One Thing to Remember About Improving Your Financial Habits

 Jacob Schroeder   Nov 23, 2021

Tired hands, young and old; tired hands to assemble each plastic piece and screw every tiny screw; tired hands to pull levers and activate conveyor belts; tired hands to pack cardboard boxes and stack containers on steel ships; tired hands to navigate the weathered steering wheel of a semi-truck; tired hands to deliver it to my doorstep; all of which is jumpstarted by a performative gesture as a consumer with a well-rested index finger on a digital button.

It is the cycle of a normal holiday shopping season. The only way to break it is to individually not participate.

Often, what is most effective in changing our habits for the better isn't a stroke of good luck but a nice, serious crisis. But whether or not it does greatly depends on single decisions, which are what make up our virtues. Habits and virtues, after all, can't be turned on and off; they take practice.

As we near the end of year two of COVID, perhaps the pandemic hasn't changed our financial behaviors as much as we first thought.

I have never shopped on Black Friday. I just would rather feel as if my head has been stomped on because of too much wine during Thanksgiving dinner than actually have my head stomped on for a flat screen TV. Though I certainly don't look down upon those who do.

Except this year, it may be an opportunity to recommit to the financial habits we adopted at the peak of the pandemic. Because it also is a decision to make for the better, and you never want to let a Black Friday go to waste.

Barack Obama's reward for winning the 2008 presidential election was responsibility over the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. At the time, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."

To view a crisis as an opportunity is a tenet rooted ancient philosophy, as echoed by Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it...so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal."

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://rootofall.substack.com/p/one-thing-to-remember-about-improving-your-financial-habits