Excerpt
Earn What You Deserve
1.
IN ALL ITS GLORY
IN THIS CHAPTER, WE’RE GOING TO DEFINE UNDEREARNING, discuss its dynamics, and give an overview of Prospering. First, though, I’d like to amplify slightly on how this book came to be written, to establish a context.
A ROAD WELL TRAVELED
I first heard Walter say that pain is the messenger in a roomful of people who didn’t drink or take drugs. There was something else Walter used to say: “The lesson will be repeated—until it’s learned.”
Both these statements have proved true for me, and valuable; I think they are true for everyone.
Over the next seven years, my life got progressively better. I worked to make it better. When pain came, I listened; I found ways to change, different ways to do things. The first major change I had made was to cease using chemical mood-changers myself. I undertook the next one a year later. I was in terrible, constant pain over my debts, which seemed to me almost insurmountable then. Someone introduced me to a support group for people in debt, and from that day on, one day at a time, I did not incur another new debt in any form.
And my life got better.
Still, something was wrong. Fundamentally wrong, though at first that was not apparent to me.
I didn’t debt, but I kept bottoming-out—running out of money. Each time, I watched the operating fund I had managed to build being depleted, drained away despite all my efforts to prevent that, until there was nothing left. Until I had no money at all. None. The pain, and fear, were excruciating.
I would not debt, was willing to go to any length not to. There was a time when that willingness meant not buying Christmas presents for my sons—a difficult and humbling thing to do. There were times when it meant pulling up the couch cushions and going through my jacket pockets looking for change so I could buy food over the weekend for myself and my youngest son, whom I had down from the country every other weekend.
Being solvent—not incurring any new debt, one day at a time—wasn’t always so grim. I paid off many thousands of dollars of debt during those years, bought clothes, and took vacations. But sooner or later (without being a profligate spender), I would bottom-out once more, get down to zero, have no money left—no matter how hard I worked, what I tried.
I am not lazy. I am not unintelligent. Nor untalented or incapable. And I was willing to do whatever was necessary to free myself from debt and debting. Why, then, did I keep ending up like this?
I think during those years that I somehow always sensed there was another, perhaps even more powerful issue behind debting for me (or one at least as powerful). In meetings focused on recovery from debt I sometimes attended, most people identified themselves as debtors when they spoke: “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m a debtor.” I didn’t. Certainly I was a debtor (someone who’d had repeated trouble with debt), but I felt that to call myself such would be vaguely inaccurate, somehow insufficient, perhaps even self-misleading. So what I would say was, “Hi, I’m Jerry. I have a long history of incurring debt.”
Which was the truth, but which also kept the question open.
Still, there was a pattern here—something was happening, kept happening, that returned me to the very edge of debting, to lack and deprivation again.
So now, after much thought, I named self-created lack as something with which I had a terrible problem, over which I was powerless, and that was making my life unmanageable. I hoped that by perceiving it thus and by taking appropriate actions (as I had with not-debting), I could begin to free myself from it, too. (This is a tricky concept, which we’ll discuss fully in Chapters 3 and 9.)
For a while, I tried working with the concept of self-created lack. In the end, it wasn’t right. It was approaching what I needed to find, but wasn’t the thing itself. With regret, I stopped working with the idea. That was not the right name.
I knew something was wrong. But what was it?
And that’s where I was when Jim Roi said to me: “Jerry, do you think—is it possible—could it be—that you are a compulsive underearner?”
• • •
Over the years I had heard an occasional person in debt recovery refer to himself or herself as an underearner, or temporary underearner, or even—though rarely—compulsive underearner. But no one had ever defined just what that might mean or addressed how one might go about freeing oneself from it.
I am a compulsive underearner.
Has a kind of frightening, final ring to it, doesn’t it?
Bless you, my child. (And thank God I’m not one, whatever it means!)
Even the simple I am an underearner, without that brutal modifier, is distasteful to most people.
No wonder no one has wanted to touch the issue. But the paradox is that that very admission—“I am an underearner”—makes liberation possible, makes it unnecessary, one day at a time, to continue underearning.
This time when I began to work with the concept, naming myself a compulsive underearner, the impact was immediate and enormous. I knew I had found the right name at last.
UNDEREARNING: WHAT IT IS
All right. So what is underearning?
To earn, in its primary dictionary sense, means to gain salary, wages, or other reward for your service, labor, or performance. To earn, then, is to gain income from what you do.
So, then:
To underearn is repeatedly to gain less income than you need, or than would be beneficial—usually for no apparent reason, and despite your desire to do otherwise.
What do we mean by need? And by less than would be beneficial?
We are defining need here in its most basic sense: an amount that is enough for you to provide yourself with food, shelter, and clothing of decent quality on a regular basis.
That’s the amount of income you need.
While owning a co-op on the park, buying a new car every year, or having the money to pay for your daughter’s medical education at Stanford might be pleasurable and even desirable, they are not needs.
Beneficial is more open to interpretation. For our purposes, it means enough for you to meet your basic needs, with some left over to spend on items or quality that exceed those needs, a bit more for recreation or relaxation, and some to put into savings. As a threshold definition, that is what we mean by beneficial.
Underearning is not synonymous with having a low income, though it often involves one. Many people earn a low income who are not underearners. They bring in more than they need to cover their basic expenses, and provide themselves with some pleasure and savings, and they display few of the characteristics common to underearners. (These are discussed in the next chapter.)
Nor is underearning synonymous with underachieving. People can achieve less, even a great deal less, than their potential and still earn more than they need or than is basically beneficial to them.
Nor, finally, is underearning synonymous with underworking. Most underearners, on the contrary, work very hard. They simply make sure, in some way, that what they get back from their effort is either not enough or just marginally enough to get by on.
So low levels of income achievement, or work—or simply levels lower than one is capable of—while frequently associated with underearning, are not in themselves indicators of underearning.
What, then, are?
Underearning is a self-diagnosed condition—and needs to be. No underearner will ever get free of underearning without first perceiving, or accepting, that he or she is an underearner. Not hearing it from someone else, but perceiving it for himself, herself. Surely, it is sometimes objected, not everyone who has ever had trouble bringing in enough money to meet his needs is an underearner? No, of course not. Just as not everyone who has ever been drunk is an alcoholic.
Chapter 2 contains detailed discussions of the most common indicators of a difficulty with underearning. Use them to determine how serious your own situation with underearning may or may not be.
Is underearning an illness of some sort? It may be, it may not. Certainly it’s not a physical illness, but the argument can be made that underearning, like other self-damaging behaviors, is a psychological and spiritual illness. (We’ll deal with those aspects as we go along.) But ultimately—is it? For some, it probably is; for others, it isn’t. But what it is, is less important than that it is. There is a condition of underearning, a state of underearning, an ontology of underearning. So whatever it may or may not actually be, it is perfectly fine, I think, to call it an illness, a malady, an affliction, a habit, tendency, mindset, or anything else you might wish.
Whatever underearning may ultimately be, there are basically three kinds of it: Compulsive, Problematic, and Minor.
