I recently had this strange thought: can you be addicted to money? I wrote about addiction before and what a fine line there is between having a real problem and just liking something very much. But what I have only hinted at is that there are addictions that are truly problematic. If your behavior seriously harms yourself or other people, you have a problem and need to do something about it. Mental health professionals will likely agree with that. But it would defeat the point of this blog if I didn't ask any deeper questions. So, what do we mean when we say "harm"?
There's some cases where it's obvious that you're harming people, like when you really enjoy setting things on fire. Physical or emotional distress, destruction of property or even death are among the most severe signs that you're harming people. But there are also more subtle things to harm, like relationships, reputation, credit scores or, and you might see where this is going, monetary values. What if one of the factors we are using to assess if your addiction is harming you is actually the thing you are addicted to? Can an addiction be harmful, if it is good for your finances?
Your natural answer to this question might be: yes! But consider this: the ICD does not list addiction to money (or anything similar) as a clinical diagnosis. If you're unfamiliar, ICD stans for International Classification of Diseases and is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), to provide a standard way to classify diagnoses into categories. So if you really have the desire to light something on fire, that would be classified under "6C70 Pyromania". But what if you have an unhealthy desire to acquire more money? You may be stupid enough to think that gambling could get you there, then "6C50 Gambling disorder" has you covered. But let's say you're kind of competent and what you're doing is actually working. Can this be problematic?
Well, maybe you're working yourself to death and conduct "QD85 Burnout". But before your body gives in, there's plenty of harm to cause. You might not have time to form meaningful relationships, you might eat unhealthily, you might abuse substances or simply work in areas that are themselves unethical or even illegal. People do some messed up s**t to get more to money. Basically, for any meaningful definition of "causing harm", I could probably argue that addiction to money might cause it. But the desire to gain money, no matter how strong, is not pathological in our society. It's expected of us. You don't want to end up falling under "QD51 Low income".
So, now that we've established that causing harm to yourself or others for financial gain is considered healthy behavior in our society, the question that remains to be answered is: why? It's easy to point your finger at late stage capitalism. It's easy to say that the ones at the top don't want the little guys to notice that we're all in a devious hamster wheel. But while the WHO is surely not free of financial motivations, it's not like they are the most incentivized to keep the engine of capitalism going, either. In the end, it's not the elites pulling the strings. It's us. It's how comfortable we have become with capitalism and how deeply we have engrained its principles into our minds. So much that few people ever stop to think about whether you can get addicted to money.
Apparently, you can't. Because everyone already is.
