While most people hate to admit it, the desire for money is a perfectly healthy attribute. Money allows us to perform exchanges to meet our day-to-day needs and wants through a standardized medium of exchange. Thus, the aspiration for monetary wealth becomes closely associated with personal achievement and the struggle to live a better life.
However, in this bleak economic climate, it has become increasingly apparent that finances are being viewed as the sole indicator of personal worth and fulfillment. This demonstrates an extreme desire that must be curbed before it leads to psychological instability. To cope with the rough economy, members of the workforce must build a foundation of personal identity and achievement outside the unpredictable and superficial realm of money.
In the current recession, one in which the unemployment rate is the highest it’s been in 26 years, more people are getting laid off each day, and the failing economy has become the main psychological challenge many Americans face today.
According to the American Psychological Association’s 2008 Stress in America survey, 80 percent of Americans reported in September that the economy is a significant cause of stress. This number is up from 66 percent in April. Rick Weinberg, a psychologist from Florida, told CNN that in one week, 80 percent of his patients were talking about the pain inflicted by the economy.
“This is really unprecedented,” Nancy Molitor, a clinical psychologist from Chicago, told CNN. “I’ve been practicing for 20 years, and I’m seeing just an unprecedented amount of anxiety, as are most of my colleagues.”
In extreme cases, financial troubles have led to drastic acts such as suicide. In early January, one of Chicago’s most well-known real-estate brokers, Steven L. Good, died of apparent suicide. Just before his death, he had talked about the tough economic situation surrounding the real-estate sector at a business conference. More recently, a California man, Ervin Antonio Lupoe, shot and killed all six of his family members before turning the gun on himself. He and his wife had just been fired from their jobs.
While these incidences are for the most part rare, they are indicative of a general mindset that reduces personal identity simply to economic capacity. If this capacity is taken away, as was the case with the real-estate broker and the married couple, life itself crumbles to nothingness.
According to Molitor, this psychological pathology is prevalent in type A personalities, which are known to be more aggressive and highly competitive. People of this type tend to build their identities around being successful in the workplace. However, once the foundation of economic identity is lost, they lose sight of who they are, as well. Given the changing nature of today’s economy, such a tendency becomes dangerous. The fear of losing one’s job also becomes an issue of losing one’s notion of self.
One’s professional life, although important, must be treated as a part of the greater concept of life, and not life itself. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s work, and careers are significant to the personal identity. This is why we associate people who are successful in their fields with their jobs. Bill Gates is known for his work at Microsoft, just as President Barack Obama is known for being the 44th president of the United States.
The problem with taking pride in one’s work is the possibility of it overshadowing the person. We often leave out the fact that Bill Gates is also a fierce philanthropist and Obama, a father and a husband. People are people, and the existence of high-paying jobs, or the lack of them, must not mask the fact that they exist outside of the economic setting.
It is saddening to reduce oneself to a mere agent of work. Monetary compensation must not be seen as the ultimate end, but the means by which people go about living. Numerous responsibilities, opportunities and successes exist outside of the economic setting. This simple fact must be realized to gain a better understanding of self, and to better insulate oneself from the troubling fiscal times.
Work and the pursuit of wealth can only go so far to define a person. It’s entirely up to the individual to define the meaning of life.
E-mail Ong at rong@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.