The Ant, The Grasshopper, Tim Ferriss, and Ben Franklin.

“Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.” – Archer

Thankfully I’m not alone.  Stupid Grasshoppers.

There are occasions when a simple question can punch you in your gut like a rabid Mike Tyson reacting to a paper cut that you just poured lemon juice on.  Here’s a question that hit me last week:

“What do you do with your money?”

“I keep it in the bank.”

“Then why do you do so many things you dislike to earn more of it?”

The above quote is from a conversation between Tim Ferriss (an author with an unusual fondness for the letter S) and Ryan Holiday (I’ve mentioned him before) –you can read the rest of the article here (LINK).  Holiday puts this exchange first in his piece – it’s pretty powerful, so powerful that it might even relate to issues we face as a country – not that I’ll solve those.  That sounds like it would be hard.

Working is good for you.  Producing value is good for you.  It says so right on the label.  But I worry sometimes about money being my goal instead of a way to allow me to work toward my real goals.  When I lived paycheck to paycheck, I was fixated on money – as a single dad with little savings, it was tough.  Did I focus on fulfillment?  No, I focused on keeping enough money in my bank account so I could pay the electrical bill, which is why it was 40°F in the house in the winter and 85°F in the house in the summer – air conditioning was for closers, and the kids were awful about closing.  Mainly awful about closing the window, but I digress.

I had Alec Baldwin give the kids a speech about cleaning their room.  He fired them, but only after they cried.  But Pugsley got a set of steak knives.

When you’re in that condition, life is about that struggle for money.  I remember we’d eat Kraft® Macaroni and Cheese™ on the nights we weren’t having Hamburger Helper©.  On really good nights, we’d have actual hamburger in the Hamburger Helper©.  If an expense wasn’t absolutely required?  I’d avoid it.  Oil changes?  Why would you do that, there’s still some in the car?  What do I look like, a Rockefeller?  Stitches?  That’s what Super Glue® is for.

At that point in my life I viewed money as the end.  Everything was about making more of it or saving what I had.

When I really think about it, maybe the only common value we have left as a country is this secular religion of chasing money.  It’s like the old fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants, where the Ants work all summer to store food for the winter, but the Grasshopper uses a leveraged buyout to get money to buy the mortgage to the Anthill from the bank and bulldozes the Anthill to put up a Starbucks®.

Okay, that’s not the way the fable ended.  The first time I saw the Ant and the Grasshopper, it was the 1934 Disney® cartoon version.  They showed it at school on a field trip because movies are easier than teaching.  The end of the movie version of that fable had the Ants inviting the Grasshopper into the Anthill for the winter, provided that the Grasshopper played music for them and voted for FDR.  I was a horrible child – six year-old me thought the Ants were just incentivizing negative Grasshopper behavior and I thought he should have been left out in the cold.  Why?  Because even at age six I was heartless.

I would have enjoyed the original fable more.  In Aesop’s version, the Ants work all summer, and the Grasshopper plays all summer.  When it comes time for winter, the Grasshopper comes begging from the Ant, and the Ant tells the Grasshopper to die in a fire.  I find that a bit more satisfying than the Disney™ version, but I guess Disney© didn’t like the idea of having a cartoon turn into Silence of The Grasshopper where the Ants eat the Grasshopper with some fava beans and a nice chianti.  It could be that hordes of traumatized and crying six year olds isn’t good for business, unless you’re a therapist.

Thankfully, if the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant were real and happening today, the Grasshoppers would form a Grasshopper PAC and would vote in a pro-Grasshopper Congressbug that would immediately introduce legislation to tax the unfair profits of Ants.  Additionally, the Grasshoppers would also denounce the Ants for the culture they created that was the source of all that wealth.  It’s only fair, right?

Me?  All kidding aside, for most of my life I’ve been an Ant.  Working huge numbers of hours to try to provide for the family, build up some financial resources for the future.  Some years I worked in excess of 3,000 stressful hours to provide for the family – that’s an average work week of over sixty hours, every week for a year.  Some people work even harder.  The kicker?   There’s an alternate view of the Ant:  some felt that the Ant isn’t always the good guy, that his very industriousness was driven by the love of money.  In the words of dead-guy-with-a-comic-book-worthy-name-from-1690, Roger L’Strange (I swear I didn’t make up that name) about the Ant (spelling and capitalization in the original):

“Vertue and Vice, in many Cases, are hardly Distinguishable but by the Name.”

In L’Strange’s oddly capitalized view, working too hard was itself a vice.  The poor Ant can’t get a break – everybody wants his stuff, but now he can’t even work hard without people piling on.

But L’Strange was right.  Maybe I worked too hard.  And maybe I am too stunningly handsome.

Okay, he’s not L’Strange, but Dr. Strange is cool.  And Benedict Cumbereberbatch Bandersnatch Cumberdoodle plays him well.

But the Ant and the Grasshopper might be the one fable that encapsulates the American dichotomy.  Are you a spender, or are you a saver?  Something tells me there might be another way.

There is a very important role of money in a free market economy.  It gives incentives for behavior that fills the needs and desires for others.  It’s a scorekeeper – resources flow to those who best used them to create economic prosperity.  It’s a rationing system for goods and services that doesn’t require the hand of government to make it function.  There are some pretty negative roles of money, too, but I’ll skip those for this post.

There is a way to be neither Ant nor Grasshopper.  If you’re working hard and understand why you’re working, that’s a start.  Paying bills is important, but trading your life away for dollars is really selling your soul.

As Ben Franklin said, “Dost thou love life?  Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”

And I don’t think Ben was talking about the magazines Life and Time.  If he was, I guess that makes the quote stupid instead of powerful, and it’s unlikely that Ben read either Life or Time, since he spent most of his time on his phone or watching Netflix®.

The powerful question remains and is really a restatement of old Ben’s comment:  “Then why do you do so many things you dislike to earn more of it (money)?”

I’m blessed now to be able to view money is a means, not an end.  The results of the Tyson punch?  Spleen ruptured.  Thankfully it’s not something serious, like having to examine my life choices . . .