How do you feel about money?

How the recession is teaching us all to love and respect money

We all know that money is the root of all evil. In our everyday speech money is unclean:

• It is known as filthy lucre,
• If you have too much of it you are stinking rich
• If you have too little you are dirt poor.

We don’t talk about money openly and we treat it like a vulgar subject. We routinely ask strangers what they do for a living, but would never dream of asking how much they earn. And that even applies to family and close friends.

In the same way I never discuss my Payday Loan activities with anyone else, except my wife.

It’s not always like that

Not all cultures feel the same about money. I have often been asked how much I earn, but never in the U.S. When I tell people that I write about money, it evokes little interest and they don’t pursue the conversation. I wonder if it would be the same if I said I was a sports or travel or food writer.

But now there’s a change

It seems that the recession is bringing the subject of money out into the open and making us love the stuff more than we did before. Most of us now believe that money is now more important than it was prior to the recession. This thinking is also reducing how we value possessions.

Money is a great tool and also a measure of value and a form of exchange. It buys food and clothes for us and our families; it keeps a roof over our head, pays our tax bills and if we’re lucky, buys a few treats as well. It is notoriously hard to earn and unbelievably easy to spend.

A lesson from recession

Along comes a recession and changes our attitudes towards money. It teaches us to look after it, show affection towards it, how to use it wisely, and surprisingly more generously.

Research is also showing that people are keeping up their charitable contributions and helping their family more in these difficult times. It is a fact that charitable donations in the U.S. doubled after the 1930s Great Depression because people had seen the trauma of poverty at first hand.

More money lessons

The credit crunch is teaching us to stay out of debt and to stop wasting and abusing money. More, it is teaching us that saving money is good, and borrowing too much is dangerous.

We will always feel funny about money but until somebody develops an entirely different social structure, or we return to a beads and barter system, we just have to learn to live with money.

We ought to learn to love it, not because it’s money but for what it can do for us, our loved ones, and society, if used properly. After this recession is over, or while we are still in the depths of this recession, we should evolve new money systems and start treating it more seriously. Most of all, we need to learn how to respect it.