Count your losses in detailed accounting
Cut your losses if needed, but never forget to count them or Count your blessings, but count your losses as well
This is part of self-regulation improvement and self-awareness improvement that I have adopted for myself and might be useful to others.
I have a hard time dealing with money, particularly if it involves being paid for service by a private individual. The feeling of billing people, sending an invoice or putting a price on my work is a mixture of extreme discomfort, something-is-not-right-and-I-don’t-know-what, is this service really worth this (question), among others, which is the worst part because I don’t know what these other feelings are. All I know is that they hurt me.
I have a hypothesis about why I have this irrational reaction to money. The clue is that my siblings also have the same general attitude. Part of it is social and, in my understanding, benign. Except it doesn’t work in this particular society, at this particular time.
From time to time, I also have a hard time dealing with what appear to be random attacks: partnerships that end up with the partner not honoring their part of the deal, which is usually paying me; people who borrow money and never pay back; clients who don’t pay my service after it’s delivered; credit card frauds, some of which require a lot of effort to force the bank to honor the contract and others that I never recovered; people who take my property — material and intellectual — and never return or even make them “disappear”; people who I don’t even know who just attack me — physically or through a complex fraud — and the results are catastrophic and irreversible. Two of them came close to killing me.
But are they random?
While being the target of sophisticated hackers or fraudsters is really quasi-random, in the sense that it is not personal but I was part of a particularly interesting group of targets to them, entering partnerships where the partner doesn’t pay me and, on hindsight, never intended to, is a pattern: it’s not random. There’s either something about me that makes me “tasty” to a particular class of opportunists and fraudsters or I lack some important skill in reading people and situations. While the first case is not one’s fault, if I (or you) am one of these “tasty targets”, then we’d better acquire protective skills. The second case is a deficiency or inadequacy.
Logging losses is not that different from logging consumed food, body weight, exercise or medication. Logging consumed food can be a great tool for self-regulation (to gain or lose weight, to identify a digestive issue, to improve one’s quality of life through nutrition), displaying to your rational appraisal things that were otherwise hidden under unconscious or automatic behavior. Making a detailed inventory of financial losses, whether directly financial or as a cost of some intentional wrongdoing, displays in an objective manner what the losses are.
Remembering each case is painful. The first version of this spreadsheet can be hard and depressing. From the small to the huge. That mysterious hack in 2016 that completely disrupted my life? The larceny itself added to legal costs add up to US$26,700.00. The period I couldn’t work or the damage to my working conditions add up to US$120,000.00. That’s US$146,000.00. If I apply 90% malignancy there, which is what I think is fair, “they” owe me US$296,334.00. I want it back: it was mine, it was taken without my consent, I am owed this. The guy who asked me to buy him a super-duper Phenom and a Leviathan and never paid me back? That’s US$635.00 today but it was over US$1,000.00 and included the shipping cost to Latin America. I want this money back: he owes it to me. Budget car rental, which dodged my calls and managed to not return my property: US$4,000.00 that turn into US$7,280.00 with interest and malignancy. The two guys, ten years apart, who took “unauthorized possession” of my gym equipment owe US$50,000.00 and US$150,000.00 respectively. I applied a 90% malignancy rate to both. Both are evil, both represent a danger to society (far-right extremists) and both have a debt with me to the day they die.
People like us need to learn to be entitled to compensation for work. Nothing beats confronting the opposite: being taken advantage of. It makes it easy to feel entitled to money. After all, it was your money and was taken without your consent.
The next step is adjusting the perception that our time, our work and all we do can be matched to a value. We may give it away if that is our wish. Otherwise, we must be compensated according to the value of that item.
