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I saw an unbelievable statistic recently about kids. I’m including it in the written version of this newsletter.

It’s a survey question that goes back 50 years, asking 12th graders if they think it is important in life to have “lots of money.”

The graph shows that a majority of boys has always answered yes, ranging from 55% in the 1970s to 74% now. That number was 36% for girls in the 1970s, and now it is 75%. So a large uptick across gender of high school seniors saying that it is very important to have lots of money.

Before I get to why I am writing about this on a sober blog, let me say a few general things.

One is that I always take these surveys with a grain of salt. It’s a regular occurrence these days for people to overreact to generational data based on the numbers themselves, without any context for why different generations might be more or less comfortable answering the way that they did. By that, I mean, it’s possible that in 1970s, before the “Greed is good” 1980s, the same number of high school seniors might have wanted to have lots of money but felt like they couldn’t say that out loud. I certainly think that’s a factor—the idea of being rich has never been more acceptable, so it wouldn’t surprise me if verbalizing that desire isn’t frowned upon like it might have been in 1975.

There is a sobriety element to that, which is that I bet surveys taken these days would find more people admitting to drug and alcohol addiction over the years. Is that because there are more alcoholics and addicts in the world now? Or that it is more socially acceptable to admit it? I honestly don’t know the answer but I do think social acceptance is a factor.

The second thing I always try to remember is that it is easy to find haunting statistics about today’s youth… but the opposite is true, too. There is data showing teen pregnancy, illiteracy rates and drug and alcohol use among young people are at all-time lows, too. So if they don’t drink, do drugs or get pregnant, but worship material things more, it’s really hard to decide what hot take I should land on. So I ultimately choose to believe that the next generation will probably be fine.

OK, now let me talk about the addiction angle of this. Which is: I think a lot of my alcoholism involved alcohol, but also lots of other things that make up the -ism part of that word. That’s a long way of saying that my addiction is a disease of more: more drugs, more alcohol, more food, more money, more Amazon purchases, more everything. If it feels good, do it—repeatedly.

I do a pretty good job when it comes to what I would define as materialism. I don’t particularly care if I have a lot of stuff, which you can see by my wardrobe. I’m not very good with money, and I tend to operate as though as long as I can pay my bills, that’s plenty.

But man, I do fantasize sometimes about being rich, and I have definitely coveted other stuff over the years. So that is definitely part of my addictive nature. Because of my 10th-grader-level expertise in financial planning, I do end up worrying about money quite a bit. I wouldn’t say it deeply affects my spiritual condition, but there are nights when I am using duct tape and bubble gum to cobble together a financial plan for the next few days or weeks. I definitely have some gray hairs from it, so I do think it’d be nice to just write checks and know there is plenty of money in the account to cover everything. Or to go to sleep knowing that my kids’ college funds are fully set up and ready to pay for everything. So I can’t really get too up-in-arms about young people answering that they would like to have lots of money. In fact, if I got asked that and answered honestly, I think the answer would be yes? I think if someone said no, I might wonder about their sanity!

Another thing that comes to mind is that I tend to define materialism a little more broadly as I get older. I used to only think of materialism as relating to having lots of stuff. But I also now include the idea of caring too much about the stuff you have, in addition to caring too much about having lots of stuff. I had this happen a few years ago where a flood ruined some of my giant baseball card collection that I had kept since I was a kid.

I hadn’t looked at the cards in years. The cards had very little value. But I wanted to keep them, and I was sad that a few thousand cards got ruined. I ended up calling my collection “my priceless, worthless baseball cards” because they meant so much to me and nothing to anybody else. I came to realize that my valuing of them was a little out of whack, but that I felt ok that stuff means something to me. I don’t want to go the other way and just decide all possessions are pointless and go join a commune that lives in the woods. I just want to try to have the right amount of appreciation for material things.

So the moral of this story is, keep your freaking hands off my baseball card collection, and maybe I wouldn’t mind having lots of money, either!

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Fed up with her husband’s coming home drunk every night, late one evening a wife drove her husband up the mountain to an overlook where they could see the local liquor factory in full swing below. Lights were flashing, machines were roaring, and trucks were pulling in and out.

“See?” the wife said. “They can make it faster than you can drink it.”

“Yes,” he replied. “But you have to admit, I’ve got ‘em working nights.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2002, Donny B. from Wurtsboro, New York)

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