We continue with our look at the system, and whether or not we participate.
Capitalism has encouraged Lay’s to develop over 200 flavors of potato chips. But capitalism is also responsible for child labor, environmental destruction, corrupt political systems, deep concentrations of wealth and power, poverty, early death, and unimaginable greed.
We came across a thoughtful, impassioned reflection of participation within our current economic world.
Chelsea Fagan, founder of The Financial Diet, discusses pragmatism while living in an unjust and immoral system.
- https://www.facebook.com/thefinancialdiet
- https://thefinancialdiet.com/
- https://youtu.be/E0vdHKSefdA
A transcript is available below.
Chelsea is definitely on the “inside” camp. Elder G reflects on where Jesus would land on this issue, based on yesterday’s Matthew 19:21 conversation
Jesus’ teaching here feels very much like a call to live outside the system—rejecting wealth, privilege, and the corrupting influence of power. It aligns with his broader emphasis on the kingdom of God being something profoundly different from earthly kingdoms, a rejection of worldly hierarchies in favor of something more just and compassionate.
You could argue that Jesus himself walked that line between within and outside—he preached in synagogues (the heart of the religious system), but also spent time with outcasts and flipped tables in the temple when the system became irredeemably corrupt.
Elder G
No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism? lol!
Chelsea cleverly titles her video “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism? lol!” She argues persuasively that anyone who attempts to fight the system from outside the system will be so poor that they will find their lives consumed with squalid survival, not emancipated activism.
She also addresses the concern that some make, that the stock market will collapse completely, so why invest?
In a nutshell, if the stock market goes to zero, losing your portfolio will be the least of your problems.
Let us enumerate:
“At this point, my portfolio is the least of my concerns.”
“If the market hits zero, I hope you invested in beans.”
Semi-Sequitur: Chelsea / Will There Be a Buffet?
Our hats are off to Chelsea for hard work and persistence! She is the author of several books and has an active YouTube channel. You can read a humorous interview with a young-ish Chelsea on:
“I’m Only Here for the WiFi: A Complete Guide to Reluctant Adulthood” covers everything from finding a job and dating to finances and friendship.
The first time she saw the book in a store, Fagan was so happy she cried. “When things happen like this, you should enjoy them,” she said.
The book took her about a year to complete and is an outgrowth of her work for the online magazine Thought Catalog. It previously published her e-book “Take Out Your Earrings Before You Fight (And Other Things I Learned In Public School).”
“A lot of succeeding in the industry is putting yourself out there and not fearing rejection,” Fagan said.
The Capital Gazette
From this interview we also learn:
Asked what wanted to be as a young girl, she replied, “Mermaid.”
She graduated from Annapolis High School in 2006 without a definite career plan, and attended Anne Arundel Community College. She then left for France to be an au pair and continue school.
The Capital Gazette
References
(lightly edited for clarity and brevity)
Hey everyone it’s me back again with uh another iPhone based video which at this point may just become a regular feature of the channel especially for the time being because it appears we’re basically on a minute-to-minute news cycle with political and economic news which, given the usual production schedule of our Channel and the content we make is just really difficult to respond to without resorting to filming myself on my iPhone in my living room. So again apologies for the lower a visual quality but once again we need to have a conversation. If you missed it I made a video late last week talking about the current political chaos we find ourselves in with the beginning of Trump’s second term.
That video happened to be motivated particularly by the spending freeze which was being threatened. It appears at least for the time being it’s somewhat on the back burner or politically untenable right now. Who knows? This may make a surprise appearance slightly later on uh in this Administration but for the time being we’ve moved on to other fresh horrors, such as the trade wars we’re kicking off with some of our closest allies (apologies uh Canada). For example I know you guys are once again hitched to the bumper of the pickup truck that is America careening around the side of a mountain now driven by an absolute madman. If it’s any consolation (which I’m sure it isn’t) many of us are just as distressed uh as you guys are, and did not vote for, but whatever it doesn’t matter as Americans it’s our responsibility to do something. So in that video I talked about the situation we’re in, how we got here, the fact that this did not start and end with Trump, and what to do next.
I won’t bore you guys by repeating the video it’s linked in the description if you want to watch it but um it did get a pretty substantial response and a ton of comments and notably one of the themes in the comments. This is also something I’ve been getting on social media. People have been emailing some version of “why should I bother saving investing planning for retirement any of these financial things if the world is just burning?” I know that they’re referring to both, literally in terms of climate change (which is increasingly just like a feature of our lives and will only become more so uh as time passes) but I know they’re also talking about the political and economic upheaval that is almost guaranteed to occur over the next four years and beyond. The consequences of that will be I want to answer in two parts, essentially because one part is the “why participate in the system if it’s so bad”, which I think is a huge part of this question and the other part is “why should I participate in it what if the stock market goes to zero or we’re all living in some Mad Max scenario”. I think both of these are valid questions and deserve to be taken seriously.
Now I do want to be clear that this sort of question framing of “why should I bother doing anything financial if the world is just chaos and we going to be even more so” is a question that we have received pretty much since we started this channel, and that is just another reminder that all of this does not start and end with Trump and both the sort of existential dread and the ethical complications of participating in our financial system is not new. This was an issue under Biden and would have been an issue under Harris, so we need to just acknowledge that first and foremost although obviously right now it is ramped up to 11. No denying – with that being said I do want to acknowledge that as we addressed in the previous video a lot of what is happening under the Trump Administration is an out-and-out war on the poor and an attempt to increase wealth inequality and to further concentrate wealth and power at the very top.
I do think even if these questions have been a recurring theme in America especially since Reagan I definitely think they’ve gotten worse now and I understand why and I share those anxieties. I think about them all the time. I just watched a 90-minute conversation between Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein (https://youtu.be/5qgcdl7pFNE) to somewhat self-soothe so we know things are dire in this house. But this question of the world is burning so why should I care is one that I really do want to take seriously because I feel like it just really never gets taken seriously from either side especially in the financial media ecosystem. because on the financial media side and the financial world generally I’m not going to name names I think a lot of you probably know who I’m talking about.
But some of the biggest players many of the loudest voices in the financial space are somewhere between neoconservative and flat-out libertarian, so for them everything that’s happening, whether it’s the tariffs or the increased deregulation or cutting taxes for the rich and corporations (and either increasing or maintaining them for the lower and middle classes). All of those things fall somewhere on the spectrum between “it’s not happening,” “it’s not a problem,” and “it’s actually a good thing.”
That includes climate change too. I highly doubt many of these uh guys (and they’re all basically guys) are that concerned about climate change if they’re even convinced it’s a reality. But suffice to say any of the very real sort of future concerns or ethical considerations that come into play when it comes to existing in our financial system – they don’t give a shit -they just simply think it’s a good thing
So that’s the one side that you encounter when you ask this question. The other side is the left progressive ecosystem which, as someone who watches a lot of YouTube and primarily watches left progressive content, one of the frustrations I often find with that media ecosystem (aside from the fact that they can’t stop fighting with each other like a bunch of Real Housewives – they’re always going at each other’s throats), is the fact that they don’t treat the reality of existing within our current flawed broken financial system with a properlevel of pragmatism and practicality.
A lot of what progressives will point out, especially in the sort of political space, [is that] it’s extremely ethically compromised, In many ways it’s contributing to climate change. It’s basically impossible to invest without your money going to at least some things you almost certainly don’t agree with. That labor is being eroded to the point that retirement won’t even be possible for a huge portion of the population. That wealth inequality is reaching these unstable labels.
All of that is true. But if the answer to that is you shouldn’t participate in it, so you should not invest, so you should not plan for retirement, so you should not save money, so you should just “divest” in whatever vague way that means. The practical outcome of that is leaving people (individuals who are not very wealthy to begin with) in a much worse financial situation
And one thing I feel like we cannot say enough on this channel, as people who do advocate for financial solvency and literacy and stability: A) keeping yourself broke or financially unstable if you have the option to make yourself financially stable literally does a nothing to help you and B) does nothing to help any of the social or political causes you care about. Nine times out of ten, being in financial chaos leaves you with the ability to do literally nothing except survive day-to-day.
And I think we don’t understand that when we talk about something like retirement (for example), what it means to not be in financial chaos, for the average person, is hundreds of thousands if not well over a million dollars saved, because whether it is through the inability to work physically or just the desire to not work, even a decade or so of living without any other income that requires a lot of money. Social Security already doesn’t cover it.
That problem is going to get way worse by the time my generation is approaching retirement so if we do not take our financial situation seriously we are essentially guaranteeing ourselves that either now or at some point in our life we will have the ability to focus on nothing but survival (which is, by the way, a very, very intentional dynamic when we talk about the war on the poor).
It’s so important to remind ourselves that keeping people disenfranchised and disorganized is the exact strategy taken by the capital-wielding class to keep the labor force cheap: a group of people who have no time or ability to focus on anything but their own survival; who are having to work multiple jobs just to get by every day they don’t have time to organize. They don’t have time to advocate for themselves. They don’t have time to contribute to their own communities or to broader political causes. They also don’t have the leverage to look for other better compensated jobs. Keeping people poor and desperate only plays into the dynamic that we’re already seeing – just less and less leverage on the side of people without money and more and more leverage on the side of people with it.
Many people do not have the choice in their lives to ever escape that dynamic. Poverty is called a cycle for a reason. If you do have the opportunity to invest to save to make sure that you are financially stable now and in the future, to not do that helps no one – least of all yourself – but once we’ve agreed (and I don’t know that we’ll all agree) keeping yourself broke helps no one – then we can sort of dismiss this very sort of broad stroke opinion of “the system is terrible so you shouldn’t participate in it.”
Now I very cynically believe that a lot of the loudest voices on “left” who advocate for that are people who, whether through generational wealth, or otherwise simply don’t have to worry about it in the same way that other people do. For example, if you have a safety net in your family where you will always have somewhere to live, you will always have your needs met, you will always be able to survive no matter what happens, you’re already in a vastly different position than many other people who have much much less of an ability to just unplug themselves from the system.
But I also think that thinking this way – the system is bad so you shouldn’t participate in it even if it means your own suffering – I think that leads us to the completely philosophically dead end of “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” which we’ll get into in a second because essentially that just justifies any and all choices under the guise of the fact that they’re all bad.
So why not just make the ones you want? I know that not everyone uses it this way but I see – every day being a financial creator – I see every day some of the most extreme acts of reckless consumerism being committed under the banner of “well they’re all bad so what does it matter anyway.”
I believe the only rational way forward is that, yes the system is bad; that doesn’t mean that abstaining from it entirely is either possible or advisable for 99% of people. And it’s also worth noting that part of shoring yourself up financially and creating basic financial stability is so you are able to make those better choices.
For example when it comes to something like consumerism and the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” you are certainly able to make much more informed and ethical consumer decisions to buy from companies with better labor practices, with better production standards, if you have more money because nine times out of ten those products are much more expensive.
So once we acknowledge that yes the system is imperfect that doesn’t mean you need to screw yourself over. I think we need to move to the second part of this (and I think the animating belief behind a lot of these questions) which is “what should we do – why should we invest?” If, for example, the stock market is just going to go to zero one day or you know the banks will collapse, or any of these other extreme scenarios, let’s start by talking about investing, because that’s something we talk about all the time here at TFD and it is very much linked up to your retirement. It’s something that we advocate for.
You’ll see us all the time advertising an app called “Betterment.” They’re great – use whatever one you want. My point being: get into investing. We say that because for the vast majority of people it is impossible to build up enough wealth to take yourself through retirement comfortably without participating in the stock market. That’s what a 401k is, that’s what an index fund is, all of these investment vehicles by necessity are tying you up with the stock market.
I want to say on the ethical front, yes it is basically impossible to have a properly diversified portfolio and not be investing to some extent in some things that you don’t agree with. I will link you (https://amandaholden.podia.com/ethical-investing) in the description to my friend Amanda Holden “Dumpster Doggy.” She’s an investing expert and she does have great explainers on how to reduce the negative impacts of your investing portfolio while still investing. She’s one of the most politically engaged women I know – very much down for the cause. She still not only invests but it educates other women on how to do it, so let’s start there.
But when we talk about what happens if the stock market goes to zero, we have over 150 years of stock market data. We have gone through the Great Depression, two World Wars, the 70s economic crisis, the Cold War, the 2008 crash, countless other social / political / economic upheavals. We still have not only all of the data that we can look back at at the stock market but a very well-established record of the fact that over a long enough period of time it is the single best vehicle for creation for essentially all classes of Americans, and especially if you’re looking to outpace inflation.
One of the only ways that we can guarantee something like a dignified retirement, like it or not, we are in a situation where Social Security is insufficient and most people do not have pensions in order to get to those numbers we talked about earlier and to not be essentially having to drive for Uber Eats until you are literally dead (which is the case for many senior Americans right now).
You are going to have to participate in this system and if if you don’t it is going to be drastically more difficult for you to save enough money. But if we take these sort of doomsday scenarios of what happens if the stock market goes to zero, what happens if all my wealth evaporates, I want to take that seriously and say it is not impossible. I mean literally anything’s possible – a meteor could strike the Earth and kill us all tomorrow! Like anything’s possible – right?
I won’t say it isn’t much crazier things have happened throughout all of uh the Earth’s history, I will say it’s extremely unlikely though, and what I will say more importantly is that long-term financial planning and wealth building are about playing the odds. They’re about playing the averages, about making decisions based on what is likely to happen. What is the most established safe bet based on historical data?
Again looking back on that 150 plus years of historical data we have we can see that the market returns of long-term investing in the stock market are the most sure, safe, secure bet to accumulating the kind of wealth that you will need in order to do things like retire and again especially beat inflation. It’s also worth noting that not just an enormous amount of global capital, but the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are inextricably tied up with the continued success of that market and the reliability of it.
So if we are in a scenario where that all goes to zero, I think we need to understand just how different the world that we will be living in will be. It’s also very fair to say that if we are in that scenario where the stock market all completely crashes and goes to zero and all of that wealth is erased, we will have many other problems – economic and otherwise – that will likely greatly eclipse the fact that our portfolio is at zero.
At some level we need to be able to separate out our rational calm financial planning from the very real and justified financial, ethical, even philosophical anxiety that we might feel at any given time. This can be very very difficult for a lot of us to do. For the record, I work with a financial adviser. You’ll also probably see us on the channel a lot promoting a financial service adviser. We love them – you don’t like them work with someone else – but in general getting someone who can help you through these times if you can afford it is also very helpful, but those of us who aren’t navigating this with someone (who have to wake up every day and read the terrifying scary overwhelming difficult to understand news and then try to make good financial decisions), we have to be able to separate those two things out.
My friend Ain Lowry, AKA Broke Millennial, is a great financial creator. We’re actually doing an advice series later this month, but she actually talked this in her investing book. One of the experts that she interviewed literally did not open her portfolio statements for the entire year plus after the 2008 crash, because she didn’t want to see those scary numbers and make a rash decision. As we’ve talked about many times on this channel, one rash decision of pulling a bunch of money out or reallocating everything in a panic can ruin decades of good consistent investing.
But even if it’s just something as simple as when you’re buying a home, or how much you’re keeping in an emergency fund, or what your career plans are – all of these things – they need to be made as measured, thoughtful, calm decisions that are based on pragmatism and based on what is most likely to happen. This is not to say that the most catastrophic things will not come to pass- they very well might. We don’t know, but we have to play the odds. We have to base our decisions on what is most likely to happen, and my best advice for people who have the ability to achieve financial stability, but are also concerned about the ethical implications of living and working within our economic system – get your oxygen mask on.
Then take all of that enormous economic privilege of not having to worry about your survival and dedicate it to any number of causes – political, social, or otherwise – that you deem worthy. That you think are important. That could be mutual aid. That could be running for office.
That could be basically anything you want it to be, but you will have the ability to do it because you won’t be worried about making rent at the end of every month. You won’t be worried about never being able to retire. You won’t be worried about potentially being homeless if anything goes wrong because you have an emergency fund. Just like with the “no ethical consumption” stuff, where you can basically justify anything because it’s all problematic or compromised, the truth can always be somewhere in the middle. You can choose not to shop at fast fashion and still for example have an iPhone and yes both of those are problematic products in their own ways.
But you can still make better choices within a flawed system because these extremely black and white proclamations of “it’s all bad so divest” or “the sky is falling so why bother” or “no ethical consumption under capitalism” – all they do is lead us to a place where nothing matters; it leads us to a place of total nihilism and total hopelessness.
The truth is that change is possible but we can only make that change when we’re not fighting on a day-to-day basis to survive. So if you have the ability to ensure your survival, ensure it is it going to be ethically imperfect, yes, but so is living in America. We don’t have the luxury of uncompromised choices. So yes – be worried. Yes – be plugged in. Yes – be thoughtful. But don’t get so woke that you torpedo your own financial stability to prove something because all it will hurt is you. That’s all! I’ll see you guys here soon. Bye!
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