Belonging at all costs; Running with the Herd
Have you ever been in the middle of a stampede?
If you’re imagining thundering hooves stirring up clouds of dust, the answer will almost certainly be no. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be here to answer at all.) But the fact is, everyone who’s ever been a member of a group—in other words, each and every one of us—has undoubtedly been caught up in the human equivalent of a stampede. You may even have led one.
We’ve seen the thundering-hooves kind of stampede at the Black Hills Wild Horse Refuge outside Hot Springs, South Dakota. We’ve spent considerable time there watching the wild horses, their behavior and their interactions with each other. There always seems to be a leader or a group of leaders who determine what the group does—not through force, but simply by example. If the leaders suddenly begin galloping away, the entire herd goes with them. It doesn’t matter if they’re galloping because they’ve caught a whiff of mountain lion, or because they’ve stumbled into a hive of ground-nesting hornets, or because they’re just feeling in the mood for a good gallop—where the leader goes, so does the herd.
The lead horses might be taking the herd towards safety. They might also be leading it, by mistake, to the crumbling edge of a cliff. None of the other horses knows for sure. But all the horses are sure that they do not want to be left behind and they do not want to be the slowest. After all, to escape from a large predator, a horse doesn’t have to be the fastest in the herd. It just has to be faster than at least one other horse. To the members of a herd, being left behind means certain death—if not now, then soon.
A common belief is that all financial decisions are driven by greed. We disagree. We believe that all financial behaviors are driven by fear: that, like the horses in a stampede, our decisions about what direction to take, and the speed with which we take them, are driven by the fear of being left behind.
Humans are social animals. Our very survival for thousands of years depended on being a part of the tribe. Being kicked out meant being alone, and being alone meant death. Plus, we are wired to connect with others. Though this is an ancient instinct, one that evolved in our prehistoric past, it’s still one of the strongest impulses we have. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, are just modern-day examples of the ancient herd instinct, and their success is testament to the power of that need to belong. That desire is not only still alive, but it is powerful, even though it typically operates below our immediate awareness. When activated, it will take charge and throw rationality out the window.
Think of the lead horse taking the entire herd over a cliff. This wasn’t a rational, conscious decision—it was an instinctual one. In humans, the herd mentality—the blind following of some de facto leader—can result in anything from riots, to gang violence, to bullying among children. Herd instinct can go out of control in the most unlikely of settings—as it did on Black Friday 2008, the day after Thanksgiving, when a temporary worker at a Long Island Walmart was knocked down and trampled to death by a “herd” of shoppers eager to snap up bargains.
The human herd mentality, too, applies to financial behaviors, and as such, can play an important role in shaping our money scripts. Many behaviors that seem to be random and irrational are, in fact, the result of a highly predictable social dynamic; our innate desire to “stay with the herd.” It is this desire that keeps us from breaking free of our “financial comfort zone,” or the socioeconomic herd in which we are most comfortable. Until we are willing to venture outside of our financial comfort zone, to leave our own herd and entering the territory of another, we will continue to unconsciously engage in financial behaviors that keep us stuck in, or draw us back to, our own.
Financial Comfort Zone
Picture the neighborhood you lived in the longest. You probably got to know it pretty well. You knew where to get groceries. You knew the quickest way to get to the hospital emergency room. You knew the friendly neighbors and the not-so-friendly ones. You knew where the closest hardware store was. Drug store. Coffee shop. Playground. Drycleaners. You knew your neighborhood. You felt comfortable there. You felt safe there. You belonged there.
A financial comfort zone works the same way. It’s the financial neighborhood that makes you feel safest and most at home. We often find ourselves in a particular financial comfort zone as a consequence of our birth and family-of-origin. We didn’t choose it originally, but many of us never realize how much a part of us it becomes. We can leave—but even if we do, the original boundaries we learned are very strong. Those boundaries may be arbitrary and drawn by others, but we soon learn to live within them anyway. Just as you learned not to throw a ball into the cranky neighbor’s yard, these financial boundaries set the parameters for where it’s acceptable for you to go and what it is acceptable for you to do with your money. They become second nature to us. They define our reality. Because they are automatic and lie outside our awareness, these financial boundaries, when unexamined, become glass ceilings and floors.
We see this phenomenon in multigenerational welfare recipients, professional athletes who come from poverty and, despite new-found riches, soon return there, and other sudden money recipients who turn their gold into dust. They are so comfortable with the expectations and the membership requirements of the social groups they grew up in, they will cling to the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of that group, even when their circumstances have changed. Some go so far as to lie, cheat, steal, and sacrifice relationships on the altar of the work-god, in a desperate attempt to stay in the neighborhood where they believe they belong.
Each financial neighborhood has its own set of values and mores. It has its own answers for questions like: What is the financial role of fathers and mothers? When if ever is it acceptable to take on debt? What is the best way to use my money? What are we supposed to put up with to meet our financial obligations to others (for instance, working at a job you don’t really like much)? How acceptable is it to flaunt how much I have, and what I spend it on?
Your financial comfort zone also dictates how “poor” and “rich” are defined (as we’ll see in a minute, these in fact are highly relative terms), and at what point you move from one position to the other. We know of one young lady from an upscale neighborhood who was planning her wedding. Her parents told her that they would give her a certain amount of money for her wedding, setting a limit to what they would be willing to contribute. Shocked, the young woman said, “A budget? Mother, that’s what poor people do!” Point is, the wealthy and the poor think very differently, and without a significant shift in thinking, it is difficult to move from one group to the other.
Our goal is to teach you to stretch your own financial comfort zone. We want to help you think and behave differently, so you can become comfortable at any financial level, and develop the mental and emotional framework you need to reach and maintain the financial level you aspire to.
