There Ain't No Rest For the Wicked

"There ain't no rest for the wicked.

Money don't grow on trees.

I got bills to pay.
I got mouths to feed.

Ain't nothing in this world for free.

No, I can't slow down.

I can't hold back,

Though you know, I wish I could.

No there ain't no rest for the wicked

Until we close our eyes for good."

-Cage the Elephant

I am consistently amazed at the existence of certain technology. Like Pandora: it is free radio, all the time, and all I have to do is turn down the volume every so often to avoid listening to an advertisement. Then, I get more good music coming through my computer or my phone that is magically personalized to my taste, and all for free. We live in an amazing time.

This song from Cage the Elephant came on my Pandora station the other day: "There Ain't No Rest for the Wicked." And while I like the song, I hadn't really listened to the lyrics before. It tells a story of a narrator interacting with various wicked people (a prostitute, an armed robber, a crooked pastor): each of them living wicked lives, hurting themselves and others, because, like the song says, money don't grow on trees. They got bills to pay, they got mouths to feed...ain't nothing in this world for free. They always need money, and that is never going to change, so the prostitute, the robber, and the crooked pastor do what they have to do.

It got me thinking that this is basically how life was when I lived paycheck to paycheck. There was no rest, and there never would be, because the bills would never stop coming. Like Dave Ramsey says: all the money came in, and then all the money went out. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I lived like this for the majority of my working life. I had been working 40 hour weeks in white collar jobs since I was nineteen, through my undergraduate degree and my teaching credential, and still on through to today. Some jobs paid a lot, some didn't - but that didn't really matter, the way I was spending. Whatever I took home was quickly spent, and then some. Debts accumulated, but that was no big deal: those credit cards were just different bills to pay. Because my natural state was to send off all my money, did it really matter who I was sending it to?

Since we know that acquiring material goods doesn't provide lasting happiness, I think on some level I was fine with giving a credit card company a portion of my check every month. Who cared that I was sending $100 to Chase instead of spending that $100 on, I don't know, some booze or new clothes? Neither option made much of a difference in my overall satisfaction with life, so why not have a portion of my pay go towards creditors? At least that kept me from buying one more piece of junk to throw into my closet and, eventually, the trash. If my steady state was to simply give away all my money, it didn't matter who got it. And thus I had no motivation to get out of debt. It didn't help that, literally, everyone I knew was doing the same thing. We all grinded along, working just to pay our bills, and hopefully get back to zero at the end of the month. No rest for the wicked.

My future wife finally called me out on this, and pretty early in our relationship, too. We had just started dating, back in 2007, and I was blowing a lot of money on dates trying to impress her. We'd go to restaurants most nights during the week, and I'd always pay, waving off her protests to show it was no big deal. When we'd go to stores, I'd try to buy her stuff, even her groceries, just to show that I was a man of means and generous, too. Quite a catch, right? She finally told me one day that none of this was impressing her. It just showed her that I was terrible with my money, and that was not as attractive as I thought it was. (Looking back, I should have known right then that she was a keeper: a gorgeous woman who proactively stopped me from spending money on her. I am a lucky guy.)

At that point, I had no savings, other than the mandatory retirement account that my employer made me contribute to, as they had a defined contribution plan. Thank goodness they at least made me contribute a few percent of my income. Instead of savings, I had thousands in credit card and student loan debt that would take years to work through. But had my wife not pointed out an alternative to spending everything I earned (she called it "saving") I would have been on that treadmill for many more years. Decades, probably. Instead, she got our finances on track. We slowly started using my paycheck to pay off my debts, and then to save for retirement, and a down-payment on our first home, and the rest is history.

I don't mean to say that people living paycheck to paycheck are "wicked", of course. If anything, I mean the opposite. Still, I think Cage the Elephant should have used the other popular version of the idiom: there ain't no rest for the weary. Because that is state of people working their whole lives just to pay the bills and to feed their loved ones. They are tired and weary and, sadly, there is never going to be rest, until they find a way to make a change. And that change isn't some big raise, or an unexpected windfall, because those things never did me any good when I was living paycheck to paycheck. The change is keeping a little of your paycheck for you, the future you, and not sending every dollar off to stores and bills. But what am I telling you for? You guys know this already. Do me a solid and forward this to some weary friend of yours.

*Photo of Cage the Elephant is from Candace Longoria at Flickr Creative Commons.