These Subtle Cultural Scripts Probably Shaped Your Money Habits

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Writer Elise Loehnen (“On Our Best Behavior”) joined me to explore how our money stories make us spend, work, and live. Distinct cultural scripts shape our relationship with money, like “sloth” and “greed” or the idea that “a man should be a provider.” Even if you’re not consciously abiding by this societal shorthand, Elise says, it probably influences your attitudes.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• The Seven Deadly Sins

• Earlier reference to Elise’s work in our episode with Kate Kennedy on the economic power of women in media

• 2004 study on the “obesity penalty”

• How the Seven Deadly Sins Began as ‘Eight Evil Thoughts’, per National Geographic

• Mrs. America on Phyllis Schlafly

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Elise Loehnen:

Regardless of how you were raised, this stuff is our culture and it is in us in unconscious and insidious ways, and it very much shapes how we think about all of these qualities and this very tenuous and complex relationship that women have with greed. And when it was first written down before it was gendered and turned into culture and socialized in all of our bodies, it was an admonishment not to hoard weaalth and to be generous, to be generous with the poor.

Katie:

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich People. I am your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and today we are talking about the Seven Deadly Sins, or maybe more accurately how our perceptions of a couple of them, namely greed and sloth, unconsciously affect our relationships with money and work. For those who aren’t consciously aware of the Seven Deadly Sins, they are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, aka all the ingredients for a great Saturday night.

And I say consciously aware because as my guest today will point out, these ideas are woven into our culture regardless of your exposure to explicit religiosity. Elise Loehnen, author of On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good, and the host of the Pulling the Thread podcast is joining me today. I first discovered her work a couple months ago via a series that I was referencing in our episode with Kate Kennedy, if you remember that one in which Elise had audited the feeds of popular male podcasters in an attempt to understand how and why women were so absent from their conversations in their platforms. And as serendipity would have it, we actually talked for this episode the morning of the Huberman exposé in New York Magazine.

I picked up a copy of her book shortly after I heard about her work for the first time, and I found the entire premise to be really original and ambitious as an undertaking, and something that jumped out at me in the greed chapter of the book specifically, which we’re going to talk about together shortly, made me want to bring her on the show. Because while the whole book is about the various ways women ingest messaging about how to be “good women” and how that goodness feels paramount to our safety and protection and security in a patriarchal society, her missives about money struck me as potentially useful for women who have a lot of mental noise around spending and investing. And really who amongst us doesn’t?

Because she argues that even if you weren’t raised religiously like I was, these unconscious beliefs puppeteer a lot of social behavior and norms, while they typically equate denial of self for everyone. Aka, sloth is really just a pejorative term for resting, while gluttony is an amorphous threshold that’s crossed at some indecipherable point while you’re eating, apparently. This trained self-denial is especially poignant for women, Elise says, and can disconnect us from our own instincts and our desires. So when I learned that the Seven Deadly Sins actually originated with a fourth century ascetic monk, it all clicked. Self-denial is what I would associate with the lifestyle of an aesthetic monk. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to be good given the Seven Deadly Sins of it all. You may be wondering which Bible verse we can attribute these almighty rules to.

But as I learned in her book—and curiously not in 12 years of Catholic school—it was Pope Gregory the first who codified the Seven Deadly Sins. Well, first he modified them, then he codified them at some point in the sixth century. The source material came from that aforementioned fourth century Christian ascetic monk who outlined the eight evil thoughts. One of them, sadness, was later dropped.

The point is, if you’re looking for them in, say, the Catholic Gospels, you won’t find them there. And as Elise points out in her book, nor will you find the gospels of any women like the famously smeared Mary Magdalene, who truly got the most unflattering edit in the history of narrative telephone. And again, for those of you who aren’t religious or didn’t have religious upbringing, Elise will unpack more of these references in our conversation. But the Seven Deadly Sins map pretty closely to our relationship with money.

I mean, envy, greed, sloth, even gluttony can be construed as a money-adjacent topic. And I’ve shared a lot in the past about my deeply internalized belief that one must earn their rest and that sloth is sinful and productivity is godly. And the way in which embracing this a little too earnestly and crucially, semi subconsciously, meant I couldn’t sit on the couch for more than 20 minutes without feeling itchy. The career consequences were predictable in that it led to moderate financial and professional success, but ultimately paved the path to misery and burnout. We’ve all seen this film before. We didn’t like the ending. I won’t belabor the point. I ended up hiring expensive professional help this year to work through it once and for all because I felt trapped in my own self-imposed restrictions; self-denial. We’ll do an episode about that in a couple of months.

Then you’ve got envy and greed. Now, these are slightly more self-explanatory in their financial implications, but I think the bigger picture revelation that I experienced after encountering Elise’s insights was that so much of what drives my behavior is under the surface. I think that’s true for a lot of us. We might craft aftermarket explanations for our behavior, but most of us aren’t really aware of the underlying motivations or fears that shape our day-to-day financial choices. And in that sense, thinking of the Seven Deadly Sins as an invented manmade manual—literally manmade—that purports to explain what one should embrace and what one should avoid is a roadmap for understanding where we may have internalized messaging about right and wrong, that is muting our own instincts and interfering with our ability to relate to money in a healthy, well-adjusted way.

We will get to my conversation with Elise after a quick break.

Elise, welcome to the Money with Katie Show.

Elise Loehnen:

Thank you for having me. Very excited.

Katie:

The pleasure is mine. So mostly today I want to dive into all of your reflections on how beliefs about greed can shape our relationship with money. But before I do that, there was one landmark study that you highlighted in your book in the gluttony chapter and it pertained to pay discrimination. I thought it was funny because in your book, it was one of your footnotes from your research, but I wanted to talk to you about it because it’s struck me as this perfect case study in how all of these moralized frameworks, aka the sin of gluttony serve to infiltrate these societal narratives over the centuries and actually end up policing women’s bodies and using compensation as very real control as a form of reward or punishment. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts more about this study if you’d like to share.

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, so the authors in this study found that a 65 pound increase in women’s weight, specifically women, that was correlated with a 9% drop in compensation. And the implications of this are wide, and as you mentioned, it’s the perfect example of one, how these sins tend to overlap in Venn diagram in women’s lives and specifically their bodies, but also in how insidious all of these other—body appearance class, gender, race, et cetera—how all of these things can converge in a way that becomes such a Gordian knot to untangle. Suddenly you’re like, I don’t even know how to unravel this much less do anything about it.

Katie:

Yeah, yeah. Where it even begins.

Elise Loehnen:

Where do you begin?

Katie:

There was, I’m not sure if it was this study or one that was attempting to replicate the results, but I read something recently that highlighted something similar. And to your point about it only pertaining to women, there’s been this longstanding belief, at least in the United States, I think that wealthy people tend to be thinner. And the thought was that this is because having a lot of money lends itself to healthier lifestyle. You can pay for a personal trainer, you can pay for healthy food. In extreme cases, you may be even able to pay someone to cook for you. You are probably less stressed about where your resources are coming from, and as we know, stress impacts your body and your emotions as well.

But what they found was that the correlation between weight and wealth only existed for women. And that in the United States, I believe it was the correlation between how thin a wealthy man is and how thin a poor man is. There was pretty much no relationship between weight and wealth for men, which led them to the same conclusion of, oh, we thought it was that wealth creates thinness, but actually it’s that in women, the opposite is true, that thin women tend to make more money and accrue more wealth. And so it was top of mind for me when I was reading and I thought it was interesting that it came up again.

Elise Loehnen:

No, it’s fascinating. I would also say now wealthy women have access to Ozempic, which is I think the Upper East Side is the most prescribed neighborhood for Ozempic and similar prescriptions. Isn’t that wild? I don’t have the exact stat you don’t say, but yes, these things are perpetuating and so insidious. I think that fatphobia, I think we can all agree that we will look back on this as the big ism of our time and say, and we’re sort of trying to get there, but not two steps forward, one step back, but we’ll look back and say, do you remember when we wielded all of these judgements against people about their bodies? And as you mentioned, it’s far more pernicious for women and the implications are much more extreme. We’re much more tolerant of men who have bodies that don’t abide or are not obedient or compliant or perfectly under control or good.

Katie:

Your book does such an amazing job of drawing those conclusions and making those connections so explicitly because even the words that you’re using right now, compliant, obey, goodness. These are things that I never really noticed explicitly or had a conscious awareness of.

But because I grew up in the Catholic church and going to Catholic school, there were things about the papal history, we’ll say, the gospels, things that I learned reading your book that I had never been taught in my 12 years of an hour a day of religion class. So I was kind of shocked to see the implicit made explicit insofar as the way moral frameworks function to control women. I appreciate you indulging that.

The other history lesson that I found really illustrative was this deadly sin of greed. And you write about the origins of that concept. You write about this distinction that was made in the early days and how we might be misinterpreting it now. So can you share a little bit more about how it’s evolved the way we think about it?

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, just to go back to what you said, because really the thesis of the book is that women are conditioned for goodness, an exterior, like a socially adjudicated version, goodness. And men are conditioned for power. And that’s what I wanted to understand, that goodness.

And the first example you use is a perfect one for how all of these ideas of goodness get layered into us over time and are not actually gospel. That’s the thing. The sins are not in the Bible. They came out of the fourth century, a desert monk named Evagrius Ponticus. This was in the fourth century. And then it wasn’t until the sixth century, that Pope Gregory, who’s also really responsible for turning the Vatican, turning it into a functioning government. And he did a lot of good things for the poor, but he also is the one who created this idea of the seven cardinal vices.

And he assigned them all to Mary Magdalene. And this is the same homily where he turned her into the same woman who anoints Jesus’s feet with her hair and he turns both of them into the same person who was a penitent prostitute. And so she wore that reputation until I think like 1980.

In 2016, Pope Francis said she was the apostle to the apostles. They’ve tried to sort of clean up her reputation, but the damage is done. And what I try and point out in the book, regardless of how you were raised, whether in the Catholic church or half Jewish like me, this stuff is our culture and it is in us and unconscious and insidious ways, and it very much shapes how we think about all of these qualities like greed and this better than anyone, this very tenuous and complex relationship that women have with greed. And when it was first written down before it was gendered and turned into culture and socialized in all of our bodies, it was an admonishment not to hoard wealth and to be generous, to be generous with the poor and the church.

That’s sort of the beginning of them, this muscle of taking money and redistributing it and of course keeping it for themselves a whole different book, whole different history. But that was the impetus. That was the idea behind greed. It was about being generous and charitable, specifically philanthropic.

Katie:

Here’s what was so wild to me, this point that you’ve made about whether or not you consciously received these messages that it is part of our culture, but B, the way that greed in particular strikes me as a universally pernicious player in women’s financial lives.

I was just in Florida with my parents and my Grandma Jean, Grandma Jean is somewhat of a legendary character on the show and in Money with Katie universe. But I was talking to her about her frugalness, her frugality, and she said something that I thought was really interesting because oftentimes when I talk to people about their relationship with money, you can scratch beneath the surface a little bit and there is an answer they’ll give you that’s kind of high level about why they’re frugal or what they believe. But then if you keep asking questions and digging deeper, you usually get to something that’s a little more meaningful.

And she’s always been a very frugal person when I was encouraging her to loosen up a little bit, have some fun, that was kind of the spirit of the vacation. She wanted to take all of us on a vacation. But money is always kind of a topic of conversation in my family. And she said, well, I’m a very contented person. I don’t need much to be happy. I don’t really need anything. I’m not a materialist. And I thought that was interesting. So I kind of kept pushing and eventually we got to the point that she admitted that if she were to indulge in something like staying at a really nice hotel or buying a really nice car or your standard issue luxury purchase, that she would feel guilty. And she used the word guilty and I thought that that was interesting. I said, what would make you feel guilty?

She says, well, I just don’t think I deserve that. And I was like, that’s interesting. Tell me more about who would deserve it, what would have to be true for you to deserve it? And she wasn’t sure. She didn’t have an answer. She’s like, I don’t know who would deserve it, but I can’t help but think a lot of those emotions, guilt, deservingness, these subconscious feelings about how we interact with money in the world around us comes back to this innate fear of giving into this sin of greed or being perceived that way or feeling that way about yourself. And I don’t really think any of it is happening at the conscious level.

Elise Loehnen:

No, none of it. That’s what makes these scripts so insidious, these cultural ideas, because they run us. And we would never say, you would never say, I’m Katie and I think of myself as greedy, or I police myself on my sexuality, or so many of us are sort of anti-this. But then our behavior, what we’ve learned, what we have seen modeled by other women and what we police other women about horribly, unfortunately I do it too. We all do it. It is unconscious and because we think these things are bad, they’re so repressed and suppressed that we refuse to let it come up so we can even look at it and allow it and embrace it and accept it instead. It’s like we find those qualities that we hate in ourselves in other women, and then we deprecate them and criticize them sort of across the board.

It’s interesting to look at even the world of philanthropy, and I write about this in the book, but the difference between women and men. You have MacKenzie Scott just unloading her cash as fast as she can compared to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world right now, is giving away the most infinitesimal fraction of their wealth if they’re doing anything at all.

And the women meanwhile are just trying to unburden themselves in really beautiful ways. What’s also interesting too, it’s that there’s so much pressure, I’m sure you get this all the time, to behave more like men or take your part or do—it’s like this, rise to the occasion of this standard that the men are establishing and to win and to sort of even it out or balance out culture. This, if we just have more women doing the same thing as the men, somehow the world will benefit. And it’s always this rise to the occasion of the men do as they do. And we’re very rarely do we say, I would be better if the men could just behave more like the women.

Katie:

We’ll get right back to our convo after a quick break.

This question of cultural roles is so powerful because I think that there is some innate permission that’s granted on behalf of men. So stay with me, this narrative that men should strive to be providers. Your role is to be a provider. And so if I’m a provider as a man, it follows that things like greed and ambition are seen as natural to that cause perhaps masculine, perhaps even if greed is not cast as a positive thing, almost like a necessary evil in order to fulfill your duty, there is largely less friction to that concept or to a man behaving that way than the opposite. But to your point, women are more likely to have stories about money that are at the intersection of greed, sloth, and pride. Like Grandma Jean, do I deserve this? Did I work hard enough for this? And so I don’t know.

I think it’s something that even though I am aware of it now, I do question where this healthy solution lies. Because I, in some ways, think that to your point about, well, should the women act more like the men and follow those cultural scripts are the opposite. I think thinking of yourself as either destined to provide or fundamentally undeserving of financial security. These are both in my mind, suboptimal outcomes. And so that striving for the masculine approach doesn’t really fix things. But at the same time, whenever we see research that shows even breadwinning women will downplay their financial status because some report explicitly in the data, oh, it makes my husband uncomfortable that I earn more than he does. So I’m pretending that I don’t. That just kills me.

Elise Loehnen:

Yes. And it’s so complex and so nuanced. And there’s some impulse in your grandmother, I’m going to guess, that is like I don’t deserve to have so much when so many people have so little. I feel like that’s also a big part of the money story. Certainly part of my story and part of it is I think our world is so out of balance. It’s so out of control that women are the ones who are not, I don’t want to say stuck, it’s a beautiful, but it’s this—we’re bound to this idea of nurturance and creativity and care and these very, very, very, these qualities that are coded female even though they belong to all people and men really need to get in touch with this desperately. It’s killing them to not be in touch with it. But there’s this, I guess if you guys aren’t going to do it, we’re going to try and balance out the world on our own backs rather than men saying, this is out of balance. We need to find this space in the middle.

Katie:

You actually wrote something about this that I wanted to bring up, which is this quote, “The women I know are deeply ambivalent about money. We are attracted to its promise of security and power and repelled by the inequities it perpetuates,” that I think speaks to this, we’ll say, confusion, discomfort, this awareness of the good and the bad.

But I found this to be really resonant based on the conversations that I’ve had with women about money over the years. Because I mean, you noted in your chapter about greed that talks about investing. Women are more likely to believe it’s wrong to make money without effort, and that making money with no talent output or work feels fundamentally wrong to us. But as we know, that’s literally how investing in public markets works. Its passivity is the value proposition that you don’t have to do anything, you just have to put the money in and it will grow over time.

So I think I take it even a step further too, again, based on the conversations that I’ve had with listeners that I think some of this moral hesitation is not even gendered, but just in the sense that there is this awareness in many cases that the profits that enrich you as a shareholder are sometimes ill-gotten. And I wonder about this ambivalence overall that maybe to our earlier point about is there a correct route here? Maybe we’re not really making a judgment call, it’s just the observation, but is ambivalence in some ways the healthier response given the complexity of the topic? It’s maybe the more insightful response because it’s acknowledging the inherent inequity in something like public market investing.

Elise Loehnen:

And I love that you use the word ambivalent because I spent most of my life using it or feeling like it meant a balance, neutrality or something. And it’s the opposite. It’s like that you are both completely compelled by and repulsed by something sort of simultaneously or I think that that’s exactly what it is for women. It’s like I was talking to this woman that she’s kind of a therapist and slightly more out there than that, and I was talking about money and scarcity because I feel like this is a big pattern I’m coming to in my life, this deep ambivalence. And I create conditions for myself where I need to overwork and almost create scarcity to justify my workaholism. I don’t quite know what’s going on, that’s why I’m talking to her.

But she said to me and similar to I’m like, I don’t want anything. I have my perfect small contained house and I educate my kids Well, I don’t want anything and I don’t really care about money. And she was like, honey, money is at the center of your world. It’s the only thing in some ways that you think about. And I was like, oh god, that hits, it hits even as it’s not something that I profess, I’m a writer. There are easier ways to make money, but I am so torn between this wanting the ease or wanting this idea of what it would promise, safety, security space, and then being completely resistant to it and refusing it in some ways.

Katie:

It’s totally fraught territory, I think, because that definitely lights something up in my brain. I sometimes think even in my own writing and in the work that I publish where I’ll go, man, I am just a walking contradiction because half the time I’m emphasizing the importance of wealth creation and you need to be taking these strategic steps and you need to be on it and you need to be watching it, and you need to be aware and intimate with the money and familiar and yada, yada yada.

And then the other half of the time it’s like money isn’t everything. Money is a means to an end if you’re worried about it all the time, you’ve gone too far. So it almost feels like this tightrope that we’re constantly trying to navigate, but no one is acknowledging by and large that the tightrope is even there a hundred percent.

We aren’t really having open cultural conversations about what healthy relationships with and to our finances really look like. And I think that’s why you have maybe people like my grandmother in her eighties, who when you ask her why she doesn’t want to spend money on anything and why she’s so frugal, it’s this surface level answer. And not to blow up Grandma Jean’s spot—love Grandma Jean, but the fact that it’s like, well, I just don’t need anything. It’s like, ah, okay, there’s definitely something else going on there, but these aren’t things that we’re really taught to interrogate, and I think a lot of us are probably walking around with these internalized, this programming that’s determining how we are relating not just to money, but to your point about body image, workaholism, effort, family, how all of these things are interwoven together almost inextricably. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, let me tell you, Katie, what a good woman is. A good woman is never tired, is always subjugating her, wants to other people’s needs. And on the subject of needs, like your grandmother, she doesn’t really have needs. She doesn’t have an appetite, she doesn’t have sexual desire, she doesn’t want anything for herself, and she’s never upset about any of it.

Katie:

Damn.

Elise Loehnen:

Sound familiar?

Katie:

You totally just connected two wires that I had not. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I hear my mom say similar things. God, my family is going to love this episode. I always will hear my mom say similar things like, well, I just don’t want much. That not wanting is the thing to strive for, the ultimate.

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, it is the ultimate to not want anything. And of course to not really acknowledge your needs, but you would meet your basic needs after everyone else’s needs are met.

Katie:

Yeah, we hear that too a lot in the conversations around things like generational wealth. I think the personal finance world’s obsession with creating generational wealth is interesting because there is an implication within the term itself that implies, I’m doing this for someone else. This isn’t for me. This is for the next generation. Therefore it’s selfless.

Elise Loehnen:

You can triangulate everything a hundred percent. I’d never thought of that, but yes.

Katie:

So let’s talk Martin Luther. How about a hard pivot to the Reformation? Martin Luther, our friend Martin, he had some grievances that he wrote about in 1535 that you say that greed had come to be viewed as talented, smart, and careful stewardship of money, but in his accounting of the world, he didn’t think that wealth was tied to merit. And I’m going to go ahead and make the connection between merit and effort, given where we’ve already been today, because it feels obvious to me that there was and remains this tension between wealth and how you get it, what it means if you are wealthy, if it’s okay to have it, at what point is it considered greedy? How does, I guess the Martin Luther viewpoint, the Protestant Reformation, Protestant work ethic, you’ve already shared a little bit about how that functions in your life and how there is this sense of needing to be really strenuously exerting yourself to feel deserving of the spoils of that work. But I’m curious how your relationship is informed by this work that you’ve done and where you’re at with it now.

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, I mean, I think the Protestant work ethic, I mean that still certainly has its teeth in us. I think we can all agree and this idea of this unending labor, but again, not for reward or not for, but because it’s what’s required of you. These things have shadow and light, all of these things. And then you look at seeds that Martin Luther and what the Reformation did and then what it sprouted down the road, which is wild, then you get into prosperity gospel and this idea that again, wealth isn’t necessarily, money’s not necessarily attached to what you’re able to produce. It’s because you’re a good person, Katie and good health, good wealth, all of this stuff is a higher level of spiritual value that is assigned to the only the people who are worthy, which is so dark. But a way, I think for people to bypass again, their whole relationship in some ways to money by ascribing it to God’s will. It’s wild to see how these things are planted in the culture. Maybe what the original intent was. You can say the original Pope Gregory’s original idea of greed is maybe more aligned with what we would like to see, which is a more philanthropic world where we care about the poor, but then the way that it shows up is in such a metastasized, dark way.

Katie:

What I can’t help but notice is the inverse of I’m really rich, a good person, and I did everything and God loves me. The inverse is what does it mean about me if I don’t have money, if I have not had a prosperous life? And I think what I feel like I have to underline here is something that you said 20 minutes ago, which is that a lot of the time this is not an explicit religious teaching that you have consciously been like, yes, and I believe that I have money because I am good, because God loves me, that a lot of these messages are so subtle, they’re so subtle. And so you don’t have to have a religious upbringing or religious past or to have internalized those feelings of, if I don’t have money, that must mean something is wrong with me, or I have failed this capitalist experiment and—

Elise Loehnen:

I’ve being punished in some way.

Katie:

Or I’m being punished. Right?

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, it can carry over because particularly it’s important to remember that we live in a very patriarchal capitalist society, and the way to be in the top of this society is to have power, which is closely tied to money. So of course, we’re entirely engineered around that as an ultimate pursuit, and life is very hard in our culture without money, or much harder. It’s exactly what you were saying about finding yourself on this tightrope.

We ascribe so much meaning and so much value or worth to money when so many of the things that actually enrich our lives are essentially priceless or don’t fit within that rubric or that concept. What’s the power of your relationships? Are there people who love you and who you love? Are you lonely or do you feel like you have community? All the things that everyone says are the most important, don’t fit within. Ask people what the most valuable things they own are. And it’s hard to be like my 401k, right?

Katie:

Doing your little gratitude journal in the morning. Today, I am grateful for the S&P 500. It’s so true.

Elise Loehnen:

It is the center of our world.

Katie:

Yeah, I think it’s really telling that the woman you were speaking with told you. It’s in some ways all you think about.

Elise Loehnen:

It’s all I think about apparently, as I’m learning,

Katie:

But I think it’s kind of true. Henah and I, my executive producer, we have conversations about this kind of stuff all the time, the mental gymnastics and hoops that we jump through to justify things like, oh, well, I’m going to spend this money on this, but it’s okay. I got a bonus and I worked really hard for the bonus, so I deserve it. And the sort of negotiation or bargaining that we do with ourselves to justify the desires that we might have or want to choose to act on.

The other piece that I thought was really interesting here is, speaking of I guess subconscious drivers or subconscious stories that are in the driver’s seat, rather, you mentioned this phenomenon that I think we’ve talked about on the show before tends to happen after natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, that in the US, there is a sense of consumerism as civic duty.

And I believe the last time we talked about this on the show, we were mentioning how it was a really prevalent cultural phenomenon during the Cold War when it was kind of seen as capitalism versus communism and how do you promote and tout the benefits of capitalism when you buy stuff and you participate in the market economy.

But this idea that we also saw a crop up after 9/11, that it’s more selfless to spend your money supporting other people or the businesses that employ them than saving it for yourself. It’s almost philanthropy in the broadest and most consumerist sense of the word, which is not giving to charity, but putting money back into circulation by spending it. And you said that you felt on some level that it was better to put the money that you earn back into circulation, whether that is spending or donating it. But I thought it was really interesting because I do, it does seem as though from the conversations I’ve had, that sometimes when people think they have a spending problem or they feel like they’re incapable of saving, that there is something like that going on.

Elise Loehnen:

So interesting. And yes, another insidious script that I’m sure everyone who’s listening to you is like, oh, yeah, that is me. That was my first instinct when Covid happened was, oh God, the economy, I don’t want people to lose their jobs. I should go and buy things.

Katie:

Yeah.

Elise Loehnen:

And it was very over, as you mentioned, after 9/11, it was like, don’t let the terrorists get us down. Go to the malls. And this again falls on women. So it’s this household CEO BS, but it’s how we’re marketed to. It’s in all of our media is buy, buy, buy, rather than hold, hold, hold. And that somehow being a compliant good citizen requires this output of caring for the larger economy, and an economy actually comes from home—oikos—which is interesting. And it doesn’t land in the bodies of men in the same way that it does for women. And so it’s this total double-edged sword. It’s like men can hoard/save and need to give the money away or spend the money as fast as they make it.

At least I would find, again, going to these internal scripts for me that I was like, why am I doing this? I don’t even want any of this stuff. One of the most profound parts of writing the book, and I wrote the book as I went through a career change too, and everything, all my finances were shape shifting, and I didn’t have a full-time job anymore, et cetera, which created so much panic. And I was speaking to someone and she was slow down. I was like, I don’t think I have enough. And she was like, what is enough? What do you need? What do you want? Write down your needs, write down your wants.

And this breathless and not enough is so I think pervasive for women, I just don’t have enough. I don’t know what enough is. I couldn’t tell you, Katie, what that looks like because I’ve never really, I’m on this hamster wheel of not enoughness, and I will say writing it down, and you could call that a budget, but just getting really clear with myself about what I absolutely needed and then what would be nice or what I would want. And I found I didn’t want that many things either, that I put these things down like, oh, I want a new bag. I think I need a new bag, but I don’t actually care about a bag. It was a simple exercise in Excel, and I know you’re not supposed to put words in Excel, but I love writing in Excel. But it was a simple exercise that really crystallized it, concretized it for me in a way that I could get my arms around it. And self-soothe.

Katie:

It reminds me a little bit of a conversation that I had at the beginning of this year when I think that there are stages to these types of realizations. There’s the brain phase where we know something to be true, but we don’t really feel it yet. It’s not in the body in the same way that it’s in the mind. So even though we have that neck up awareness, we still are driven by that underlying impulse.

So I was kind of in that phase with realizing that it was really past time for me to stop making money the number one priority in all of my decisions. But that programming had been so ingrained and so reinforced. Those pathways were just solidified that it took a lot of work and talking to other people about it out loud and flushing it out to get to the place where it started to feel safe, even to loosen the grasp a little bit.

And what I had told this woman, this coach that I was working with, was, I really want to be a better writer. I want the quality of my work to improve. I want to make really fantastic work. And she connected the dots for me in a way that I had not consciously done so yet. She said, well, more money doesn’t mean that; just making more money this year doesn’t mean that your work is better. That you’re a better writer. It’s not what that means at all.

And it was kind of like the light bulb went off that her putting it that way connected the dot for me that I had always subconsciously associated with earning more money, with doing better work. And she kind of shattered that belief that, no, actually you focusing on things that you can do to make more money or to raise income or to raise revenue is in no way directly tied to you becoming a better writer. So you’re focusing on the wrong thing if that’s actually the goal. And I have to say that reframe really impacted and kind of made the fog clear a little bit of, oh yeah, I’m kind of creating an association here where maybe there’s a loose relationship, but in no way is it direct. And in no way is me focusing on revenue going to make, becoming a better writer is not a byproduct of more revenue.

Elise Loehnen:

I think that’s so powerful, and I get that it’s subtle, but I think as people in this economy of making podcasts and whatnot, I can promise you the people who are the most successful are making the most money at podcasts. It’s not because their podcasts are of superlative quality or value for culture. It’s that they’re really good at marketing and they are really good at—men are in particular very good at supporting each other. But I think that we are similar to you think the output, what I am paid for my work is a direct reflection of its value. And what we know in our culture is the things that actually have the most value, taking care of people, feeding people the stuff that we cannot exist without pays the worst. It’s actually an inverse relationship.

Katie:

I hadn’t made that connection either. There is something that I wanted to ask you a little bit about, which was your experiences dating in New York City in the early 2000s while you were living paycheck to paycheck. Maybe this was the birth period of your feeling of not having enough, but you were working an administrative job at a magazine and you noticed something in these dating experiences about the financial role that you were expected to play. Can you tell us a little bit more about that time period?

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah. I was a magazine editor. I made no money. I was living very much paycheck to paycheck, essentially in debt or slight debt. And I was set up on all these dates as one is, and everyone was set up with the same people as, it’s probably still true today, although now I know it’s online.

And I would go out with these guys who just thought it was so cute that I had this job. It wasn’t a career in their minds. And they would say things like, oh, you could keep working and you’d have some walking around money or shoe money, shoe money. And it was interesting. There was two things alive within me. One, it was so hard, and I was like, I would love to be rescued right now. And this sounds nice. I have to be honest. There was that part of me that was like, oh, take me out of this misery because this is so hard and I have no idea how I’m ever going to build a life for myself. The twenties are hard. And then secondly, this rising in me of there is no way that I will ever be in a relationship where my salary doesn’t mean something. And I’m glad that side won.

Katie:

Are you familiar with the reemergent “stay at home girlfriend” TikTok trend?

Elise Loehnen:

Oh, yeah.

Katie:

There’s an interesting piece. I can’t remember when it came out. It was probably, was definitely like a post-2020 article, but it was about this idea of this stay at home girlfriend phenomenon or this idea of this idea of being rescued. And it was really interesting because it basically talked about how, because things are so economically fraught right now, or at least they feel that way. I mean, I think you could look back to the great financial crisis and you could say the exact same thing, that it was actually worse back then because unemployment was so high. But that because things feel so economically fraught and an entire generation feels rightly or wrongly cheated out of the American dream, that basically this concept of there is a contingent of young women who feels as though they were cheated out of this 1950s domestic bliss where they didn’t have to have a career and they could just be taken care of. And the article kind of does a good job of enumerating all the ways that actually that lifestyle was a historical blip and only for a very small portion of wealthy white women. That was not the way things used to be. It was a five to 10 year period.

Elise Loehnen:

Five to 10 years, just in time for TV. It didn’t ever really exist.

Katie:

Yes, exactly. But it’s interesting, the cultural grip that has that kind of fantasy, it just occurs to me that anytime we have economic precarity as a defining feature of a period, there will be a resurgence of that fantasy.

Elise Loehnen:

100%. And it is a fantasy. And it’s interesting that Phyllis Schlafly, who people might recognize as the woman who defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, defeated and just hated it, is like the ultimate patriarchal female poster child. Her mother worked, she was the child of a working mother who needed to work to keep them in the middle class. And that’s the reality for Americans. And it was the reality then, and it’s, except for one, as you mentioned, five to 10 minute really, five to 10 year period was not… This whole concept of the stay at home mom was a reality. It was so short.

Katie:

Yeah, the Phyllis Schlafly of it all, the Mrs. America series was so funny in that way. So good.

So there is this scene where Phyllis’s understudies are backstage, I think with Bella Abzug or the character playing her, and she’s kind of asking them, so what have you learned from Phyllis? And what has Phyllis taught you? Has she taught you how to lobby? Has she taught you how to organize? Has she taught you how to protest?

And they’re like, granted, these are women who conceive of themselves as housewives. And they’re like, well, we don’t want to be working girls. And Phyllis is showing us how to do all these things. And Bella kind of looks at them and is like, well, congratulations. You’re working girls. You’re doing work right now. You’re doing the very thing that you’re protesting your right to do, which is just, it was so well done, the entire thing.

Elise Loehnen:

Yeah, I wanted to talk about all these things. You have to come on my show so we can talk more about scarcity.

Katie:

I would love, love nothing more.

One of the broader prescriptions of your book is that we basically need to bring things back into balance. And I think this really came through clearly in your chapter about money. And you use this example about hoarding toilet paper during a pandemic, which I think very recently, we all remember this, and it was kind of meant to emphasize this imbalance. And what happens when people feel scared, when they feel scarcity, they overcorrect. And in the case of the toilet paper, they inadvertently create the shortage that they feared.

Now, something that I struggle with though in applying this metaphor more broadly to our feelings about money is how we can restore balance in how we approach it. I kind of constantly vacillate between this, oh, it’s a zero sum game. If you take more, other people have less versus this idea of, oh, it’s infinite, it’s abundant. And there’s always more. Because in some ways, I really buy into this rhetoric that says, money is a neutral exchange of energy and a value. But then there is this cynical side of me that looks at how unequal society is and goes, well, it’s kind of hard to see how some people having way too much isn’t negatively impacting everyone else. So I guess I’m curious how you now make sense of or reconcile those feelings.

Elise Loehnen:

It’s complicated, and it goes back to this thin line that you’re talking about, where I’m with you. It’s like, I would like to think of it as sort of an unbounded energy that’s infinite and can grow, but this whole “up and to the right, up and to the right, up and to the right” mentality is clearly not entirely connected to our planet and what’s happening to it. So we are getting proof that the way that we’re living is not sustainable and durable, et cetera. And so the two are at odds, and we have to somehow land this idea of money as energy into a material reality. And I think, again, women are much more connected to the earth. I think we just are. And in this sense, I think men need to learn how to be more like women. Yes, it’s renewing and it’s replenishing. Yes. And when you take it out of its natural cycle of enoughness, it gets distorted and cannot sustain itself.

Katie:

Elise, thank you so much for being here.

Elise Loehnen:

Thank you. This was so fun.

Katie:

That’s all for this week. I will see you all next week, same time, same place on the Money with Katie Show. And be sure to tune back in because we are going to be talking about the replica luxury black market that is shaking up the whole stealth wealth and luxury fashion scene. It’s really fascinating.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.