Truth Bomb Tuesday: It’s a common tendency. Is it holding you back?
There are a few glitches in the psyche that work as wealth repellents – belief systems that we inherited or picked up that undermine our efforts to build wealth for ourselves.
A good-chunk of my work feels like pest-extermination.
One of the common ones is a perceived trade-off between wealth and happiness. People buy into the idea that not only can wealth not buy happiness, being wealthy actively makes you sad.
Hot tip: the belief system was sold to you to make you feel less bad about being poor. “I may not be able to afford groceries, but at least I’m not rich and unhappy. Dodged a bullet there.”
But today I wanted to look at one of this bug’s cousins – the idea that there is a trade-off between wealth and other people’s happiness!
I see this system of belief take root in people who have that ‘people-pleaser’ tendency.
Remember that ‘people pleasing’ – which we can define here as the tendency to put other people’s needs above your own, if you even listen to your own needs at all! – remember that people pleasing is a survival strategy.
Humans are a herd species. In the old days, we didn’t survive on our own. Banishment was death.
And so we developed a large neo-frontal cortex in order to help us navigate fitting in and belonging with another group of beings who also had large neo-frontal cortexes.
We are hard-wired to fit in and belong. We are hard-wired to please people.
To a point. But the way I see it, that faculty developed to modulate belonging, either side of an intrinsic baseline level of belonging. Little bit more, little bit less.
Not to generate a functional sense of belonging to begin with.
(It’s one of the reasons so many people feel so stressed.)
Anyway, where this lands today, is that people want to please people in order to generate a sense of belonging.
But we also see that people can resent you if you have nice things.
Envy is as old as time. We envy people’s cars, their spouses, their houses… everything. Anything that can be owned can be envied.
But you know who never attracts envy? Ever? From anyone?
The one who has nothing.
If you don’t have a thing, then no one is going to envy you or resent you.
And so the drive to people-pleasing can translate into a subconscious desire to have nothing – to be poor.
To have nice things – even a bare minimum of life’s essentials – can be difficult for people-pleasers.
They feel more comfortable having nothing, and knowing that nobody out there resents them for their nice stuff.
And the biggest obstacle to escaping poverty (however you define it) is how perversely comfortable poverty often is!
Anyway, if you or someone you know has this people-pleasing tendency, maybe check in and see how this relates to the idea of having stuff. How comfortable or uncomfortable are you having a nicer car than your friends, for example.
Poverty can be a people-pleasing strategy.
But you can find a way around it
DB.