Explaining the Disarray of Your Finances

It’s strange, you know. One would think that having a job would result in a surfeit of cash–or at least enough to live “comfortably,” as they say. And yet, bizarrely, working seems to entail having less money than ever, or, essentially, feeling the exact same way as you did when you were a bum. The electric bill here, the need for a YSL bag there–how is any office worker supposed to keep up, to build a momentum of burgeoningness in her bank account?

The answer is, she can’t. The mounting material desires that come with the illusion of “having” only lead to further poor financial planning–and, let’s be honest, office workers already aren’t the best of financial planners to begin with, their congenital petit bourgeois existence always prompting them to believe they’re of a higher class than they are. So when outsiders ask, “How are you so broke all the time (and still living as though you aren’t)?” The response doesn’t tend to mirror Hemingway’s “Gradually and then suddenly” explanation in The Sun Also Rises, but rather, Holly Golightly’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “I’m trying desperately to save money. I told you. I just can’t seem to.”