Financial pornography is money-related advice that lies to you about the nature of the risks that you need to take to live a full life. It appears to be sexy stuff, but it’s not. It’s boring.
The purpose of this article is to work through the thought process by which I have come to believe that financial pornography is boring. My hope is that, once you come to understand why this sort of material is boring, you will be less drawn to it. This stuff can do serious harm to your financial freedom dreams. You need to resist it.
The first step to resisting financial pornography is understanding why pornography is shameful.
Most of us are ashamed to be caught looking at pornography.
Why?
Is it because pornography is associated with sex?
That shouldn’t cause us shame.
Matrimony leads to sex. We are not ashamed to have people know that we are married. We are not ashamed to have people know that we attend weddings.
No, it’s not the connection with sex that makes pornography shameful. What makes pornography shameful is the lie it tells about sex.
Pornography argues that sex is a selfish act. Pornography argues that sex is easy. Pornography argues that sex is of central importance in a person’s life.
These claims are lies. Pornography tells lies about sex. That’s the source of the shame. We are ashamed to have people know that we have been fooled by lies as obvious as the lies that pornography tells.
The second step to resisting financial pornography is seeing how the same sorts of lies that are told in sexually-oriented pornography are told in financial pornography too.
“Follow my example and you can retire early with complete safely at age 40!”
“If you obey these three rules, your start-up business is sure to be a success!”
“You can learn how to invest like Warren Buffett by reading this book!”
These three statements are examples of financial pornography. They are not complete lies. They are more dangerous than complete lies. They are lies that possess just enough plausibility to entice us.
Many of us have desires to obtain the sorts of benefits promised. But we know that there is risk in retiring early or in starting a business or in picking stocks. The promise of an easy way to satisfy our desires is a lie of the same nature as the lies told in sexually-oriented pornography.
The third step to resisting financial pornography is rejecting the idea of tuning out messages that promise satisfaction of strongly felt desires.
Some would say that the way to resist sexually-oriented pornography is to get over your interest in beautiful and exciting woman. Makes sense, no?
Um — No.
That’s dumb.
God wouldn’t have inspired Paul McCartney to write the song “I Saw Her Standing There” if he didn’t want men to be drawn to beautiful and exciting women. The attraction is cool. It’s the false ways of pursuing the attraction promoted in pornography that are a bummer.
Similarly, it’s cool to want to retire early. It’s just dumb to think that it can be done without taking risks.
And it’s cool to want to start your own business. It’s just dumb to think that it can be done without taking risks.
And it’s cool to want to pick good stocks. It’s just dumb to think that it can be done without engaging in a lot more work than what it takes to read a single book.
The fourth step to resisting financial pornography is coming to see that there is a four-letter word that is at the heart of it all.
The word is —
Risk.
The inappropriate treatment of risk is the common element in each of the three promises/lies listed above. The inappropriate treatment of risk is the common element in all financial pornography.
Go down deep, and you’ll see that that’s so with the other kind of pornography too.
Sex is not bad. Sex is risky,that’s what it is.
Think about when you stood before your second-grade class and tried to recite a poem that you thought you had memorized and you flubbed most of the lines. You felt shame. You were taking a risk, you were putting yourself out there. The risk didn’t pay off. You dropped the ball. That’s why your cheeks turned red. That’s why you felt shame.
The big risk with sex isn’t the possibility that you will get a disease. The big risk with sex is the possibility that you will get your heart broken.
It’s an inescapable risk. If it wasn’t for this risk, sex wouldn’t be exciting and fun. The thrill you get from sex comes from the same place as the thrill you get from a roller-coaster ride. You put yourself in such dangerous circumstances that you feel that there is a good chance that you are going to die. Then you don’t. That “I didn’t die!” thing feels good.
Sex is a means by which we connect with another human. We all possess a strong need for such connections. It breaks our hearts to think that we have formed one and then to learn that we were wrong. Having sex makes us emotionally vulnerable. Sex is risky.
The appeal of pornography is that it airbrushes out the risk. The sin of pornography is that it tells a lie about sex (and about life, of which sex is a part). The shame of pornography is that partaking in it shows that you have been taken in by the lie, that you have been fooled by it.
The fifth step to resisting financial pornography is adopting a middle-ground position on the risk question.
A common response to the discovery that taking risks can lead to experiencing pain is to avoid risk.
Not good.
The repulsion that you feel toward pornography (now that you’re aware of the danger of the lies it tells about risk) does not justify swearing off sex for the rest of your life. I mean, come on.
So it is with the sorts of risks associated with financial pornography.
I’m here to tell you that lots of people tell lies about early retirement. I am not here to tell you that early retirement is a bad goal to pursue.
I’m here to tell you that it’s a rough road you will walk trying to get your own business off the ground. I am not here to tell you that you had better just resign yourself to remaining a wage slave for the remainder of your days.
I’m here to tell you that picking good stocks is a whole bunch tougher than it looks. I’m not here to tell you that you should throw your hands up in the air and sign up with the people who say that no one should ever invest in anything but an index fund.
Risk is real. We need to face it. We need to struggle with it. We need to confront it.
Running from it isn’t the answer.
There’s a healthy middle ground between never thinking about being with an exciting woman and wasting away your days (and nights) engaged in porn fantasies. There’s a healthy middle ground between counting how many years you still have to go to earn a pension when you are only 25 and handing in your resignation from your corporate job without first crafting a plan for how you are going to make do without a regular paycheck.
The Retire Early Movement is a movement for those staking out the middle ground on the risk question. We do not quiver in fear over the possibility that bad things might happen to us if we take some chances. We don’t make light of the risks we are taking on, though. We take risk seriously in this community.
The sixth step to resisting financial pornography is understanding the nature of its appeal.
Here are a few lines from a recent post by one of our community’s most-respected and best-loved Words Guys, a poster who goes by the screen-name “Bob Dylan”:
I’ve been sitting down studying The Art of Love.
I’m thinking it might fit me like a glove.
I want a real fine woman who will just do everything I say.
Everybody’s got to wonder what’s gone wrong with this cruel world today.
Pornography flatters. Pornography tells you that you can have it all and without paying much of a price. Pornography tells you that you’re the big boss man and she is just a tool for bringing your fantasies to life.
Pornography appeals to our base instincts.
Pornography takes the love out of sex.
Pornography has nothing to do with love.
To craft a plan for early retirement is an act of love, if it is done right. The sorts of people who tell you that, if you follow their example you can have a risk-free early retirement, are not teaching love. They are teaching lies.
To start your own business is an act of love, if it is done right. To learn how to pick stocks effectively is an act of love, if it is done right.
Pornography is not about sex or about early retirement or about start-up businesses or about picking stocks. Pornography is about telling lies.
That’s the thing you need to remember. It is the lie about risk that makes a claim a pornographic claim. In particular, it is the lies that flatter you that you need to watch out for. Pornographic lies are lies that gain their power from their appeal to the vanity of vulnerable human beings. We are all vulnerable, and so we all fear risk, and so we all are drawn to the sorts of lies that are the driving force of both kinds of pornography.
The ugliness of pornography is that it is not a lie about just any old thing. It is a lie about something that we much desire, it is a lie that works because of our weakness for flattery, and it is a lie that over time pushes the things we desire farther out of our reach.
The seventh step to resisting financial pornography is coming to see that it is anti-you.
I don’t like either kind of pornography. I dislike both types for the same reason. (I have fallen victim to both kinds from time to time, to be sure.)
Pornography doesn’t bring you closer to the human connection you seek. It adds distance between you and the attainment of your natural and healthy desire.
It’s the same with phony claims about early retirement. The clock doesn’t stop running while you fool around with phony approaches. Wake up to the flaws of those approaches ten years after starting to explore them and you are ten years older than you were when you started. Phony Retire Early claims can ruin your hopes of realizing your Retire Early dream.
It’s the same with phony claims about starting your own business or learning how to pick stocks successfully.
Financial pornography is anti-desire. Financial pornography is anti-you. Financial pornography is not sexy.
Reality is often hard. Truth is often uncomfortable.
Reality talks back, like a soulful woman. Truth lets you know when you are messing up, like an until-death-do-you-part marriage partner.
Demi Moore once said that the thing that most excites her about looking at a naked man is the wedding ring on his finger (she was talking about a case in which the particular naked man in question was married to her). That’s the right spirit in which to approach things.
Reality is your best friend. Truth is a long-term comfort. Pornography (both kinds) is a bore.
The eighth step to resisting financial pornography is to find something real to serve as the focus of your desires.
You want to help out an 18-year-old who has developed a pornography problem. Do you punish him by telling him to stay in his room for a week?
No! That’s not at all a good way to deal with this particular problem!
The boy’s problem is that he has been spending too much time in his room as it is. Tell him that he must stay out of his room for a week. Get him away from the comfortable fantasy world and into the world where girls are complicated and smart and funny and wear glasses and have big ears and sharp elbows. Get him mixing it up with the girls who are both a whole bunch more interesting and a whole bunch more difficult than the ones in the glossy photos.
The poor boy needs to meet some cool girls. Is that not right?
Fantasies provide an escape from reality. The way to overcome a reliance on fantasy is to escape back to what you earlier escaped from. “Get back!” Paul McCartney admonishes. He’s right! Get something going on in your life that is real and that is good and the fantasy loses its grip on you.
If you are drawn to Retire Early fantasies, sit down in a chair and write a budget. A budget is real. Writing a budget will help you achieve an early retirement that really works. Writing a budget will also soak up a lot of the mental energies that in earlier days were being focused on daydream approaches to the “I Hate My Job!” blues.
Do real stuff. What if you were to call up some people engaged in the sort of business you want to start? They might tell you some things you don’t want to hear. Good. That means that you are talking to real women now. You’ve left your porno loser days behind you.
You read an article about a “story stock.” It sure sounds enticing. You might double your money in six months. Yeah, and you might get a date with Demi too. No! That stuff’s not for you!
Head off to the library and check out Value Line and see whether this particular story stock still tells such a good story after you have done some fact-checking. Tell the “story” to your wife or husband and see what she or he says. If she or he laughs, maybe it was just a fantasy. Porn ideas can’t take the heat of questioning advanced at the dinner table by a loving spouse.
Financial pornography hurts you. But your desire for it is just a sign that you want to live bigger and bolder and better, and what’s wrong with that? The idea is not to run away from risk, or to fantasize about life without risk, but to deal with risk in realistic ways.
My job is to tell you why early retirement is always risky, and also to tell you why it is worth taking on the unavoidable risks and how best to do so.
My job is to tell you why your start-up may well become a flop-down and also to present the case for going down that road all the same so long as you prepare yourself for worst-case scenarios prior to doing so.
My job is to tell you why picking stocks is a good way to lose a lot of money quick-like and to tell you why it’s a good way to make a lot of money quick-like too, and to point out the factors that cause the cards to fall in one direction or the other.
Risk is real.
We know it. We accept it. We deal with it.
We are real. So our attraction to risk is a natural and healthy attraction.
We are dreamers in this community. But we are not pornsters. We are practical dreamers. That makes all the difference.