The number that doesn’t match your receipt

One · What happened

A calm headline and a violent one, out of the same report

The Labor Department released July’s consumer price figures on 12 August. Prices overall were up 3.4% over 12 months, which is unwelcome but is also the kind of number that gets described as moderating. The energy index was up 14.7% and gasoline by itself was up 24.6%. Food was up 3.0%, shelter 3.2%, and electricity 4.2%.

The pump numbers come from actual pumps. The Energy Information Administration prices regular gasoline every week, and in the week before Labor Day the national average was $4.07 a gallon. The same week last year it was $3.15, and 5 years ago that week it was $3.14. The national average first crossed $4 back in early April, and AAA noted at the time that it was the first time it had done that since August 2022. It really hasn’t come back down since.

Two · What it is doing

Being told you are wrong about your own life

An average is a weighted mixture. Gasoline is a small slice of the basket the government prices and shelter is an enormous one, so when the small slice moves violently and the large one barely moves, the headline stays calm. That’s just how the arithmetic works, and there’s nothing sinister in it.

You don’t buy the basket, though. You buy your own particular set of things, and if your life runs on a 40-mile commute and a house that leaks heat, you’re paying the 24.6 and hearing about the 3.4. The official number describes a whole country, and it has no idea your household exists.

Then there’s how visible it is. The price of gasoline is the only number in American life that gets posted in 4-foot numerals on the way to work, and you read it going out and you read it coming back, buying or not. Grocery inflation hides inside 400 small decisions, and rent shows up once a month in an envelope, but you see the pump price twice a day without ever asking to. So a category that is a few percent of your spending can take up a wildly disproportionate share of your mood.

What you end up with is a running discrepancy between what you’re told about the world and what you can see with your own eyes, and it gets refreshed several times a week on the side of the road.

People do one of 2 things with that, and both are worse than the discrepancy itself.

Some turn it on themselves. If things are basically fine and I am struggling, the problem must be me. It shows up as shame about ordinary arithmetic, in a person who is doing everything right and has been priced out of a life he was told was normal, and he concludes privately that he’s just bad with money. A man in that state leaves the statement unopened in a drawer, and he never calls around for a better insurance rate, because calling would mean looking.

The louder version blames everybody else. They keep telling me it’s fine, and it isn’t, so somebody is managing me. A statistic turns into a settled suspicion of the institutions, and before long of whoever is sitting across the table at Thanksgiving. I have watched a man arrive at real contempt for people he loves by a chain of reasoning that started at a gas pump.

Whose fault the price is, you can read about anywhere else, at length and at volume, and that argument will still be going long after your tank is empty again. The question I’m asking is a smaller one. What is the number doing to you between fill-ups?

Three · Where the ground is

You are subtracting correctly

If your income didn’t move and the cost of driving to work went up 29%, you are subtracting correctly. A budget that no longer closes is information about prices, and reading it as a verdict on your character is what keeps people from making the 2 or 3 boring phone calls that would actually help them.

Scripture is unembarrassed about this. It’s full of people who are poor without having done anything wrong, and plenty of rich ones who didn’t earn it either, and it never once suggests that the size of your margin is a scoreboard of God’s regard for you. The line in 1 Timothy 6 about the love of money being a root of all kinds of evil was written to people who had some money to love.

Paul says contentment is something he had to learn

The most quoted verse on this subject is almost always cut off one sentence early. In Philippians 4 Paul writes from prison that he has learned, in whatever state he is in, to be content, and then he makes a point of saying he learned both, how to be abased and how to abound. Each one took learning, and most of us only notice the first.

He says learned, and I think he means it. Contentment in that sentence is something you acquire under the exact conditions that make it hard, kind of the way you learn a language by being somewhere it’s spoken all day. So if it’s going to get learned, it gets learned in a year like this one and not in a cheap one.

The prayer nobody prays

There’s a request in Proverbs 30 that I would guess almost nobody reading this has ever prayed and meant, and I include myself in that. Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me. Agur gives his reasons. If I have too much, I will be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord. If I have too little, I will steal and profane the name of my God.

He treats having too much and having too little as 2 spiritual dangers of about the same seriousness, and he doubts he would survive either one. In my opinion that’s a more honest picture of money than the 2 pictures most of us pick from, where having more would fix us or having less would purify us. Both of those are false, and the second one gets a pass because it sounds holier than the first.

The other man’s tank

The sharpest thing written about this feeling is about 3,000 years old, and it’s Psalm 73, where Asaph looks at people who are doing fine and it very nearly takes him apart. My feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. What he’s describing is envy, and he admits it had brought him within inches of walking away from God entirely, over a comparison.

Nothing in his circumstances changes in the entire psalm. What breaks the envy is that he goes into the sanctuary and his sense of scale comes back, and he starts measuring his life against how things actually end for people, and against God, and the man in front of him gets a lot smaller. Keeping score against your neighbors, or against a version of the country you think other people are living in, is a spiritually dangerous hobby, and the news makes it feel like you’re just staying alert.

The daily-bread request in the Lord’s Prayer works the same way, and it’s almost insultingly small. Today’s bread, today, with no forecast attached and nothing at all said about the cost of your commute in November. In Exodus 16 the manna couldn’t be stockpiled at all. Whatever somebody gathered for tomorrow had worms in it by morning. Provision at that scale is maddening if what you wanted was security, and I wanted the security. It turned out to be enough anyway.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Money fear responds to specific action better than most fears do, because most of what makes it unbearable is the vagueness. A known number is lighter to carry than an unknown one, even when the known number turns out to be worse.

1. 01

   Open the one you’ve been avoiding.

   The envelope, or the account balance you haven’t looked at since spring. Today. Whatever it says, it has been saying it for weeks, and it has cost you more sitting there than it will cost you to read it.

2. 02

   Work out your own inflation rate.

   Take 3 months of statements and sort them into 6 lines, fuel, power, groceries, insurance, rent or mortgage, and everything else. Compare each line to a year ago. It takes about an hour, and you end up with a number that is about you, and no headline is ever going to give you that.

3. 03

   Make the call before you need to.

   Ask your utility about budget billing or level pay, and ask what hardship programs they have. Do it while you’re current, because they are far more flexible with a customer who is ahead of the problem than with one who is behind on it, and the whole call takes about 15 minutes.

4. 04

   Change one recurring number.

   Willpower fails when you have to use it every day. Re-quote the insurance, or fix the thermostat schedule, one decision you make one time, and it keeps paying while you’re asleep.

5. 05

   Decline the argument once this week.

   Somebody is going to bring up the price of gas and steer straight into whose fault it is. Say the true and boring thing, it’s hitting us too, and let it end there. You will feel the pull to win it, and it’s worth asking yourself what you’re actually protecting when you feel that pull, and then let it go.