A hub piece on the psychology of money for MikePetryJournal.com
By Mike Petry
The question that keeps me up at night, and that eventually became the thing I decided to build an entire ecosystem around answering, is why intelligent, financially literate, generally good-hearted people reliably spend money against their own stated interests year after year, even after they have been told that they are doing it, even after they have promised themselves that they would stop, and even after the exact mechanism by which they do it has been laid out in front of them in painstaking detail by somebody they trust and respect.
I have been thinking about this question, in one form or another, for most of my working life, which means that I have had plenty of time to notice how uncomfortable most of the usual answers to it actually are. The polite answer is that people need more financial education, which is the answer the industry has been giving since roughly the 1970s, and which has produced trillions of dollars of financial education content without producing a visibly less confused consumer. The slightly less polite answer is that people are weak-willed or lazy or bad at math, which is both empirically wrong and also conveniently flattering to whoever is giving it. The honest answer, as far as I have been able to work out across the last few years of sitting with this, is that money is almost never actually the thing that is going on when somebody is making a money decision.
Money is the thing that is on the receipt. Psychology is the thing that is on the chair, holding the credit card.
That observation, which is older than I am and which I take absolutely zero credit for, is the foundation of what I have quietly started calling a modern financial philosophy. It is not a program. It is not a system. It is a working premise that the honest study of money is less about the money itself than about the specific, repeatable, often slightly funny ways in which otherwise intelligent human beings mishandle it, because nobody has taken the trouble to walk them through how the mishandling works from the inside.
That premise is what I keep coming back to when I talk about The Psychology of Money as a working field of study rather than as a book title or a trending phrase, because The Psychology of Money, properly understood, is less a shelf of self-help titles and more a slow, careful, decades-long attempt to describe the specific gap between what human beings say they want from their financial lives and what their financial lives actually end up looking like once they have been quietly lived.
That premise is what the three channels I have been building are all, in different registers, trying to serve.
Why The Psychology of Money is the actual subject
The reason I keep returning to The Psychology of Money, specifically and by that name, as the organising frame for everything I am building across the ecosystem, is that it is the one phrase that captures what the entire project is actually about underneath the surface of any individual essay or video, which is the recognition that the money part of personal finance is almost always the simpler half of the equation and the psychological part is where the real year-after-year leverage over an ordinary life quietly lives.
Why three places and not one
The simplest version of the answer is that the people who learn best by watching a story being lived from the inside are not always the same people who learn best by reading an argument being made from the outside, and neither of those groups is quite the same as the group that just wants somebody to tell them, in the time it takes to make coffee, the single thing nobody told them about money this week.
Chronicle Zero is the cinematic version of the project, where each episode drops the viewer inside a specific moment in financial or psychological history, so that the invention of the 401(k) is not a Wikipedia paragraph but a specific September evening in 1980 inside a small office in Valley Forge, and so that the behavioural economics that explains why your 401(k) looks the way it does is not an abstract set of lecture notes but a Jerusalem seminar in the spring of 1969 where one psychology professor raised his hand against a stranger he had just met. The episodes are twelve minutes long, written in second person, and they are built on the premise that history teaches you more about yourself when you are standing inside it than when you are reading about it from a distance.
nobodytoldmike is where I take the ideas that come out of that historical material and translate them into the specific choices you are actually facing this month, this quarter, and this decade, which is to say the choices that nobody ever sat me down and walked me through either, until I had to figure them out on my own in the specific way that costs more money than figuring them out any other way would have cost.
What NTM Told Us is the practical daily companion to all of that, where the longer arguments from the first two channels get compressed into the amount of time it takes to make a cup of coffee in the morning before anybody has started asking you to make real decisions about anything.
The three of them, together, form the ecosystem the whole project points at, which is the one I am most interested in building out carefully over the next several years, because I have come to believe that a modern financial philosophy worth the name is not a single-channel operation at all, but a careful conversation across multiple registers that compound on each other over time.
What binds all three
The thread that runs through everything, in whatever register I happen to be working in on any given afternoon, is the psychology of money, and more specifically the psychology of spending, which is the particular corner of the broader field where I think the actual day-to-day leverage over an ordinary person's financial life quietly lives. That is where I think the actual leverage lives, because almost everything else that a thoughtful adult might want to know about money, from the mechanics of index investing to the structure of tax-advantaged accounts to the broad shape of inflation and interest rates, is already written down in a hundred different places by people who have thought about those specific topics for longer than I have, which means that the thing that is missing from the usual conversation is not information but a patient look at what the information is actually competing against inside the human mind.
The four companion pieces I have put out alongside this one go deeper into the same psychology from four different angles that I think are worth your time if the general argument I have been making here resonates at all. The Three Biases That Explain Why You Overspend is the Medium essay I wrote this week on the three specific cognitive patterns that quietly do most of the heavy lifting inside any given consumer-spending decision, which is to say the ones that the people selling to you are counting on without ever having to name out loud. The Thing Nobody Told Me About How I Spend Money is the Substack essay from the same week, which is a more personal piece about the specific pattern I noticed in my own spending once I started paying attention. Nobody Told Me That Most of My Money Was Leaving in the Small Doors is the practical operator's companion on nobodytoldmike.com, aimed at the dozens of small doors in an ordinary financial life that nobody is watching because nobody has ever told them there were doors there in the first place. The Psychology of Money, in One X Post is the long-form X post that compresses the whole thesis into a single piece written for the fifteen minute windows between other things.
Those two pieces, together with this one, are the current snapshot of where my thinking on this material is, which is going to keep shifting as I keep working on it, which is roughly the point of writing publicly about something in the first place.
What to expect next
If you have been reading this journal for a while, you already know that I am not interested in writing the sort of financial content that promises you a shortcut to a million dollars by forty, because that content already exists in enormous quantity and is not solving the problem that it claims to be solving. The thing that I am interested in, and that I think the ecosystem I am building is slowly getting better at delivering, is the longer and slightly less marketable version of the same project, which is a steady and patient look at why ordinary intelligent people reliably make the specific money mistakes that they do, and what, if anything, becomes possible when they finally understand the mechanics of it from the inside out.
The next piece on the website will probably be a case study on one specific psychological lever that most people have never heard a name for, and that is quietly responsible for an enormous amount of consumer debt in the country I live in. Subscribe to the journal at the bottom of this page if you want it in your inbox when it goes up.
Thank you for reading.