation. (I am assuming the debt has some negative financial impacts, it isn’t just nothing.)
If you are actually interested in understanding the mistakes in your definition of “financial situation”, you could try to think it through more.
I think your opinion was essentially that your financial situation amounts to only your net worth on a balance sheet, and nothing else. Is that a correct summary? Could you consider that more, and think of counter-examples to that? Or think about what that measurement is even useful for, who would use it and when?
I’ll try following up on these questions tomorrow.
It’s OK. Like anon said, there are various awful things you are not doing. But e.g. you didn’t directly ask for help or mentoring, and you also aren’t really driving the project forward yourself with just a few tips from others to augment your project. You don’t have clear goals and a plan to reach them laid out, nor do you seem to be aiming to get to that point. Also some bigger picture is missing so it’s hard to tell if this stuff should be your priority or some root cause is your real constraint.
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Yeah but, to be clear, it’s not by conscious design. Bad stuff like that is largely done subconsciously once you’re past childhood. People often complain/object because e.g. they don’t remember consciously designing it that way on purpose. One of the ways I sometimes say it is “not an accident” or “not random”.
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I had some vague sense in my mind that I was taking other things into account in addition to the balance sheet, but I don’t know that I had a coherent idea of how I was doing that or any kind of serious methodology for how to do so.
Balance sheet measurement seems like it would be useful if you were like, a bank deciding on whether to give someone a big loan to buy a house or something like that. You’d get information from it like how much debt does this person already have and what assets do they have. So I think it has some contexts in which it’d be useful. But it’s maybe not reliable as a general assessment of financial well-being, especially given stuff like semi-fake “debt”.
I wrote “includes” here, which indicates to me that I wasn’t thinking “consists of”. But then I had a separate category, “material circumstances”, which was focused on non-balance sheet stuff. So it wasn’t really clear (in text or in my own mind, I think) what was just in the financial situation box, what was in the material circumstances box, and what was in both boxes. My thinking here seems pretty confused.