Financial Obesity
The 1970s were
still an age of moderation, exemplified by the fact that for New York lawyers
and teachers, starting salaries were about the same. In those days, the number
of overweight or obese in the populace hovered around 10 percent. But by 2010,
the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services classified 66 percent of
adults in the United States as overweight or obese. That same year, the
starting salaries for NYC lawyers had ballooned to four times that of the
city’s teachers. The DHHS goes on to point out the dangers of physical obesity
as, “increased risk for chronic diseases such as heart disease, type 2
diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, and some forms of cancer.”
The explosion of body mass has been
blamed on everything from constant snacking, to junk food, to consumption of
huge portions, and, more and more, on emotional disorders. At last, the question
is being asked, “Why are we compulsively snacking? Why do we binge on junk
food? And why do we eat such huge portions?”
Overeating has been associated with
depression, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, frustration, stress, problems with
interpersonal relationships and poor self-esteem.
The cause and effect is illuminated
in an article from Britain’s National Health Service. It starts with an
insightful quotation. “I have just finished with my boyfriend and now I’m
eating chocolate. I know it’s not chocolate that I want. I want a kiss and a
cuddle. I want him. So why am I trying to find solace within that sheet of
silver foil?”
According to Professor Andrew Hill,
a psychologist at Leeds University, that is precisely the question we should be
asking if we want to understand overeating. To him the simpleminded approach to
curbing obesity—by counting how many calories we consume and how many we
burn—is guaranteed to fail. “There’s energy in and there’s energy out but
there’s a person in-between,” he says. “You need to understand the emotional
reasons for eating if you are ever going to change behavior.”
He points out that from infancy,
food is directly linked to emotions: the breast not only feeds, but comforts;
favorite foods are used to calm and reward. Sweets forever remind us of the
sweetness of mother’s milk. This changes little as we grow older. “What does a
man give a woman when he is wooing her? Chocolates. What do you give your
family for a special occasion? You take them out for a meal or you make a
special meal.”
It is then safe to say that overeating is not about filling
empty stomachs, it’s about “a kiss and a cuddle”—it’s about filling empty arms.
The real problem
is not what we are doing, but what we are not doing, while we’re doing what we
do. While food becomes a fleeting substitute for someone’s loving arms, it
unfortunately gets us no closer to what we really need. On the contrary.
Overeating sets a vicious cycle in motion: the more weight we gain, the more
self-conscious we become, and the more reluctant to go out and meet someone to
love. So we become even more lonely, anxious, frustrated and depressed. And, to
feel better, we eat even more.
While our society
is understandably focused on the unhealthy effects of plain to the naked eye
physical obesity, few have questioned a less obvious, but more disturbing
disorder affecting not only those suffering from it, but demoralizing and
dehumanizing us all. Significantly enough, this disease began to go viral at
about the same time as did physical obesity, and quickly became a pandemic
infecting the whole world. Its symptoms are similar—swelling and ballooning—but
instead of hips and thighs, it’s of bank accounts. This disorder could be
termed, without malice, “financial obesity.”
While overeating can be understood,
it is less clear what voids over-earners try to fill. In other words, what
drives someone to accumulate wealth beyond any possible use or need? What
motivates millionaires and billionaires to work nearly night and day, with no
concern for friends, family or society, focusing on some menial endeavor that
most often involves nothing more mentally challenging than buying and selling
with the single-minded purpose of accumulating more? Were this kind of behavior
exhibited by another species—like our dog, say we found it running endlessly
around the neighborhood pilfering a dog biscuit here, another there, then piling
them sky high in quantities that he couldn’t eat were he to live to be a
hundred—would we not be alarmed?
When looking for the “why” of
over-earning, I think we have to dismiss comparison to eating disorder
motivations—of trying to relive the sweetness of mother’s milk and her
comforting breast, for few people I know were brought up snuggling Rolex
watches or sucking hundred dollar bills.
While physical obesity results in
damage to our arteries, liver and heart, it is more difficult to measure
financial obesity’s damage to the organ it affects most: our brain. It’s fair
to say that the vital neurological paths—those formed by frequent use, as we’ll
examine in chapter 14—would be of the most limited kind, made up primarily of basic
arithmetic: figuring gain and loss. Most other vital paths—curiosity,
imagination, warmth, kindness and empathy—had they ever developed, would have
all atrophied, from disuse, long ago. I think we can assume that, as every
other human, the financially obese need “a kiss and a cuddle.” Lacking the
qualities which are normally inviting—warmth, kindness, imagination—they
continue to substitute with an inanimate satisfaction, one they can count, and
count on: money.
The point of this discussion is a
simple one: Since the explosion of financial obesity corresponds in time to the
explosion of physical obesity, there must be some aberration in our recent
culture that has caused them both. In other words, we can assume that the
emotional problems—depression, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, frustration,
stress, problems with interpersonal relationships and poor self-esteem—that lie
behind over-gorging are the same whether the over-gorging out is of the
physical or financial kind.
What, you may ask, has this to do
with real life? Well, since most cases of obesity are caused by emotional
disorders which we feel obligated to address and treat to save the patient,
then are we not equally if not more obligated to identify and treat the
emotional problems of the financially obese? Not just out of fairness but out
of self-preservation. Decades of obsessive hoarding and unbridled greed have
led directly to a near economic collapse; hence the emotional disorders of the
financially obese affect not only them but have severe repercussions on the
welfare of us all.
The first step is obvious: to
recognize financial obesity for what it is—a runaway pandemic. Second, instead
of admiring it and refusing to see its danger, treat it like any other
emotional problem or mental disease: with attentive understanding and care.
And make sure
we “kiss and cuddle” a hell of a lot more.
A REAL LIFE: Rediscovering the Roots of Our Happiness is available through
W. W. Norton and Amazon.com or wherever books and ebooks are sold.
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