Saturday, January 19, 2013

Let’s see. What happened this week? So far, my banking adventures have had happy endings. On Tuesday or something like that, I checked my main bank in Canada online, and the two accounts that I had opened up through the call center in India were sitting there just as we talked about and were ready for action. To be honest, I was a bit relieved about that. After the phone call with the guy in India, I felt a bit uneasy. I started to wonder afterward whether I had dreamed the whole thing or the guy was legit. Of course, I didn’t really have those concerns. I knew I was really talking to someone from my bank. However, it all felt so otherworldly, I was still vaguely uneasy, and it felt good to see those accounts and to see my hard-earned money still there and nicely distributed among the accounts as we had discussed.

I was very happy to have done this very sensible thing. In particular, I was happy to have opened the special investment account. I locked away a good amount in that account and it is now safe from my spending urges and earning a solid interest rate. In fact, it had already earned interest in the day or two that it had taken to set it up and I already had more money in that account than I had deposited into it.

That’s a good thing, but my feelings about this account were double-edged. I’ve had this experience before, and I wonder if this is a common human experience. What happens is that I finally do a good thing – a sensible thing – and I feel good about that. However, once I do this sensible thing and see how good it is and how easy it was to do, I am suddenly overwhelmed with a rush of regret and unhappiness over why I didn’t do it earlier in my life. This rush of unhappiness and regret can be so powerful that the thought of it can even prevent me from doing things. I might know that Action A or Action B will make me happy and make my life better. However, if I do Action A or Action B now, then I will suddenly realize that it was possible all along and I’ll kick myself for not doing it sooner. So if I never do Action A or Action B, then I can avoid that rush of regret and pretend to myself that such a thing never would have been possible anyway and so I can avoid that intense feeling of regret and self-recrimination. I almost prefer to keep moving forward in a bad situation rather than fix it to avoid that feeling. It’s not logical, but that feeling is there. As I said, I wonder if other people experience that same thing.

I probably made that sound very complicated. It’s simple though. It can be summed up in the reaction, “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” I did a good thing, but then it brings up this reaction. So in this case, opening this investment account and putting money into it seems so logical and so good and there are so many benefits to it and I see that so clearly now. So I have this rush of regrets and I start to wish I had done it ten years ago, twenty years ago, even thirty or forty years ago. That may sound silly, but it isn’t at all. I’ve been making money in one fashion or another for my entire life. Everyone who grew up in North America has. I made money delivering pamphlets. Then I had a paper route. I cut grass. I had summer jobs. I had part-time jobs in high school. All that stuff. And from the very first moment that money was placed in my little hand, a good chunk of it should have gone into some kind of permanent savings account or investment account. It would not have been a sacrifice in any way. And the long-term benefits would have been enormous. Then we can fast-forward to when I started working full-time and occasionally had a chunk of money saved up. I can think of several occasions like that. At that time, a good 50% of that money should have gone into savings. But I just spent it all on travel and crazy projects. At the time, it didn’t seem like enough money to worry about. I thought of investments and that sort of thing as involving huge sums of money, not the little bits that I earned. I had no experience with money and I didn’t think of $1,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 or even $20,000 as worth worrying about.

Based on what I know at this point in my life, I can see that those are very significant sums of money and are valuable. And doing something sensible with it isn’t that complicated. At no point in my life was I ever capable of thinking about real investments like stocks. That was so far outside my experience, I couldn’t have done it without guidance. But even I was capable of opening some kind of high-interest investment account with a bank. And I should have.

The point of this story isn’t money, however. The point I started with is this odd part of my nature that brings such regret with doing a good thing. And that regret is so strong that it actually sometimes prevents me from doing what I KNOW is a good thing. I guess this flies in the face of the expression “better late than never.” For certain people, that may not be true at all – maybe for a lot of people. Sometimes it can be expressed as “better never than late.” I say that because doing something late brings with it that sense of regret and self-recrimination. Choosing the “never” option means you can avoid that.

This is connected with the idea of the possibility of happiness. In many instances, I have shied away from the possibility of happiness. And it’s related to this idea of regret. There might be the possibility of making a change in my life – in a pattern in my life – and there is a strong possibility that that change will bring a great deal of happiness. But I will resist making that change because the sudden possibility of happiness brings into focus the reality of all the previous unhappiness. And who wants to face that? To avoid that pain, it feels better to continue forward in an unhappy situation. Then at least you can pretend that the state you are in is inevitable. That’s just the way it is and there is no possibility of changing it anyway. If you make the change, do something different, take control, you might suddenly find yourself very happy and living a much better and more fulfilling life – but that comes with the very painful realization of how unfulfilling it was before, how unhappy you were before, and how much time you wasted. You think, “If I was always capable of being this happy, then I’ve wasted so many years!” To avoid that feeling and realization, you just continue forward in your current unhappy situation. It’s cowardly, I suppose. And, to be frank, isn’t accurate. I know this because I’ve gone through the process many times in my life. And when I do make a change and find myself much better off for it, I am always extremely glad I did it. The sudden realization of the lost opportunities of the past and the wasted time is not as painful as one thinks. I’m generally just enjoying the happiness of the present moment and glad that I made the change I did. I don’t know how many people are like me in this respect (and many other odd respects), but if it’s at all a common human experience, than I can say with confidence that humans are a funny bunch.

This banking experience illustrates another aspect of my personality. This one is probably not exactly universal. I think it’s somewhat restricted to the unlucky few like myself. How can I describe this particular trait? It’s a tendency in my life to be influenced in very large ways by complete chance encounters. I can use money and banking to illustrate this since I’ve started with that theme. I said earlier that I absolutely should have been smarter about money from a very young age. The crazy thing is that I could have done the right thing if by absolute chance I had been nudged in that direction. I want to believe that larger forces – significant forces – are at work in my life, that there is meaning in what happens. Then things make sense. But in my case, it’s rarely true. I have always been stupid about money. Yet, I could easily have been very smart about money if I had met someone who told me what I needed to know.

Let’s say, for example, that one day when I was thirteen years old, I was in my bank depositing some money that I made from my paper route. Maybe the bank teller could have tossed out a comment or a bit of advice and said that I should think about putting some of that money into an investment account of some kind or even a mutual fund or whatever. I might have followed up on that bit of advice, discovered the possibilities and lived a much different life because of it. All because of a chance encounter.

I’m not sure if that example makes clear what I’m talking about. The basic idea is that I often have no idea what is good for me or what I want to do or what I’m interested in. I simply have no idea. Call it a lack of imagination or who knows what. I simply don’t know until someone else tells me or I otherwise stumble into it.

A very good example comes from my first year as a student at the University of Guelph. By absolute chance, when I first got to that university, I was in this bar and I met a guy named Peter. We started chatting and he told me that he worked for an organization called OPIRG – the thing founded by Ralph Nader. He said that they were currently looking for students to be on the board of directors. He told me a bit about it, and with his encouragement, I applied and got onto the board.

There are two aspects to this story. One is that this chance encounter with a stranger completely transformed my experience at that university – made it richer and better and more interesting in a thousand different ways. My being on the board of directors of OPIRG shaped my entire experience at that university. It brought me into contact with lots of people all working in various organizations to do with student activism, environmentalism, international development, and similar things. This is all stuff I was interested in at the time. Yet, I probably would not have gotten involved in it on my own. I wouldn’t have known how. Simply running into Peter that night and his chance remark was a spark that completely changed my life at that time.

The second aspect is something I’ve already alluded to – this idea that deep down I actually wanted to be involved in all that stuff. It was something I was actually interested in. Another person would have been self-aware about that and gone out looking for the opportunities to get involved. Such a person would have gotten involved with these groups naturally. They would have sought them out. My nature is such that I needed that chance encounter to make it happen.

I can take this chance encounter thesis and see it in operation in my entire life. It’s not something I like very much, and I’ve always wanted to change it. Yet, I don’t seem able to. I don’t really understand it either. Most of the time, I see this chance encounter thesis in terms of lost opportunities, and it makes me sad.

High school is a very good example of that. When I went to university, I had this chance encounter, which led to me having a richer and better experience there. In high school, no such chance encounter took place, and I wasted those years entirely. Sure, I went to school and studied and got decent-enough grades. I hung out with friends during lunch and played cards. But that’s all. Looking back and knowing what I know now, I’m aware of how much more there could have been to my high school experience. I should have been involved in so many things. I should have been involved in everything – the drama club, the school newspaper, the camera club, anything. It was all there – a rich world of things to be involved in. But I did none of those things. Every day when school was over, I got on my bike and rode home. And that was it. If I could go back in time and change something, I would find my young self on the first day of school and just make me go to every single club in the school and sign up. Just take that one little step on the first day of school and see what happens. But I never had the chance encounter with anyone that led to my being aware of this world let alone getting involved with it.

Perhaps this is not as uncommon an experience as I imagine. Perhaps the lives of many people are dictated by chance encounters. Yet, I see a certain type of person that simply knows what is what and they go out in search of the things they like. Chance encounters would make no difference to that person because they’d eventually end up doing or finding what they want anyway.

Going to Korea to teach English was also the result of a chance encounter with someone who had done that. Going to India with Canada World Youth was a result of chancing upon a poster in a hallway. I could go on and on. It’s like I need that chance encounter to make things happen.

All of this rambling began with the news that my bank accounts had been set up at my bank in Canada. I don’t know yet about the other bank. This second one is the bank for which I had to find the printer paper and inkjet cartridge so that I could complete the online application and then mail in the forms. I have no idea what is going to happen with that. For all I know, it is an automatic process. What, after all, is the big deal about opening a bank account? There seem to be two main keys to the process: a credit check and a an actual check from another bank account that you already have. My credit check should not be a problem. My original bank had to do a credit check in order to open these new accounts and there was no problem there. And I sent this new bank a check for $25 drawn on my original bank account. Beyond that, I have a valid mailing address in Canada. So everything should be fine. The bank wants customers and they want my money, so they should make it easy to open the account. Yet, I’m so nervous around money, I keep thinking that it’s more serious than that and that there will be all kinds of problems. I sent them my forms by express mail, and they should have arrived by now. So things should be underway.

 

Tags: Canada, India, North America, OPIRG, Ralph Nader