As human animals, yes, we do. If babies and toddlers are offered a variety of (natural) foods to eat throughout a week they will eat a near perfect variety of nutrients and kcal required for growth and brain development. Yes, they will eat the same thing in spurts, but it balances out over longer periods and is thought to provide extra nutrients of things the body is especially needing for what’s happening developmentally.
It’s the fact in our culture we offer food that isn’t actually food that is the problem. Add in a dose of messaging that food is a moral issue and yeah by 2 or 3 a lot of kids already have fucked up ideas about food.
But pathophysiologically yes, as soon as kids grab food and shove it in their mouths the actual biological intuition is unsullied and correct for their bodies’ needs.
Oh, I’ve known children that are nursing only (so presumably not getting any food that isn’t food) and still are very food avoidant/refuse to nurse. But interesting. I should learn more about IE I guess, my experience has shown me a lot of issues with getting kids < 3 to get enough nutrition.
Nursing issues can be food related (particular foods the source is eating) but can be a ton of other things too. Nursing before babies can grab and eat solid food isn’t really a choice they are making cognitively though.
I grew up in a family that probably overemphasized saving. When I got my first real job as a teenager, I spent almost everything I earned in a kind of reactive teenage rebellious phase that was kind of like binging. Luckily my mom saved my SS benefits for me and that was my college nest egg. But I still did quite a bit of spending on frivolous stuff (music, clothes) when I was in college. I did work 20-30 hours/week throughout college, but I was living beyond my earnings and was down to my last $1000 or so in my checking account my last quarter in college. When I used my credit card to cover a bunch of stuff for my best friend’s wedding in Colorado. Came back and got my tuition bill AND the credit card bill and did not have enough money to pay them both. I cried. My sister (we lived together) bailed me out – gave me enough cash to cover what I owed as an early graduation gift. She knew I had a summer job (working for her boss) and a graduate fellowship waiting for me in the fall.
I still lived pretty close to the edge while I was in grad school (I found some of my checkbooks and was STUNNED at how close my balance got to $0), but I managed to moderate my spending enough that I never had credit card debt again. And once I read Your Money or Your Life I had the whole “is it worth my life energy” calcuation to apply, so I think that is what helped me develop a pretty strong sense of healthy intuitive spending for me.
There is no doubt in my mind that the idea of intuitive spending is 100% priveliged. Only people with more than their needs met can even entertain this as an idea. That being said, it’s a useful idea for people like me in that priveliged position.
It’s like the buy it for life principle. Not useful for people who don’t have anything to spare.
This was therapeutic to explain but kind of long and maybe depressive and self pitying a little bit:
Summary
My family always expressed anxiety around money. “Right now do we have enough for X that just happened?” “Will we [vaguely… very far in the future] have enough at this point? Ever?” My parents had a very stable income but major problems, no education or understanding, and lots of consumer debt. Like, I knew about the credit card debt even when I was 5 years old somehow. It was talked about a lot but only in negative terms, ever, even though we were so far from financially struggling and any real problems were behavior factors that my parents chose, not social factors. Although, both of my parents grew up with money situations much less stable than the one they raised us in. To this day I still have no idea what my parents’ financial reality was/is. It’s not good… but it’s not catastrophic. I have major fears it could turn that way as they get older, though.
I also, for 100% of my life, heard and internalized the belief that money is not worth saving because there will never be enough anyway. My parents have never saved anything. Nothing for themselves, nothing for us. My dad has a pension he is on now and they still have financial problems.
When I got my various first minimum wage jobs in highschool and college, I didn’t really save anything I recognized that having my bank balance go to near zero felt really shitty. I would sometimes find like up to $500 on hand at once just by circumstance. Over the summer I was 19 I did manage to accumulate $1,500 in the bank. I wrote a $1,500 check for my next semester’s tuition (only time I ever did something like this). Looking back I’m not sure that was a good idea at all (well, actually it definitely wasn’t.) But I recognized that I needed to start getting something tangible back from all this work I was doing while also being in school. And I felt the impulse that I needed to and could be smarter with money. Realizing that my natural instincts with money were 100% fatalistic and masochistic and never felt good and made me feel not as smart as other people, when I started noticing that actually most people don’t have the money situation my parents do. I did use a lot of my in school earnings to pay for important stuff because sometimes my parents would offer to help, sometimes they wouldn’t. But also, I just spent so much on mindless consumerism and stupid shit because really no matter what I did, nothing would ever make a dent in private college tuition that was 100% financed through loans.
I think that we were really lucky to start out when credit cards were hard to get, and we didn’t have any. What was in the bank was all there was, and we had to adjust every decision around that. We literally couldn’t overspend.
There is a part of me that’s like “yeah I spend intuitively, I didn’t feel too committed to a hard budget even in grad school” and then I’m like “but do I, really?”
I definitely try to minimize large recurring expenses, without sacrificing key functions/features. Rent being an obvious example. Long story short, we got a 2br that allowed cars cats, but 20-40% more could get us into a nicer unit. However, this would sacrifice our ability to comfortably manage on one income which provides enjoyable security. Plus, this way we can save for a house. We made similar decisions regarding transportation.
Besides that…I set what seem like reasonable targets for larger or more thought out expenditures…xmas gifts, electronics, vacations…But for groceries, incidentals, subscriptions…I’ve gotten to the point where I can buy pretty much what I need or even want without worry.
It’s the “need or want” where I think things geta little hairy. I’m definitely denying myself certain things, but it’s gone from “I can’t afford it” to not wanting to contribute to consumerism, or not finding the item/cost/impact “worth it,” or worrying if it is… Clothes might be the best example here. I recently bought 4 pairs of sweatpants/loungepants. I previously resisted buying sweatpants because I had sweats and pjs, even though those pairs weren’t comfortable or warm or right for WFH.
I’ll also add that COVID has changed my thinking about spending in other ways, too. It’s made clear that one person’s luxury (eg take out/delivery) is another person’s paycheck… While I don’t think I’m engaging in any new luxuries, I do try to feel better about supporting the local economy. And I’ve started to loosen up on/in charity giving since I finished repaying a family debt, though still on that journey.
Oh, and I totally admit I’m planning on easy mode add am in a privileged position. 100%.
Feeling this. I am having a hard time sitting like a dragon on top of my hoard when so many people are in fire straits. Almost all of my charitable giving this year has been in the direct aid category versus my typical non profit orgs. I’ve given up on my restaurant budget because there are too many places I don’t want to see close down.
I’m wondering if I can join, coming from the different direction. I need to stop spending money.
Spending money has very much become an anxiety response for me. I wish I were smarter/more accomplished = buy a ton of books. I wish I felt more self-confident = buy a ton of clothes. Etc etc. I would like to decouple these emotions with spending and do more work on the root causes of these emotions.
I think that in most circumstances, I do all right with a low-budget intuitive spending approach. I also see most low income people without addiction doing similarly well. When housing is unaffordable is when the giant hurdles come up.
I see a lot more disordered spending higher up, and I’m in a higher income situation right now and family spending is fucked. I want to move to where a healthy spend is natural again
I have definitely been there. For me, in addition to other uncomfortable feelings (anxiety/stress) this is usually associated with being short on time/energy. A workout is as good a confidence boost as a new top, and actually cleaning/decluttering my apartment would help way more than buying a whatever for it. Buuut those actions sound suspiciously like “work”… Admitting this has definitely led to a productive self-conversation of “want!” “But will it solve The Problem?” “No…” “So what will?” “Removing a dozen holey tshirts from my closet and doing laundry…” “ok lets do that then.”
I highly highly recommend this book for anyone trying to untangle their relationship with money - overspending, underspending, wondering why they have such physical responses to money.
I have had some really good (and sometimes really tough) ongoing conversations with myself about spending in this vein.
cut just because it's long and kinda disorganized
The first is spending on books. I am a smart cookie. Growing up, and especially when I was a PhD student who wanted to be a professor, being smart and educated and, well, bookish was just… a really huge part of my identity. (I actually considered library school instead of my grad field.) When I graduated and went into industry, I suddenly (a) was making a living wage and (b) found myself with a shifting identity that was hard for me to manage. I absolutely reacted by spending a shitton of money on books – they were my gazingus pin.
At some point I realized that this spending was reflecting something that was off, because I wasn’t reading every book as it came in; the books were accumulating, and I was clearly not buying them to read them right away. In retrospect, I was trying, in some way, to comfort myself. It was a way of reassuring myself that I was still smart and educated and worthy, even though I wasn’t in academia anymore.
Of course, buying books didn’t actually really reassure me. It was a very temporary fix at best. What really ended up helping was seeing this pattern in myself, going ohhhhhh, and then doing two things: (a) doing the work on myself to actually reassure myself that I was still worthy and (b) doing a gazingus pin challenge over on MMM as a complementary way of uncoupling “books = worth.” I still love books, and I love being surrounded by books, but it feels so, so much healthier now.
The other one is restaurants, which is something that’s still super on-going for me (hello, my journal). I have long had some negative feelings around my restaurant spending. I’m untangling everything still, and it’s still messy, but I’m progressing.
The biggest thing I’ve realized in the past year and a half, and which the pandemic has made very stark, is that for me restaurants are tied up with pampering because of feeling unsupported or overwhelmed in some way. They feel like taking a chore off my plate (harhar). However, they didn’t actually make anything feel better or solve the problem at hand. If anything, I started to associate bad feelings with meals out, because I had this “bad feeling > restaurant > bad feelings still exist” cycle going.
Where I’m at right now: I’m in the process of generally moving to a less restrictive and judging approach to food, so that’s complicating things because my relationship with food is generally changing, and in ways that are really really good for me wanting to cook. But one thing I’ve learned is that I wasn’t giving myself enough time pre-pandemic – I was doing a lot and overscheduling myself, especially socially, and it was taking a toll on me. The pandemic unsurprisingly significantly reduced my social life, and frankly, that’s been fucking great and I needed it. Way less overwhelm on that front, and I have a corresponding reduced desire for restaurant food in addition to the changes that more clearly stem from changing my relationship to food more broadly.
tl;dr I feel this to the bottom of my soul. There are areas where I’ve felt like I haven’t been in control of spending, and I’m trying to really work on understanding why I spend in those areas. I wouldn’t call it “intuitive”, really, but it’s about understanding why I spend the way I do and what problems I’m trying to solve with that spending.
THANK YOU!!! This is just the kind of thing/sentiment I was trying to get at when starting this thread.
I had the whole book thing as a grad student, too. Moving my whole academic collection across the country, then moving it again when we bought a place, and then deciding to sell most of it off when we moved to China helped a bit. But then we bought an apartment in Beijing that had nice big bookshelves in the hallway! So I filled them up again – mostly with second hand, cheaper stuff, but still. I still have more books than I need/read. A big chunk of them are food/diet culture related so those can go soon (bye bye Michael Pollen and Marion Nestle). Can’t decide if it is ethical to give them away, though…
This is why the OMD “spend your values” message works SO well for me (as does the pocket of the MMM forums where that’s more prevalent). It turns out that every time I decide to work on some financial thing or another I actually end up doing 6 months to a year of psychological work that ends up being way more important than whatever financial thing was going on.
One of my current projects is reading down my library. It’s pretty fun, actually.
