push:
tbh…
I grew up in what was a rather wealthy family. I’m not going to try and pin down how wealthy, but we had multiple cars (up to five, at one point!), two garages, two boats… we were extremely well off. And growing up, my parents bombarded me with messages about the importance of saving money. I can’t waste money, I have to save up, a penny saved is a penny earned, people on the street will just use that money to buy drugs, don’t buy things you can’t afford, every single miserly tip they could possibly give, because that’s part of how they got to be that well off – they saved every last cent they could. They abused tax loopholes to make trips less expensive by writing them off as ‘business expenses’. They’d use every last appliance until it completely broke before they’d even consider replacing it. It was late stage capitalism run rampant – money was the only thing that mattered.
And growing up in a household where it’s driven in how incredibly, incredibly important it is to save every last possible cent you can, it colors your opinions of charity. You only give away things you can no longer use – clothes we outgrew, or that were damaged or stained. Toys we didn’t play with anymore, or were broken. Money was always good – and so money was always saved. You look for every last dime you can save – the gas discounts at the grocery store let us buy up to 20 gallons of discounted gasoline, so we’d bring multiple cars to buy all 20 of our discounted gallons. We’d compare the prices of two different brands of milk, or two different sizes of the same brand, and sometimes make our decisions on which to buy due to one being literally a single cent cheaper. And so you grow up trying to maximize the value of everything. And, sadly, it is objectively true that every cent you spend on someone else is a cent you’re not spending on yourself – a cent that your upbringing has taught you that you might need later.
Some of us are lucky enough that we see it for what it is. We learn that it’s an awful system and try and change. Sometimes we can’t, and we beat ourselves up over being unable to be charitable, or we second-guess every time someone asks for charity, wondering if they’re trying to pump us for our money instead of valuing us as friends.
And sometimes we never realize how fucked up our upbringing really was, and go on to teach it to the next generation.
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