The Money See-Saw: Trending Up?

: Image by Roby72© via Flickr

2,160.

That’s the estimated number of times the word “money” turns up in the 360-page novel Money, by Martin Amis. And the word never loses its thrill. What was narrator John Self thinking or feeling about money right now? What would happen — good or bad — because money was there, or wasn’t? (Money, in the novel, is a character, and a deity, and a mysterious force, and at times, it seemed, the air itself.)

By the end of the book, money jumps off the see-saw just as Self has reached its apex. Once flush, Self doesn’t have enough to buy an aspirin from a bathroom wall dispenser.

I know something of this feeling, although it’s more along the safe middle-class lines of an essay by Steve Almond that recently appeared in Real Simple. (Now finally online.) Almond writes about trying not to spend any money for one week, and all of the small problems this causes.

Hmm, can’t pay the toll booth. Can’t buy our favorite buns from the shop around the corner. Can’t buy Raisinets. (I could spend some serious coin keeping myself in Raisinets.)

This is funny as an experiment, and not funny as reality. If you actually have to consciously think about everywhere you might spend a bit of cash, but can’t, that’s a psychic weight. Is it cumulative? Is it permanent? Or does it fall away once money returns?

(Here’s a snippet from the above link: “Just handling paper money could reduce the distress associated with social exclusion, and also diminish the physical pain caused by touching very hot water.” That’s part of a study soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science.)

Lately our money see-saw is trending up — a slow hydraulic sqeeze. As it breathes us in and up, I feel my own breath slowly, cautiously ease out.

But I like to think, with all this attention I’m paying to money’s sneaky ways, that I’m warier now.

I’ve got my eye on you, money. Yes, I do.