There is a particular kind of adult who is not, by any reasonable measure, rich, but who often seems to have money in the bank. They are not high earners. They are not particularly disciplined investors. They are not the kind of people who, when asked about their financial strategies, can produce a coherent account of what they are doing. They are, more accurately, people whose accounts have, for as long as anyone has been keeping track, contained a particular amount of money that the person treats as untouchable for almost all practical purposes.
The cultural framing of this behavior tends to read it as either financial prudence or, less generously, as a kind of miserliness. The person is being careful with money. The person is being cheap with money. Neither reading captures, on close examination, what is actually happening.
What is actually happening, in most cases, is not financial behavior in any obvious sense. It is, more accurately, the slow ongoing maintenance of a small private buffer between the person and the version of their life that, somewhere in childhood, taught them that the absence of a buffer is a particular kind of vulnerability they would do almost anything to never feel again. The money in the account is not, in their internal experience, money. The money is, more accurately, distance. The distance is between the current version of their life and the version that the buffer is, in some real way, designed to protect them from ever returning to.
What the original vulnerability was
It is worth describing what the original vulnerability tended to look like, because the cultural register tends to flatten it into a generic category of “growing up poor” that does not, in most cases, capture what the actual experience involved.
The original vulnerability, in most cases, was not the absence of money in some abstract sense. The original vulnerability was, more specifically, the experience of a particular kind of household weather that the absence of a financial buffer produced. The weather involved a parent’s voice changing in a particular way when an unexpected bill arrived. The weather involved the small ongoing tension that the rent might, this month, not be coverable. The weather involved the visible effect on the parent’s face when a landlord, a creditor, or a service provider called the house. The weather involved, in some real way, the structural fact that the household’s stability was, at any given moment, contingent on factors that the household did not, in any meaningful sense, control.
The child living in this weather absorbed it without having any language for what they were absorbing. The child registered, in some real way, that the adults around them were operating with a particular kind of low-grade ongoing fear that the child could not name. The fear was about money. The child, who was not yet old enough to understand money in any operational sense, did not register the fear as a fear about money. The child registered the fear as the texture of household life. The texture was unpredictable. The texture was, in some real way, what childhood was.
I know this because I grew up adjacent to a version of it. My household was not poor in any obvious sense, but my mother, who came from a more straitened background than my father did, ran a particular kind of financial vigilance in our household that I, as a child, could not have named at the time. The vigilance showed up in the small ways. The careful examination of every receipt. The slight tension around discretionary spending. The particular way her voice changed when an unexpected expense arrived in the post. I did not, as a child, know what I was registering. I registered, more accurately, that money was a particular kind of subject in our household that produced, when it came up, a particular kind of weather. The weather was small. The weather was also, in some real way, the most consistent piece of household climate I grew up inside.
What the adult is, in fact, maintaining
The adult who came out of this kind of childhood, and who now has a particular amount in the bank that they treat as untouchable, is not, on close examination, saving for anything specific. They are not building toward a particular purchase. They are not investing toward a particular goal. They are, more accurately, maintaining the structural condition that the original vulnerability is not, in their current life, currently operative.
The maintenance is not, by any external metric, large. The amount in the account is, in most cases, modest by any reasonable measure. The amount is not, in any economic sense, what is producing the protection. What is producing the protection is, more accurately, the existence of the amount. The existence is the buffer. The buffer is what allows the adult, when an unexpected bill arrives, to not have the experience their parents had when an unexpected bill arrived in their childhood. The buffer is what allows the adult, when a landlord calls, to not have the experience their parents had when a landlord called. The buffer is, in some real way, the structural difference between the adult’s current life and the childhood the adult is, by long internal training, protecting themselves from returning to.
This is why the amount in the account is, in most cases, treated as untouchable for almost any practical purpose. The adult is not, in their own internal accounting, willing to draw down the buffer for any of the standard purposes that money is, in the cultural register, supposed to serve. The standard purposes involve spending the money on things the adult would enjoy. The adult does not, on examination, want to spend the money on things they would enjoy. The adult wants, much more specifically, to maintain the buffer at the level that produces the structural distance the buffer is designed to produce. Drawing down the buffer, even for things the adult would, in principle, enjoy, would reduce the distance. The reduction of the distance is, in the adult’s internal experience, a much larger cost than the enjoyment of the thing would produce in benefit. The buffer, accordingly, stays in the account.
Why this is so easy to misread
The cultural register, when it encounters this kind of adult, tends to read the behavior in one of two unhelpful ways.
The first reading is admiration. The adult is being financially disciplined. The adult is doing what everyone should be doing. The adult is, in the standard self-help framing, a model of late-capitalist responsibility. The framing flatters the adult. The framing also misses, on close examination, what the adult is actually doing. The adult is not, in their internal experience, being disciplined. The adult is, more accurately, maintaining a piece of psychological infrastructure that was installed in childhood and that has, by long habit, become identity. The infrastructure does not require discipline to operate. The infrastructure operates by default. The adult is, in some real way, less the agent of the saving than the host of it.
The second reading is mild criticism. The adult is being cheap. The adult is failing to enjoy the money they have. The adult is, in the wider framing, missing out on the various pleasures that a different relationship to money would have permitted. This reading also misses what the adult is actually doing. The adult is not, on examination, failing to enjoy the money. The adult is, more accurately, deriving a particular kind of structural enjoyment from the existence of the money that the cultural register does not have language for. The structural enjoyment is the small ongoing pleasure of knowing that the buffer is in place. The pleasure is real. The pleasure is, in some real way, the actual return the adult is getting on the money. The wider framing, which assumes the return must be in the form of spending, misses that the return is, in this adult’s case, in the form of not-spending. The not-spending is the product. The product is what the adult is paying for.
What it costs, and what it provides
I want to be honest about what this configuration costs, because I do not want to romanticize it.
The configuration does cost something. The cost is that the adult is, in some real way, less available to the various small pleasures that a more relaxed relationship to money would have permitted. The dinner out that does not happen. The trip that does not happen. The small impulse purchase that does not happen. Each of these, on its own, is a modest cost. The cumulative cost, across a lifetime, is not modest. The adult is, in some real way, living a slightly thinner present in service of a slightly thicker buffer. The thinness is the price.
What the configuration provides, in exchange, is a particular kind of structural calm that the cultural register does not entirely have words for either. The calm is the absence of the original household weather. The original weather is no longer in the room. The buffer is what is keeping it out. The maintenance of the buffer is, in some real way, the ongoing daily project of keeping the original weather where it cannot return.
For the adult operating in this configuration, the trade is, on examination, almost always worth it. The thinness of the present is a real cost. The absence of the original weather is, in their internal experience, a much larger benefit. The trade-off is calibrated to a particular nervous system that has been trained, since childhood, to value the absence of the weather above almost anything else. The training is deep. The training does not, in most cases, reverse in adulthood.
The honest acknowledgment
The adult who is not rich but always has money in the bank is not, in most cases, doing financial planning. They are, more accurately, doing the ongoing structural work of maintaining the distance between their current life and a particular kind of childhood vulnerability they remember from a household that did not have the buffer they have now built for themselves.
The buffer is not, in any economic sense, what is producing the protection. The buffer is, more accurately, the symbol of the protection. The symbol is what the adult is, by long internal training, attached to. The attachment is not necessarily irrational. It may be the understandable response of someone who learned, very young, what happens when the symbol is not in place. The symbol is now in place. The maintenance of the symbol is, in some real way, the most important piece of psychological infrastructure the adult has built. The infrastructure is invisible from outside. The infrastructure is, on close examination, what the adult’s apparent financial discipline is, all along, actually a feature of.
The balance in the account is not really about money. The balance is, more accurately, about the distance from the version of life where one phone call from a landlord could undo everything. The distance is what the adult is, every day, quietly maintaining. The maintenance is, on the available evidence, working. The original weather is not in the room. The current life is operating in conditions that the childhood version of the adult could not have imagined as available to them. The buffer is what is producing those conditions. The buffer, accordingly, stays.
This is, in some real way, the most honest description of what is happening in the accounts of millions of adults whose childhood weather the cultural register has not, until recently, given particularly good language to. The naming, when it finally arrives, does not change the configuration. The configuration is, by this point, structural. The naming does, however, allow the adult, in their own internal accounting, to recognize that what they are doing is not, in fact, what the cultural framing has been telling them they are doing. They are not being cheap. They are not being disciplined. They are, more accurately, maintaining the buffer that, for a particular kind of childhood, was the only piece of late-life adaptation that was, in the end, actually worth pursuing.
