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Counting Your Pennies in the Abattoir: The Pathetic Virtue of Personal Finance

Buck Valor
Written by
Buck ValorPersiflating Non-Journalist
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
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A hyper-realistic, cynical oil painting of a weary office worker sitting at a mahogany desk in the middle of a vast, burning wasteland. The worker is intensely focused on meticulously balancing a checkbook using a quill pen made from a vulture feather. In the background, a giant, cracked hourglass is filled with gold coins instead of sand, and the sky is a bruised purple and orange. The style is reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch Vanitas, emphasizing the futility of material wealth.

The chattering classes have stumbled upon a new bone to gnaw on: the defense of personal finance. It is an argument so profoundly ghoulish that it could only have been birthed in the sterile, air-conditioned corridors of a financial periodical. The premise is simple, yet breathtakingly cynical: yes, teaching people how to manage their money—or their lack thereof—exacerbates the yawning chasm of inequality, but it has ‘advantages.’ It is the sort of logic that would defend the distribution of umbrellas during a tsunami because, while it won't stop the drowning, it might keep your hair looking presentable for the autopsy.

Let us dissect this ‘defense’ with the clinical detachment it deserves. The argument suggests that by encouraging individuals to master the dark arts of compound interest and tax-advantaged savings accounts, we are somehow empowering the masses. It is a delightful fiction. We are essentially telling the average drone that if they just skip their morning caffeine fix and invest that four dollars into a volatile market controlled by high-frequency trading algorithms and sociopathic hedge fund managers, they too might one day own a slightly nicer brand of cardboard box. It is the democratization of anxiety. We have taken the systemic failure of the global economy and repackaged it as a personal failing. If you are poor, it isn't because the cost of living has outpaced wages since the Nixon administration; it’s because you haven’t properly diversified your portfolio of pocket lint.

Naturally, the Left and the Right have their respective roles in this pantomime. The Right views personal finance as a moral litmus test. To them, a balanced checkbook is a sign of a clean soul, and debt is a character flaw that justifies any level of suffering. They worship the ‘meritocracy’ of the spreadsheet, ignoring the fact that the spreadsheet was written in a language most people were never taught to speak. On the other side, the performative Left decries the inequality inherent in financial literacy while simultaneously checking their own investment apps between tweets about dismantling capitalism. They wring their hands over the ‘unfairness’ of it all, yet they offer no solution other than a vague hope that a benevolent bureaucracy will one day manage everyone's misery more equitably. Both sides are equally nauseating, locked in a struggle over how to best decorate the interior of a sinking ship.

One of the supposed ‘advantages’ of personal finance is the promotion of stability. What a charmingly quaint notion. Stability in a world where the climate is collapsing, the geopolitical order is a powder keg, and the labor market is being systematically dismantled by artificial intelligence that can do your job for the price of a few kilowatts. ‘Personal finance’ is the secular religion of the modern age, complete with its own priests (TikTok influencers in rented Ferraris) and its own promise of salvation (retirement at sixty-five, provided you don't die of a preventable illness first). It offers the illusion of control in a universe governed by chaos. By obsessing over ‘budgeting,’ the individual can pretend they are the master of their destiny, rather than a microscopic organism being buffeted by the whims of central banks and billionaire tantrums.

The defense of personal finance also conveniently ignores the fact that the system is predicated on the very inequality it claims to manage. For your high-yield savings account to yield anything at all, someone else, somewhere else, must be paying an exorbitant interest rate on a predatory loan. The ‘merits’ of personal finance are built upon a foundation of exploitation that we are all encouraged to ignore as long as our own numbers are moving in the right direction. It is a collective hallucination where we believe that if we all just save enough, we can all be wealthy, conveniently forgetting that wealth is a relative measure. If everyone is rich, no one is.

Ultimately, this defense is a confession of defeat. It is an admission that we have given up on the idea of a society that provides for the basic needs of its citizens, and have instead decided that everyone should be their own miniature Chief Financial Officer. We have replaced the social contract with a brokerage account. It is a lonely, exhausting way to live, spent constantly monitoring the fluctuations of a market that doesn't know you exist. But please, by all means, continue to ‘defend’ it. It gives the rest of us something to laugh at while we wait for the inevitable collapse of the entire house of cards. After all, knowing exactly how much you’re losing as the world burns is surely the greatest advantage of all.

This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: The Economist

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