Beyond Getting By

Beyond Getting By Plot Summary

Introduction

Money plays a complex and often contradictory role in our lives. While it provides necessities and opportunities, it also carries emotional weight that shapes our behaviors and relationships. Many financial discussions center on accumulation—amassing wealth through aggressive saving, investing, or entrepreneurship—without examining deeper questions about what constitutes "enough" or how financial decisions align with our core values. This mindful approach to personal finance challenges conventional wisdom that equates financial success with ever-increasing net worth. By examining the psychology behind our financial habits and decisions, we can break free from scarcity mindsets that keep us trapped in cycles of overwork and overconsumption. Rather than viewing money as an end in itself, we can approach our financial lives with intention, building wealth ethically while creating space for more meaningful aspects of human experience—connection, creativity, and purpose. The analysis provided offers both practical frameworks and philosophical guidance for those seeking a more balanced relationship with money that serves their values rather than consuming them.

Chapter 1: Reframing Money: The Psychology of Financial Shame

Money shame permeates our financial lives in ways we often fail to recognize. This insidious psychological force influences our spending habits, career choices, and even our willingness to discuss financial matters openly. Financial shame doesn't merely affect those struggling with debt or unemployment—it manifests across income levels, making even high earners feel inadequate if they aren't constantly maximizing their earnings or investment returns. The roots of financial shame in Western societies trace back to Puritan ideologies that linked wealth with moral virtue and poverty with personal failure. This cultural inheritance persists in contemporary financial discourse, particularly through figures who promote shame-based financial advice. Their messaging suggests that financial struggles result primarily from personal failings rather than systemic inequalities or circumstantial challenges. This individualistic framing puts the onus entirely on personal responsibility while ignoring structural barriers to financial stability. Shame-based financial approaches typically fail because they rely on restrictive, all-or-nothing thinking. Much like extreme diet regimens that promise quick results but prove unsustainable, shame-based budgeting creates cycles of deprivation followed by compensatory spending. When we internalize the message that any "unnecessary" spending represents moral weakness, we set ourselves up for a pattern of restriction, inevitable "failure," self-recrimination, and abandonment of financial planning altogether. Breaking free from financial shame requires a fundamental reframing of how we approach money management. Rather than viewing budgeting as punishment for past mistakes or a test of willpower, we can approach it as a values-alignment tool. This perspective shift allows us to allocate resources intentionally toward what truly matters to us—whether that's security, experiences, relationships, or personal growth—without judgment about what "should" matter. A more compassionate framework divides financial allocation into three categories: essential needs (the financial ego), future planning (the financial superego), and discretionary spending (the financial id). This balanced approach recognizes that all three aspects require attention and resources. By acknowledging that discretionary spending serves legitimate psychological and social purposes, we can budget realistically without perpetuating cycles of shame and rebellion. The ultimate goal of reframing our relationship with money isn't simply better financial outcomes but greater psychological well-being. When we recognize that money represents a tool rather than a measure of our worth, we can make decisions that genuinely serve our holistic needs rather than conforming to external expectations or compensating for internalized shame.

Chapter 2: Finding Your Happiness Threshold in a Consumer Culture

The concept of a "happiness threshold"—the point at which additional income no longer significantly increases subjective well-being—has gained considerable attention in economic psychology research. Studies have attempted to pinpoint this threshold, with estimates ranging from $75,000 to $200,000 annually depending on geographic location. However, these numerical approaches oversimplify a deeply personal and multifaceted relationship between money and life satisfaction. Research consistently shows that beyond meeting basic needs, happiness correlates more strongly with relationship quality, personal autonomy, and self-awareness than with absolute wealth. These factors certainly require some financial foundation—maintaining relationships demands time that financial pressure can constrain, and autonomy necessitates options that money can provide. However, these factors don't scale linearly with income, particularly after basic comfort and security are established. Paradoxically, extreme wealth often undermines the very factors most crucial for happiness. Studies reveal that people with higher incomes spend significantly less time with family and friends compared to those with moderate incomes. Higher socioeconomic status also correlates with decreased empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately read others' emotional states—which erodes relationship quality. The social isolation that frequently accompanies extreme wealth creates a self-reinforcing cycle of disconnection and decreased life satisfaction despite material abundance. This pattern reveals a central contradiction in consumer capitalism: the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth often requires sacrificing the very experiences that create genuine fulfillment. The phenomenon of "golden handcuffs" demonstrates this tension—high-income professionals trapped in unfulfilling careers by lifestyle inflation that makes downshifting financially impossible. Each increase in income establishes a new baseline for perceived necessities, creating a perpetual cycle of work and consumption without corresponding increases in satisfaction. Determining your personal happiness threshold requires honest self-reflection about core values and how various expenditures align with them. This involves distinguishing between expenses that genuinely enhance well-being versus those that temporarily alleviate status anxiety or provide fleeting pleasure. For some, meaningful expenditures might include educational opportunities or creative pursuits, while others might prioritize travel or community involvement. The mindful approach to personal finance suggests that financial decisions should flow from clearly articulated values rather than external benchmarks or social comparison. This inverts the typical approach to budgeting—instead of starting with income and dividing it into categories, we begin by identifying what constitutes "enough" in various life domains and work backward to determine the income required to support those priorities.

Chapter 3: Building Wealth Without Exploitation: Ethical Investment Strategies

Traditional investment wisdom focuses almost exclusively on maximizing returns, with ethical considerations treated as secondary constraints at best. This approach tacitly accepts exploitation—of workers, communities, or natural resources—as an unfortunate but necessary aspect of wealth building. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that ethical investment strategies can generate competitive returns while aligning financial activities with broader social values. The first misconception to address is that ethical investing necessarily requires sacrificing financial performance. While early "negative screening" approaches (simply excluding problematic industries) sometimes underperformed market benchmarks, more sophisticated strategies have emerged. These include positive screening for companies with exemplary environmental and labor practices, shareholder activism to influence corporate behavior, and direct investment in enterprises addressing social or environmental challenges. Meta-analyses of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing show that such approaches frequently match or outperform conventional strategies, particularly over longer time horizons. Ethical wealth building extends beyond investment selection to broader questions about financial structures and wealth concentration. The conventional financial industry extracts significant value through fee structures, information asymmetries, and privileged access—mechanisms that systematically disadvantage individual investors. Community banking, credit unions, peer-to-peer lending platforms, and cooperative ownership models offer alternatives that distribute returns more equitably while keeping capital circulating within communities rather than extracting it. The concept of "enough" plays a central role in ethical wealth building. Unconstrained accumulation inevitably creates pressure to maximize returns regardless of social consequences. By contrast, setting sufficiency targets—whether for retirement, education funding, or other life goals—allows investors to prioritize how wealth is generated alongside how much is generated. This sufficiency-based approach reduces the pressure that often drives unethical investment decisions. Practical implementation of ethical investment strategies requires moving beyond simplistic labels toward substantive analysis of investment impacts. This might involve examining supply chain practices, labor conditions, environmental footprints, tax behaviors, and governance structures of potential investments. While this level of due diligence demands greater effort than conventional investing, numerous resources have emerged to facilitate ethical investment decisions, from specialized advisors to comprehensive databases of corporate behavior. Building wealth ethically also means recognizing the systemic context of individual financial decisions. Even the most conscientious personal choices operate within economic structures that may perpetuate inequality or environmental degradation. Therefore, ethical wealth building must include advocating for policy changes that address structural issues—from tax policies that reduce wealth concentration to regulatory frameworks that internalize environmental and social costs into market prices.

Chapter 4: The False Promises of Get-Rich-Quick Schemes and Manifestation

Contemporary financial discourse has witnessed the convergence of two seemingly distinct traditions: the get-rich-quick schemes long associated with entrepreneurial hustle culture and the "manifestation" practices emerging from wellness and spirituality communities. Despite their different aesthetics and vocabularies, both approaches promote fundamentally similar messages about wealth creation that obscure economic realities and shift responsibility entirely to individuals. Get-rich-quick schemes typically promise extraordinary returns through insider knowledge, proprietary systems, or emerging opportunities like cryptocurrency. These narratives rely on cherry-picked success stories while minimizing or ignoring statistical realities about risk and probability. The cryptocurrency phenomenon exemplifies this pattern—stories of overnight Bitcoin millionaires drove waves of investment into increasingly speculative assets, culminating in the market-wide cryptocurrency crash of 2022. This cycle repeated patterns seen in numerous previous financial bubbles, from tulip mania to dot-com speculation, yet was marketed as a revolutionary departure from traditional finance. Parallel to these explicit wealth-building schemes, manifestation practices claim that visualizing desired outcomes—including financial abundance—can directly influence their materialization. Proponents suggest that financial limitations stem primarily from negative thought patterns rather than structural economic factors. While positive visualization can indeed influence motivation and goal-directed behavior, manifestation rhetoric often crosses into magical thinking that disregards the material conditions and structural privileges that facilitate wealth acquisition. Both approaches share a core characteristic: they individualize financial outcomes to an extreme degree. Success becomes purely a function of personal choices, beliefs, or efforts, while failure indicates insufficient commitment, visualization, or positivity. This framing serves specific ideological functions, absolving economic systems of responsibility for increasing inequality while placing the burden of transcending economic constraints entirely on individuals. The appeal of these approaches lies partly in their emotional resonance. They offer narratives of control and agency in an economic environment where many feel increasingly precarious and disempowered. The possibility that financial success might require only the right mindset or special knowledge provides comfort against the more complex reality that economic outcomes depend substantially on factors beyond individual control—from intergenerational wealth transfers to macroeconomic policies. A more realistic approach recognizes that sustainable wealth building typically requires conventional methods applied consistently over time: living below one's means, regular investing in diversified assets, developing marketable skills, and gradually increasing income sources. This approach lacks the excitement of promised windfalls but acknowledges the actual mechanics through which most non-inherited wealth accumulates. Rather than passive manifestation, it focuses on active facilitation—taking concrete, incremental steps toward financial goals while recognizing both individual agency and structural constraints.

Chapter 5: Negotiating Your Worth While Battling Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome—the persistent belief that one's accomplishments result from luck rather than skill and the accompanying fear of being "exposed" as a fraud—profoundly impacts financial trajectories. First identified in high-achieving women in the 1970s, subsequent research has confirmed that this phenomenon disproportionately affects women, particularly women of color, undermining their ability to advocate for appropriate compensation despite objective qualifications and contributions. This psychological barrier operates alongside documented disparities in how negotiation behaviors are perceived across gender and racial lines. Research demonstrates that identical negotiation tactics elicit different responses depending on who employs them—assertiveness from women and people of color frequently triggers negative reactions where the same behavior from white men is viewed positively. These parallel challenges create a double bind: internal psychological barriers combined with external penalties for the very behaviors that might overcome those barriers. Imposter syndrome particularly undermines self-advocacy in negotiations by distorting one's perception of relative value. Those experiencing it typically overestimate others' competence while underestimating their own, leading to acceptance of substandard compensation. This pattern becomes self-reinforcing as each instance of undervaluing oneself creates compensation benchmarks that influence future negotiations, producing cumulative financial disadvantages over a career trajectory. Cognitive reframing offers one powerful strategy for addressing these challenges. This involves recognizing that many ostensibly successful individuals achieve their positions through structural advantages rather than superior competence. Understanding the myth of meritocracy—the false belief that outcomes result solely from talent and effort—allows individuals to contextualize their own struggles within systemic patterns rather than interpreting them as personal inadequacies. Practical preparation strategies can complement psychological approaches. Maintaining a comprehensive record of achievements, contributions, and positive feedback creates an objective counterweight to subjective feelings of inadequacy. Similarly, researching compensation standards and consulting with peers about negotiation experiences provides contextual information that reduces uncertainty during negotiation processes. The dynamics of negotiation differ significantly across employment contexts. Salaried professionals generally have more explicit negotiation opportunities than hourly workers, while freelancers must continuously set and defend their rates. However, all workers can benefit from reframing negotiation as advocating for fair valuation of their contributions rather than seeking special treatment. This perspective shift recognizes that companies routinely act in their own financial interest and legitimizes doing the same for oneself.

Chapter 6: Work-Life Integration: Challenging the Four-Day Workweek Myth

The concept of work-life balance has evolved into a ubiquitous cultural touchstone, yet its common framing contains a fundamental contradiction. The prevailing narrative presents balance as an individual responsibility achieved through personal time management techniques, mindfulness practices, or boundary-setting. This individualistic approach overlooks how workplace structures and economic incentives systematically undermine the very balance they claim to value. This contradiction manifests clearly in discussions of reduced work schedules, particularly the four-day workweek. While organizations increasingly tout flexible work arrangements as employee benefits, implementation often reveals significant limitations. "Compressed" workweeks that maintain 40 hours within fewer days simply redistribute the same work burden rather than reducing it. Similarly, "unlimited" vacation policies frequently result in employees taking less time off due to implicit expectations and performance pressures. These superficial approaches fail to address the fundamental issue: productivity has substantially increased over recent decades while wages have stagnated and working hours have remained static or increased. The technological efficiencies that early economists predicted would dramatically reduce working hours have instead been channeled toward greater output and shareholder value rather than worker well-being. This pattern reveals that work-life imbalance stems not from individual time management failures but from structural economic arrangements. True work-life integration requires reimagining workplace structures around human flourishing rather than maximum productivity. Organizations implementing authentic four-day workweeks—reducing total hours while maintaining compensation—report counterintuitive results: productivity typically remains stable or improves, while employee satisfaction, creativity, and retention increase significantly. These outcomes challenge the assumption that economic viability requires maximizing working hours. Implementing sustainable work structures demands concrete changes to workplace practices. Meetings, often the primary culprit in workday inefficiency, require radical reassessment. Organizations successfully transitioning to reduced schedules typically slash meeting frequency and duration, institute meeting-free days, and establish clear criteria for when synchronous communication is genuinely necessary. Similarly, expectations around communication response times and availability require explicit recalibration to prevent work from expanding to fill available time. The psychological dimension of work-life integration proves equally challenging. For many professionals, particularly women, work identity has become inextricably linked with self-worth. Breaking this connection requires cultivating alternative sources of meaning and identity beyond professional achievement. This psychological shift supports the practical implementation of reduced schedules by diminishing the internal pressure to continuously demonstrate professional dedication through constant availability and overwork.

Chapter 7: Cultivating Abundance Mindset Through Intentional Community

The scarcity mindset—the perception that resources, opportunities, and even meaningful connections are fundamentally limited—profoundly shapes financial behavior and life satisfaction. This mindset creates a self-perpetuating cycle: perceiving scarcity triggers protective behaviors that paradoxically reinforce isolation and limitation. Breaking this cycle requires more than individual psychological shifts; it demands intentional cultivation of communities that embody and reinforce abundance thinking. Scarcity thinking manifests in financial contexts as excessive competitiveness, zero-sum approaches to negotiation, hoarding resources, and chronic anxiety about insufficiency regardless of objective circumstances. These patterns appear across income levels—from those facing genuine material hardship to wealthy individuals who nevertheless perceive themselves as perpetually insecure. This psychological orientation toward lack creates significant barriers to both financial and emotional well-being. Social context powerfully influences whether we perceive abundance or scarcity. When surrounded by conspicuous consumption and status competition, we naturally calibrate our sense of "enough" against escalating external benchmarks. Conversely, communities that emphasize relationship quality, creativity, and non-material sources of satisfaction help establish more sustainable internal standards for sufficiency. This highlights why individual mindset changes, while necessary, prove insufficient without corresponding shifts in social environment. Intentional communities built around shared values rather than consumption patterns offer powerful alternatives to mainstream consumer culture. These communities take diverse forms—from formal cohousing arrangements to informal skill-sharing networks, mutual aid groups, or regular gatherings centered on creative expression rather than commercial activities. What unites these varied structures is their emphasis on collaborative rather than competitive relationships and their recognition of multiple forms of wealth beyond financial assets. Such communities demonstrate abundance thinking through specific practices: generously sharing knowledge and skills, maintaining lending libraries for rarely-used items, creating time banks for service exchange, and establishing community investment models that allow members to pool resources for shared goals. These approaches recognize that many resources gain rather than lose value through sharing—knowledge expands when exchanged, tools serve more purposes when widely available, and skills develop through practice with diverse community members. Building these intentional communities requires overcoming significant cultural barriers, particularly the hyperindividualism and privacy norms that characterize contemporary Western societies. Initial steps might include organizing skill-sharing events, establishing regular communal meals, creating neighborhood tool libraries, or forming investment clubs that combine financial education with actual investing. Such initiatives build the social infrastructure and trust necessary for more substantial resource sharing over time.

Summary

Transforming our relationship with money ultimately requires a fundamental shift in perspective—moving from viewing wealth as an end in itself to recognizing it as merely one tool among many for creating meaningful lives. This approach acknowledges money's genuine utility in providing security and opportunities while refusing to accept financial metrics as the primary measure of success or worth. By establishing personal sufficiency thresholds, practicing ethical wealth building, resisting both scarcity thinking and excessive consumption, and embedding financial decisions within supportive communities, we can develop financial practices that genuinely serve our broader life aspirations. The mindful approach to personal finance carries broader implications beyond individual well-being. As more people question the assumptions underlying conventional financial wisdom—endless growth, maximum productivity, consumption as self-expression, wealth as virtue—collective possibilities emerge for economic structures more aligned with human flourishing. While structural economic change requires political action beyond personal financial choices, those choices nevertheless shape the cultural context in which broader changes become conceivable. By rejecting scarcity narratives and embodying alternatives through our daily financial practices, we participate in an essential reimagining of what economic life might become.

About Author

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Chelsea Fagan

Chelsea Fagan is the co-founder and CEO of The Financial Diet. She is the author of many books, including THE HIGH DIVE, coming May 27, 2025.Chelsea is an avid home cook, and lives in Manhattan with her husband and dog.

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