by: Cameron MacKenzie
There’s nothing sexy about being responsible.
I do not feel sexy when I go to the store to buy bread. And while I am decidedly not sexy when I go to the store anyway, I do feel a little sexy when I go to the store to buy wine. I can pay precisely as much for a bottle of wine as I want, and the more money I pay, the more I scratch the itch.
It takes real discipline to be responsible, especially with money, because money has the potential to let us do whatever we want. Maybe the biggest reason people struggle to balance their finances is their inability to separate what they should do from what they want to do.
One of the best examples of exactly how dangerous this treadmill is, believe it or not, is Dolly Parton’s famous song “Jolene.” There’s a thousand versions, but you’ve got to check out Dolly’s outfit in this one:
Dolly’s unstoppable. But what makes this song classic is that the lyrics diagram a love triangle that all too many of us are familiar with. The basic outline is that Dolly’s man loves Jolene because Jolene’s beautiful, and Dolly’s begging Jolene, “Please don’t take him just because you can.”
Jolene, in Dolly’s mind, is simply better than Dolly, more desirable than Dolly, but, I mean, look at Dolly! What’s Jolene got that she ain’t got? Well, Dolly, thankfully, makes a list, noting Jolene's “auburn hair” and “emerald green” eyes. Jolene is so different than Dolly, and it’s that difference that her man desires. Things, for Dolly, look hopeless. That poor girl is going to lose her man.
But if you look at the song closely, you'll see that Dolly isn't really that concerned with her man. Who even is this sap? All we know about him is that he wants Jolene, but how do we know he wants Jolene? Because Dolly says so? But Dolly says that every guy wants Jolene. And so Dolly has set up, before anything even begins, a competition between herself and Jolene.
If Dolly can keep her man, Dolly beats Jolene, and if Dolly beats Jolene, then she’s more gorgeous than Jolene, more desirable than Jolene, and better than Jolene. This song is really about a competition between Dolly and Jolene that has very little to do with the man at all. In fact, the man is just the excuse for the competition. And this is the kind of competition that never stops, because if Dolly beats Jolene, there’s just going to be another woman down the line, and another, and another. In order for Dolly to know she is beautiful, in order to know who she really is—she’s got to beat somebody she knows is better. As Tyler Durden put it:
“How much do you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”
We're grownups, of course. We're not trying to get in a fight or take somebody's guy, but we do still compete in other ways–the quality of the label on my pseudo-sexy wine bottle, for instance. Or the SUV I drive, or the coffee I drink, or the shoes I wear, the house I own, the place I send my kids to school. The question here, in other words, is how much is enough? What are you willing to do; or, in grown-up language, how much are you willing to spend? And the answer—illustrated by billions of people spending trillions of dollars every day—is, I'm afraid, we don't yet know.
For Dolly, the song ends without a resolution. Fight Club suggests the way to break the capitalist karmic wheel is violent revolution: once we blow up the banks we'll all be free. That might cause a few more problems than it solves, but the rubber does eventually meet the road for everyone, and it does so in many different guises. I often ask myself the question, what do I care about more than myself? The two little boys I've got running around my house right now provide an easy answer, but the next question is a little tougher: how can I avoid projecting my own desires onto them? That one might take another Dolly Parton song to figure out.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.