Integrating Money and Meaning

another achieve the American dream.

In other words, our ancestors’ experiences can affect our own brains and, therefore, our own experiences. Studies show that traumas experienced in one generation, such as the Jews during the Holocaust or children who have been abused, can show up as inherited psychological and behavioral tendencies in future generations, even if the specific memori

George Bailey Sr. is a kind, loving man who founds the Bailey Building and Loan, the kind of banking establishment that demands a sense of community to be successful. It was designed, first and foremost, to make home ownership available to the “common man” by leveraging the savings of the community to help one

“Get up and deal with your money.”

A 2015 study found that children raised in wealthy families turned out wealthy, whether they were biological children or adopted. Although this study didn’t try to pinpoint exactly what in the environment was creating this trend, they found it was not related entirely to wealth being passed on from one generation to the other.

I began to feel a terrible tension between having too much money and not having enough, at the same time recognizing that none of the money was really mine to begin with. While my parents never said so outright, I could feel the strings.

Money was part of the mess too. Isn’t it always? I still had a little money left in my investments, but it was definitely waning. I was anxious about money but mostly in denial. I would oscillate between feeling rich and feeling impoverished. It was haunting me, but I had absolutely no idea how to speak of it or with whom I could discuss it.

During the recession of 2007–09, for example, the average wealth of the top 1 percent dropped by 16 percent; meanwhile the wealth of the bottom 99 percent dropped 47 percent. The statistics go on and on and are startling.9

The wealthiest eighty-five people on the entire planet have more money than the poorest 3.5 billion people combined. It’s hard to even take in that statistic. Between 1979 and 2007, the wages of the top 1 percent of households in the United States rose ten times more than the bottom 90 percent.