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Growing up my dad regularly told a joke: ya know, money can’t buy happiness, but happiness can’t buy groceries.
In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss Freud writes, “Happiness is the belated fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness. Money was not a childhood wish.”
While he’s right that wealth and happiness tend not to have a one-to-one correlation, he missed an important truth about money and well-being that my father understood: money can’t buy happiness, but happiness can’t buy groceries.
In his assertion about the disappointing nature of money, Freud seems to ignore that money can’t make us happy, but it can buy things that make us happy. In fact, that’s the only thing money can do. Unless it’s being spent and received and spent again, money remains just a worthless pieces of paper or numbers on a spreadsheet.
When I was a child and my parents encouraged me to save the few dollars they gave me for completing my chores, I responded, “Why would I save it? Money’s no fun unless you spend it.” It turns into something more substantial only once we use it, something that has to do with what we want and upon which our happiness depends. Money’s no fun unless we spend it. In fact, it really isn’t much of anything until we spend it.
Because we can only spend so much, each of our purchases requires us to act as if we know quite clearly what we want and to barter some sort of truce between our conflicting desires. Something as simple as buying a cheeseburger means I know that not only do I want this burger here and now, but that I also don’t want to spend that money on a chicken sandwich or a small gift for a spouse or a ticket for a movie.
This process of desiring, which we usually (hopefully) don’t give much active thought to, suggests that we have to act as if we understand our desires clearly enough to make these choices and that we only want the one thing that we’ve decided on.
But that’s not always the case. We often want one thing, a cheeseburger, that’s in conflict with something else we want, losing weight for instance. Then those desires may conflict with other desires. We may not want to order a salad for fear of how we look to those around us, but that may conflict with how we’d like to look after losing weight. And yet the money’s spent. It went from nothing, a small piece of paper, to something and that something was more than we bargained for.
Freud spent his whole career combating the notion that we know what we want. He based his practice off the idea that what we want is never as readily transparent to us as we would like to think, and that the internal war we wage over what we want will never come to a peaceful truce.
The story of the unconscious, as told by Freud, says that we generally have only a vague idea of what we want. More often than not, what we were really after appears only in looking backwards, not forwards. We’re tragically poor predictors of what we want, and self-awareness is typically a retrospective journey.
These murky waters of our desires and the unconscious mind form the backdrop of financial transactions, including our generosity. In every exchange of money, every purchase and donation, there’s an underlying web of desires — both known and unknown.
We hand over money for a product or service or we give to a non-profit or church, we put what we want into play with what someone else wants or needs, sometimes desperately wants or desperately needs. This exchange, a dance of desires, is inescapable when it comes to money because money can be spent on whatever we want. That what we want and what others want remains partly veiled even in plain transactions — has profound implications when we consider the act of giving money. It raises essential questions about our understanding of others’ needs and desires and just how much we can or should know about them.
I’m now the Executive Director of a non-profit called Held. We give money directly to people who need it. This puts me in a position in which I often have to reflect on this complex and conflicted relationship between people, money, and desire. We provide money directly to people in need, no strings attached and no matter what they want to spend it on. The proper term for what we do is “guaranteed income,” but it’s one I’ve drifted away from since founding the organization in early 2023. I typically just say that I give money to people that need it.
While not new, guaranteed income is having a moment of popularity politically, culturally and within the social service world. Sometimes referred to as “basic income” or with a bit less grace “direct cash transfers,” the basic idea says that when people need money for rent or childcare or to put food on the table, there’s simply no substitute for having the cash on hand and too often people’s market income isn’t adequate to or timely to cover those expenses.
Far too many people know from experience that happiness can’t buy groceries or pay the rent or fix the car.
Over a decade ago, I began to feel compelled by the simplicity of direct, guaranteed income. Not only is it simple, but it also seems to respect people’s dignity in a way that other social services sometimes skip over. When I worked as a pastor, people in need would show up to the church thinking we had both the money and the desire to help. When they were lucky, they were right on both accounts. More often than not their needs were urgent and they could only remedy them with money.
Over the years, I have insisted that we ought to just give people money, ask as few questions as possible, and all move on with our day. Much to my surprise, I’ve encountered a not insignificant number of people that vehemently disagreed. They offered a number of reasons why giving money to people was wrong, and I have certainly had my own doubts about it.
But I don’t do my job based on certainty, and I know that a good number of us harbor those same doubts about giving someone money.
I have given money to people that spent it on drugs or alcohol. I’ve given money to people that got housing. I’ve given money to people that spent it on a car that got them to work, and I’ve given money to people that spent it on a car that broke down immediately. I’ve given money to someone that got a heart transplant.
Everyone has a story of the guy on the street asking for money for food, they offered him an actual meal, and he declined. Most people I know have generously helped someone with cash to get by only to watch them spend it on something frivolous. Trusting others with money, our money, isn’t easy.
The question I get more often than not from skeptics about giving money directly to people in need, is this: what if they go and spend the money on drugs and alcohol? I’ve answered that question time and time again. And while the overwhelming data suggests that when people have money they need, they spend it on the things they need, pointing to data rarely satisfies anyone.
Over the years, I have found it far more interesting and quite a bit more productive to rephrase their question for them, “What if they want to spend the money on drugs and alcohol?” I think this is much more helpful because it locates the fear in its actual cause: the desire of others, specifically the desires of someone in need.
Once we start with the idea that people can’t be trusted with money, we come up with all sorts of clever solutions for getting them the money that they need without giving it to them directly.
When we give someone an object they can use instead of money they can spend, they can’t do what they want, they can only do what they should (or at least what the giver thinks they should). Give someone socks, they have to wear them on their feet. Give someone a meal, and they have to eat it. Give someone job skills classes, and they can only show up (or not).
But give someone money, and they can do whatever they want. And I find this is where people get scared.
Something about another’s desire and their happiness and what they might spend money on to pursue happiness provokes an anxiety in people, and it’s that anxiety and fear of what others want where I find my own desire provoked. It provides the thrilling and oftentimes terrifying opportunity to learn what it means to love.
It’s this mixture of fear and thrill, terror and love that I find myself drawn to in my work at Held, giving people money generally, and in my belief in the necessity of a large-scale welfare state for the poor. There’s simply no knowing what people will do with what we give them.
If I were to offer a criticism of the kind of charity centered around giving objects to people (socks, meals, a shelter bed), it’s not that it’s inadequate or a bandaid when what they need more. It’s obvious that people need these things, but are they what they want? And if we can’t make space for the fear of what someone in need wants, where is there for love to go?
It’s in the space of our fear, the space that fear creates that love can begin to grow. If we aren’t a bit anxious about how things might go, we’re missing out on a lot of love.
The writer and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says that love is giving to someone that which you don’t have. His translator and interpreter Bruce Fink helpfully puts it this way.
Imagine rich parents that buy their children whatever they want. This isn’t a sign of love because they have plenty of money. However, those same parents also work extremely demanding jobs that occupy a good deal of their time, but they always make time to go to their children’s sporting events, theater productions, and school gatherings. In giving their children the thing that they lack, their time, these parents love their them.
When I tell people about my work, I often say that we don’t just give people money, we give them trust. Others typically see this positively, as conferring dignity on those who seldom experience it. But I hope they also perceive the inherent anxiety in it.
I can’t know when I send a homeless teenager a couple hundred dollars each month whether they will spend it on rent and food or drugs and alcohol. We have to trust when we don’t know. I give them money, which I have, but I give them trust, my lack of knowledge in what they will do with it. So in this way, every dollar that we give to someone in need is also giving them something that we don’t have: the knowledge of how they’ll spend it. Every dollar given is an act of faith.
In that space that fear creates that love shows up little by little, dollar by dollar.
Giving money to people that need it isn’t simply a matter of information about its efficacy. It works. We know that. It may not work to solve every problem, but it does work to solve one problem: not having enough money.
It’s also not a matter of morality. I would never tell you you should give money to people or you’re a bad person or that you’re a good person because you do. It’s got nothing to do with virtue. You should give people money because you want to or find a reason to want to and my only drive in life is to show you how much fun it can be. Money’s no fun unless you spend it and the only thing more fun than spending it is giving it away.
It’s possible to give to people what we think they need, socks, a sleeping bag, skills training classes, without fear. It’s impossible to give people money, to give them the ability to do whatever it is that they want without some measure of anxiety. Nothing inspires fear like what someone else wants. The uncertainty of another’s desire is the beginning of all anxiety.
But where trust is the hardest to muster, it also means that faith, hope, and love can grow the deepest. To say “Here’s some money, go spend it on whatever you want,” is to give them something you never had in the first place and certainly should never want: your control over them.
When people ask me if I know what people will want to spend the money on that Held provides them, I just say that I don’t. And I find that quite thrilling. I do it because what if they want to spend it on rent and clothing? What if they want to spend it fixing their car to get back to work? I rarely know what I want without doubt or conflict, let alone what someone else will want.
But I do know what they need and that’s money. When we give money to others, allowing them the freedom to use it as they see fit, we engage in an act of trust amidst this uncertainty. Fear starts carving out a place in our heart where love can come in. Money uniquely allows us to acknowledge our shared human condition of not always knowing what we want, yet choosing to step forward in love anyway because we have shared needs.
In doing so, we begin to fulfill those deep-seated wishes that money itself can never satisfy. We turn the nothing of money, into something for someone else, one dollar at a time.