YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU

Derek Hagen
2 minutes ago
4 min read

❝There's a time for work and a time for play. Great moral. But when does the ant ever get to play?❞ -Bill Perkins

We're good at saving. We're less good at knowing what we're saving for.

I'm in a warm ballroom with stale air, sitting next to a couple of hundred people waiting for the next presentation. I'm at a conference in New Orleans. The speaker talks about the discipline behind wealth creation and how much of the population fights against the habits that build it. Then he brings up the Aesop fable of the ant and the grasshopper. I know the fable, but I've never heard it used in a financial context before.

The short version: it's summertime, and a grasshopper is singing and dancing, enjoying the days. An ant is busy collecting food and supplies for winter. Neither can understand the other. The grasshopper can't understand why the ant is working so hard in such nice weather. The ant can't understand why the grasshopper isn't taking the future seriously. Winter comes. The grasshopper wasn't prepared and dies. The ant makes it through.

The moral is usually something about delayed gratification or preparing for the future. In his book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins asks a seemingly obvious question: when does the ant ever get to play?

Hand-drawn ant faces a grasshopper with "VS" between them; illustrates the ant-vs-grasshopper tension in financial planning

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THE VIRTUES OF THE ANT

Most financial education, when we get any, focuses on the virtues of the ant: delay gratification, save for a rainy day, prepare for the future. The time value of money shows up to remind us that a dollar saved today is worth more tomorrow.

Hand-drawn ant with speech labels: "I need to prepare," "I must save," and "Time for work"; illustrates the ant's delayed-gratification mindset

Many of us discipline ourselves accordingly, building up sizable savings over time. And then we use money as our main yardstick, waiting for it to make us happy.

Stick figure standing atop a large money pile with arms out; illustrates wealth accumulation without purpose

Because if you follow the virtues of the ant, your wealth will grow. That seems straightforwardly good. But it leaves a question sitting there: what is all this money for?

Hand-drawn line graph with Money on y-axis and Age on x-axis; upward curve labeled "What's the Point?" questions endless accumulation

Money is a tool. It can help us achieve something, and that something is different for everybody. Money is a means, never an end. If we focus too much on the virtues of the ant, we risk treating it as the destination - the thing we believe will bring fulfillment, joy, and happiness. The Grim Reaper doesn't care how much we've accumulated.

Grim Reaper faces a stick figure clinging to a money pile; speech bubble reads "You can't take it with you"

SURVIVING OVER THRIVING

Follow your family tree back far enough, and you'll find ancestors for whom survival was the only thing that mattered. The ones who didn't focus on survival didn't make it. We come from a long line of people who were hyper-focused on threats, and that got coded into our genes. It's called negativity bias, and it's why we spot threats more readily, remember negative experiences longer, and why they stick with us harder.

In survival conditions, missing an opportunity just means you wait for the next one. Missing a threat is a multiply-by-zero situation. So we evolved to catch every threat, even the ones that weren't really threats.

That wiring is why so many of us carry a fear of running out of money.

Perkins points out something worth sitting with: most people are more afraid of running out of money than they are of wasting the one life they have.

Chart from Today to Death showing money declining to zero before death, with "Oops!" block; illustrates running out of money too soon

Somewhere deep down, the overfocus on surviving makes sense. Nobody wants to be broke. But surviving and thriving are not the same thing.

Frowning stick figure holding two broken pink piggy banks; illustrates the fear of running out of money

Money is the number one source of stress in people's lives, above work, health, and kids. People with money disorders typically have faulty beliefs about money and cannot change their behavior even though they know they should.

HOARDING PREVENTS THRIVING

Delaying gratification can pay off. But you can delay it too long. If you do, you run out of time to enjoy what you were waiting for.

It's a mistake to have too much life left at the end of your money. But it's also a mistake to have too much money left at the end of your life - because it means you worked harder, longer, or more than you needed to, accumulating resources you never got to use.

There's an old saying that nobody lies on a deathbed wishing they'd spent more time with their money.

Chart from Today to Death showing money staying flat until death, with "Oops!" line; illustrates dying with too much unspent wealth

THE VIRTUES OF THE GRASSHOPPER

We spend so much time celebrating the ant that we miss what the grasshopper gets right. The grasshopper understands that this is the only life we get, and that it deserves to be enjoyed while we're in it. Without any grasshopper in us, we risk becoming Ebenezer Scrooge - wealthy, disciplined, and somewhere along the way, hollowed out.

Hand-drawn grasshopper with speech labels: "YOLO," "Time is short," and "Time for fun"; illustrates the grasshopper's live-for-today mindset

ANT OR GRASSHOPPER IS A FALSE DICHOTOMY

There's a meme that occasionally floats around: a confused person saying, "I'm stuck between YOLO and paying my bills." Ant or grasshopper. Pick one.

That's a false choice. You can delay gratification and still show up for your life. You can build for the future without starving the present. You can give future you a stable foundation without robbing current you of the experiences that make a life worth looking back on.

The ant and the grasshopper are both missing something. You don't have to be either one.

You get one life; live intentionally.

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