31 Jul 2025 More Bendy, Less Breaky
Just over ten years ago, Seth Godin wrote the following:
It’s tempting to invest time, money and emotion into gaining control over the future. Security guards, written policies, reinforced concrete—there are countless ways we can enforce our control over nature, random events and fellow humans.
The problem is that while the first round of control pays huge dividends (keeping rabbits out the yard is a good way to make your garden grow), over time more control creates brittleness. The Maginot Line didn’t hold up very well, and the hundred-year floodwalls don’t work in the face of a thousand-year flood.
The alternative is to invest in resilience, to build systems that can handle (or even thrive) when the unforeseen happens.
In one case, you can say, “when the roads are smooth, when you read the instructions, when conditions are ideal, this is the very best solution.”
In the other case, you can say, “if people don’t read the rider, if the unexpected happens, if there’s a surprise attack, we won’t be perfect, but it’ll work better than any other alternative, which is a pretty good plan.”
It is tremendously difficult to grasp just how vast and diverse the uncertainty of the future is. Sure, it’s obvious when you read it in a sentence like the preceding one, but when you undertake to prepare for the future through some means of financial planning, it can be easy to forget just how uncertain it all is. The planning itself can even lend itself to tricking us into a false sense of security, of having control.
And so this idea of resilience has to underpin all the particulars of planning. We have to build resilience and imagination and creativity as characteristics that describe who we are and not simply the discrete investing and tax and insurance and saving and spending decisions we make day to day and year to year.
Resilience doesn’t sell very well, is the problem. Shiny new things sell well, so the Robinhood CEO is crying about how retail investors can’t invest in private companies. Complexity sells well, so banks are continually going through cycles of selling expensive and overly clever products and then having to apologize to clients when they blow up. Fear sells well, and that seems to account for more things than I can list in this blog.
But, for those with the discipline to build it, resilience just works.
Financial resilience is a lot of things probably, but to me it can be pretty well distilled into two ideas:
- Financially resilient people build plenty of margin into their lifestyle. They aren’t pushing the envelope to see how much they can possibly spend, or how little they can get away with saving. Debt is a tool that they use sparsely and wisely rather than as a means to increase or maintain a certain lifestyle, because debt can quickly become a negative feedback loop when bad things happen financially.
- Less math, more philosophy: Financially resilient people seem to hold their lifestyle with a certain openness, even a disinterestedness. They understand that what they consume—where they live, what they drive, where they vacation, what they wear—has no bearing on their character or the real content of their life. If we set these things, the trappings of “lifestyle” in their proper place, then we are free to pick them up and set them down as we desire or as life or ethics necessitate.
So how resilient is your financial life? Or are you more concerned with control? We can’t help you with the latter, but we love to partner with individuals and families on the former. Let us know if we can help.
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