Friday, February 22, 2019

My Financial Independence Manifesto

If you are in any way following the personal finance community, then you have likely heard about the alt-FI Manifesto that was recently published on someone’s blog and then featured on Rockstar Finance.  (I’m not going to link to it here, as I don’t personally want to give it any more traffic. You can certainly Google it if you really want to read it, or alternatively you can read Done by Forty’s excellent summary and interpretation of it on Twitter.). In it, the writer goes into great detail about how he feels the world should work from a financial perspective.  At its essence, I think it distils down to the following philosophy:

“I got mine. Fuck everyone else.”

I’m not going to spend a moment of time going through the arguments in the manifesto, as I’m sure other bloggers will do a much better job of that in the coming days.  It’s also the middle of my last night in Mexico, and I really should be sleeping while the waves crash loudly outside my window rather than hastily writing an insomnia-driven blog post on my iPhone.  What I am going to do instead is state very briefly how I would like to see the world work.

In the simplest of terms, I think the ideal society cares for all of its members.  It doesn’t take the dog-eat-dog, winner takes all approach that characterizes the current political and economic culture in the United States.  Instead, it recognizes the humanity and value of every member of society, and it attempts to create systems and structures that benefit every member of that society.

I’m always happy to debate what that looks like.  I’m happy to talk about welfare versus universal basic income, or about how best to respond to addiction, or about strategies for reducing homelessness.  I will not, however, ever debate the humanity of the most marginalized members of our society.  I will never debate my belief that those of us who have more have at least some obligation to those of us who have less.  That is the essence of my financial independence manifesto.

I also want to take a brief moment to address the issue of “tribalism” that was raised in the original  manifesto.  The manifesto proposes that we should stop dividing ourselves into groups and learn to not see things such as race, gender, sexuality, etc.  I will admit that, as a queer woman, there was a time when I believed this very thing with respect to my sexuality.  I thought that the only difference between being queer and being straight was that my partner’s genitals matched my own, and as a result, I didn’t think that I needed to specifically have queer friends or be part of the queer community.

Two things fundamentally changed this belief for me.  The first was travelling with my partner of three years through the Middle East.  For two weeks, we had to be constantly vigilant to not touch each other in public or say anything that would give us away, knowing that our sexuality and our relationship made us unsafe.  When she introduced me to people with whom she had lived and worked, people who are like family to her, she had to introduce me as her roommate instead of her partner.  It’s hard for me to describe how painful it was to essentially be erased from the life story of the person who was most important to me.  That is something that most straight people don’t ever have to experience.

The second thing was dating a woman who is a very active member of the local queer community.  When we dated, I suddenly found myself hanging out with other queer women and attending community events that I had never even heard of.  And while I love my straight friends dearly, I found something in the queer women that I had never gotten from my straight friends.  Understanding.  Recognition.  Commonality of experience.  When I talked to them about coming out, or travelling to a country where my sexuality is illegal, or my lifelong hatred of wearing dresses, I didn’t need to explain myself.  They had been there, and they simply understood.

So no, I don’t think we can simply ignore the things that make us different.  On a personal level, there is value in connecting with people who share and understand your experiences.  On a broader societal level, recognizing these differences is essential to dismantling the discriminatory systems that marginalize people who are not white, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied men.

It’s still the middle of the night, and I am tired.  Partly because I should be sleeping, but mostly because I am tired of selfish, ignorant people continuing to speak from a position of hatred.  And I’m tired of organizations like Rockstar Finance giving these people a platform.

12 comments:

  1. Amen. Thank you for also not linking to it and giving them more traffic.
    Ties in well with your last post... why do people need to be assholes?

    Also nice to see you back! Hope you had a wonderful time in Mexico!

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    1. Mexico is great! I still have a few hours left, so I’m going on a food tour to take advantage of it. Taaaacos.

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  2. Love this. Love you. Enjoy the last of your vacation without worrying about the dumpster fire going on here.

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    1. Awww. Thanks.

      I told myself that I was going to ignore it and go offline for the day, but I can’t seem to turn away from the dumpster fire.

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  3. People need to stop pretending that curation is censorship and that elevating racist voices is being "fair to all sides".

    And they need to stop pretending that recognizing our differences is the antithesis to inclusion when it's the first step to being inclusive in the first place. You cannot possibly be inclusive without recognizing what people need, which requires seeing them for who they are.

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  4. The "I got mine, fuck everybody else," is a lot of what got us into this mess. Meanwhile, enjoy your last moments in someplace warm.

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  5. Well said, and better said than I could. I think your example of traveling through the middle East really shows in a concrete way how things are dramatically different for some of us.

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    1. Thanks. I disagree that I said it better than you could though - you write a lot of really good, thought-provoking posts.

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  6. I'm glad I'm reading your piece here before reading the article that you are referring to. I hate the way many things are right now here (in the USA) politically and societally. What you wrote here helped me clarify in my mind about how I believe that everyone has worth and deserves to be treated well. Some of the best people I have met are very poor finaincially. I think I am loosening up on thinking that people should just work harder, or coming to terms with some things such as that I don't like the way my taxes may be spent, that I am working with an underserved population and not getting paid really well, and that a chunk of my money is taken in taxes to pay for the very much-needed but poorly-administered programs that I work for!

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  7. Excuse the spelling errors. My program doesn't appear to be working!

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