I’ll Do Anything for Money – Even Now that I Don’t Need To

 

My father taught me to steal bread before I turned 10—not out of desperation, but of cheapness.  I grew up in northern Delaware in what was financially a middle-class family.  My father had a good job in HR at Columbia Gas Systems, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom.  They built a house in the suburbs in 1970, and we were even able to buy a new car (a Chevy Impala).  Those were the days.  Except they weren’t.  My dad had us thinking we didn’t have money to do anything.  “Vacation” meant traveling to Pittsburgh to stay with my mother’s parents (now those were the days because we had the best maternal grandparents in all the world!).  “Going out to dinner” meant going to Burger King and, get this, sitting in the car to eat it.  We never ate inside.  I do not know why, but I know it would have felt fancier to me if we did. Sure, we always had food on the table, but we never ate as well as our neighbors. And worse yet, my dad would kind of make us shoplift.  He would drive my brothers, sister, and me to the local corner grocery store for bread, milk, and a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi (although it wasn’t in liters in the 1970s) and told us to walk out without paying (while he waited in the car).  I do not honestly remember if we ever really did steal those items, but I certainly remember the encouragement to not spend my dad's money. That same mindset followed us everywhere. When we went to get new shoes, we went to a store that was the equivalent of Walmart, and he switched the price tags so that we would pay a lower price for our shoes. These are not the life lessons or financial advice parents should teach their children.

I felt embarrassed going to school because I always had “last year’s shoes.”  And remember the Levi’s fad – EVERYONE wore Levi’s!  Except us.  My brothers, sisters, and I did not wear Levi’s.  We could not afford them, my parents claimed.  We got to wear jeans ordered from the Sears catalog. I mean, those jeans were fine, but they were no Levi’s.  I recall that I somehow got a hold of the little red “Levi’s” tag and managed to sew it into the back pocket of a pair of, well, Sears’ jeans. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

By the time I reached the age where I could start earning my own money, boy did I go hog wild!  I got a job soon after I turned 16 (as a waitress at a diner where my brother worked as a dishwasher). And I took on as many hours as I possibly could.  You see, by this point, my parents were separated (for the very last time and were soon to be divorced).  As it turns out, my dad did have a good income, but he preferred to spend it on booze, gambling, and women more than on his family.  My parents had to refinance their home at one point to support his gambling debt.  And when he left in December of 1979, he did not give his wife of 22 years or his four kids (all under the age of 16) a single dime (at least not until my parents were officially divorced, and even then, my mother only got child support enough to barely cover the mortgage). So, by the time I started working, it was not to buy that coveted pair of Levi’s – it was to put food on the table, gas in the car, and heat in the house. Between the time I was in high school and off to graduate school, I typically worked two or three minimum wage jobs, always looking to work holidays or Sundays for extra pay, always looking to do almost anything to earn money. My early experiences taught me to be money insecure, and I was bound and determined to make sure that I would never be broke and that I would never depend on someone for income.

But I overlooked one crucial thing: making sure I didn’t end up with someone financially dependent on me. Long story short, while juggling grad school (on a stipend), a marketing job, and adjunct teaching, I found myself as the sole financial provider in my marriage. For 37 years of my life (5 while living together, 21 married, and another 10 paying spousal support), I carried the weight of our finances alone. After decades like that, it’s hard not to feel like financial stability is always just out of reach.

And even now, even at 60-something years old, I still find myself money-insecure, always looking for ways to work more. Social psychologists call this a “scarcity mindset” -when lack hijacks your brain, convincing you that no matter how much you earn, it could vanish tomorrow. For me, it began with stolen bread and Sears jeans, but it didn’t stop there. Even after decades as a professor, my salary and retirement savings can’t quiet the voice that keeps asking, “What if it’s not enough?”  It’s why I say yes to every $150 book review and every extra class. Logically, I know better. But scarcity isn’t logical.

As I think about retirement, of course, I worry—like so many—about outliving my savings. But my deeper fear isn't just about running out of money; it's about no longer generating income. If I don't teach that extra class, write that book, or start that Etsy shop, no paycheck will come in. No new money will be created. Scarcity leaves scars. At 60-something, I know my 401K is healthy. I know I’ve earned rest. But knowing isn’t feeling. So I’m still sewing those Levi’s tags into my life—grabbing every side gig, every chance to earn—not because I need to now, but because that kid who never had enough is still part of me.

Does scarcity whisper to you, too?

 

 

Both Sides Now

I have been a professor of social psychology at Miami University (in Ohio) for nearly 31 years.  It’s no stretch to say that I love being a professor and believe I chose the right professional path.  I love being a psychologist, which equips me with the knowledge and tools to help me understand human social behavior.  In effect, my job allows me to ask questions about human social behavior, and then design studies to answer those questions. 

About four years ago, I applied to chair my department. Serving in administration had NEVER been a goal of mine. I was happy to be “just a faculty member,” where I could effectively set my agenda and serve my students and the university. I imagined that as an administrator, I would serve someone else’s agenda; up to that point, I wasn’t willing to do that. But I had been in rank at that point for 27 years and felt that I had achieved all of the significant milestones in my career, and now it was time to give back in a bigger and more impactful way.

Being a department chair is an interesting position, largely regarded as the hardest job in the university.  After serving for four years, I can see why!  As a department chair, you are both a faculty member and an administrator, but you are also neither of those. You simultaneously advocate for faculty (to administrators and to students) and for administrators (to faculty). It puts you in the position of sitting squarely on the fence between faculty and administration, who, just by being categorized as two groups, have animosity toward one another. Faculty often distrust administrators, feeling that they do not understand all of the work that they do.  Administrators sometimes feel that faculty members have more independence than they should. Of course, not every faculty-administrator relationship is fraught—but when tensions arise, it’s often because each group sees the other’s role through their own struggles.

 

But sitting on that fence also has a unique advantage – you can see both sides.  You interact with faculty in ways you likely never did as just a colleague, and you get to directly experience an administrator's perspective, who have demands on them that you likely never realized as a faculty member. This dual perspective forced me to confront a psychological blind spot we all share: the tendency to judge others’ actions more harshly than our own—what psychologists call the actor observer bias. The actor-observer bias describes how we attribute our own actions to situational factors but others' actions to their personality, which makes sense – we have available to us much more information about ourselves (our motivations, our desires, our biological needs, etc.) than we do about anyone else. For example, if you snap at a co-worker, you might blame the stress you are feeling, but if the co-worker snaps at you, you might assume they are mean. But if we just stop for a minute and try to take on the other person's perspective and put ourselves in their shoes, then we might be less inclined to fall prey to the actor-observer bias. We might be less likely to attribute the cause of their (unwanted) behavior to their personality than to the fact that they might be having a bad day or that something is going on in their lives that we know nothing about. And this leads to me think about yet another cognitive bias in our judgements about others – the fundamental attribution error (FAE).  This bias refers to our tendency to overemphasize personality traits and underestimate situational influences when judging others. In short, it seems that when trying to understand someone else’s behavior, we automatically assume that the cause is due to something about their personality and not something possibly uncontrollable in their lives.

Being a department chair for the last four years has come with its challenges, but I will be most grateful for it putting me in the position of seeing both sides now, where I had a bird’s eye view of both faculty and administration because I was that bird. I lived in both worlds and had a front-row seat to both perspectives.  It’s almost cliché to suggest this, but I will anyway – what a better world we might live in if we all took a little time to see both sides now. Suppose we stopped in our tracks and expended a little cognitive energy to consider the situation from the other person's perspective. Next time you’re quick to judge a colleague—or even a stranger—pause and ask: What might I be missing? After all, seeing both sides isn’t just for department chairs.

Both Sides Now

Reflections on Grief

 

So today marks the 4^th anniversary of my Mother’s death.  She died in 2021 of COVID.  She was only 81 years old.  Because of COVID, I hadn’t seen her since December of 2019.  She was hospitalized in March of 2021 (and died in April).  It was a harrowing 5 weeks.  She lived in Delaware, as does the rest of my family.  I live in southwest Ohio.  Not that any of that mattered – hospitals still were not allowing visitors. I called the nurses' station twice a day, every day, for updates on how she was doing, and then texted these updates to family.  She was doing poorly, then she was improving, then her oxygen levels started to drop again, then she was failing…Then I got the call from the doctor on the morning of April 11 – she wasn’t going to make it.  My wife and I packed the car and drove as fast as possible to Delaware – a 550-mile trip.  At that moment, the hospital was allowing one family member to visit at a time. Somehow, they let more than one of us in at a time, but they were not happy about it. 

I got to spend her last 30 hours on earth with her.  When she was awake, she was lucid and aware.  She knew she was going to leave us.  She didn’t want to go.  She told us she was not afraid of dying, but she was afraid of not being with her four children (all of us in our 50s and 60s by that point).  You see, she lived for her children.  We were her life.  We were her identity. She was so concerned that we were all going to be okay.  That is what she wanted to discuss – were we going to be okay? 

My sister and I stayed with her the entire time.  She drew her last breath at 2:45 am on April 14, 2021.  And my life changed forever.  I had already lost my Dad when I was 25 years old, but loss is a strong word.  He was never really there, and at the time, his death meant little to me, save for thinking what a lonely, sad life he lived. His life and death mean more to me now, now that I do not have any living parents.  When my mother died, so much of me went with her.  Social psychologists call this collective memory (Wegner, 1987)– the shared memories and recollections you hold with people close to you, like your family.  When one or more of those people leave or die, it feels like losing part of your mind. When she died, she took with her all of the experiences I had as a baby, a kid, or even an adult that I could not remember. I cannot recall the number of times I would call her and ask things like, “when did I have the chicken pox?”; “what was the name of the neighbor down the street that I ran track with?”; “how old was I when I started my period?”.  And so on.  Now she was gone, and that part of our collective experiences and memories, from her perspective, was also gone. I felt so alone in the world.  I felt like an orphan.

It’s been four years since she took her last breath.  In that time, life, for me and my siblings, has gone on.  We have all had many life experiences in those four years, and she has missed all of them. Sometimes, it feels like those life experiences do not matter because they do not contribute to her collective memory.

In some odd way, I am glad her loss still hurts so much – it reminds me how much I loved her, and how much she loved me. And the one person who could help me manage my grief is not here anymore. 

References:

Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior (pp. 185–208). Springer-Verlag.