This week, I’ve been listening to the Death, Sex and Money Podcast (what a great title!). In many episodes, the host talks to regular people about relationships, money, family and work. Rent topics included “I Did Surrogacy For Money”, “Secrets, Turn-Ons, and Fantasies: Your Stories About Porn”, “Your Estrangement Calls Answered Live”.
Despite the titillating episode titles, the stories shared reveal that most people do plain old, normal everyday activities that are punctuated, rarely if ever, by something dramatic and extraordinary. Most of what people do is mundane, predictable, and usually not well thought out.
- People get drunk a lot.
- They go into debt without a second thought by buying things they cannot afford like luxury car leases, expensive clothing, college loans for vanity degrees and homes with big mortgages.
- Uneducated people work crappy jobs.
- Everyone complains about work.
- Lots of people get married and have kids without considering the costs, implications or commitment.
I had expected to hear something different because the stories I heard were from people whose lives were quite different from mine on the surface. And yet, because they were regular people (ie. not wealthy or elite), many of their life experiences were similar to mine.
Boring. Mundane. Predictable.
It was depressing to listen to how many people made major financial mistakes like not having money to pay bills so ignoring them or throwing them away – pretending they didn’t exist until the inevitable repossessions, evictions and bankruptcies. Then, instead of figuring out how to live within their means or obtain higher paying work, they continued the same behaviors and/or complained about the unfairness of life.
It became clear to me that many of us go through life on autopilot without considering the consequences of our actions. I include myself in this group. I made plenty of mistakes – financial and other – before learning to do something different.