How Well Do You Know Your “Frame?”

Friend-of-the-blog Anthony is a personal friend who read my very first articles when I shared them on Facebook. He’s seen The Best Interest grow over time. 

A couple of years ago, I told him that The Best Interest wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I felt directionless at the time, and was considering hanging up my writing gloves for good. And, in fact, I did hang up my podcasting microphone for a couple years.

He responded, “You know Jess…you can’t see the picture if you’re standing inside the frame. I’m outside the frame. So trust me when I say: You’ve got something special here.” 

That was a big turning point for me. I’m glad The Best Interest journeyed on.

Our Human Frames

That quote—”You can’t see the picture if you’re inside the frame”—is a pivotal part of the human condition. But many of us remain blind to it, even after we’re aware of it! It’s a daily challenge to remove ourselves from our frames and gain a true perspective.

This same theme is the integral through-line of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” which long-time readers have seen me quote countless times. 

As Foster Wallace explains, the point “is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Foster Wallace goes on to explain:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

David Foster Wallace

We’re all stuck inside our own frames.

We must first realize and accept that truth. Only then can we attempt to strategize a way out of our frames and, hopefully, execute that strategy with a modicum of success.

What About Personal Finance?

Our natural self-centered framing certainly affects our interactions with money. The most obvious way, to me, harkens back to a terrific Charlie Munger quote:

The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.

Charlie Munger

In other words, we don’t simply want more stuff.

Instead, we want more stuff because we see – and feel envy toward – others who have that stuff. We get jealous. I want it too! Soon-to-be guest on The Best Interest Podcast, Katie Gatti-Tassin, recently wrote about this concept. It’s called “Mimetic Desire.”

The Lake House

We recently spent a weekend at a rental house in the Finger Lakes. It was a wonderful ~2000-square-foot cottage, but certainly the smallest and oldest of the nearby lakehouses. (Canandaigua Lake has one of the highest tax rates in the country).

I laughed to myself and began thinking about this very article, though, when I compared our rental house to the neighbors.

“What would it be like to have the ‘worst’ of the million-dollar lake houses? What effect does that have on the psyche?” 

It’s easy for you and I to sit here and say, “I wouldn’t care! I’ll take a ‘bad’ million-dollar lake house any day!!!” And maybe that’s true.

But envy drives the world. Many people would be affected by it. Isn’t that wild?

Poor vs. Rich

We all have different frames. I feel a silver lining to having grown up in an economically depressed area of rural Upstate NY. I’ve seen poverty, but I went to a nice college and saw some eye-popping wealth. I’ve interacted with folks all over the wealth spectrum.

We can remove ourselves from our natural frames by understanding that, for example, poverty is fundamentally different from the middle class, which is fundamentally different from the upper class, especially in the early developmental years of childhood.

The framing difference between a 10-year-old on food stamps and a 10-year-old whose family owns a luxury yacht – that difference is inconceivable. In fact, the gap might be too wide for any of us to truly understand. We can’t see that picture from standing inside our frames.

“Walk a mile in their shoes.”

That’s another way of saying, “Get out of your frame and into theirs.” It might be more than a thought experiment, though. You might have to see it for yourself, talk to people different from you, and truly immerse yourself in the day-to-day aspects of others’ lives.

Who Do You Trust?

Perhaps the easiest way to get out of your natural framing is by seeking advice from a mentor, a loved one, a trusted counselor, etc.

The most rewarding aspect of The Best Interest is providing that exact help to those of you who ask for it. My favorite part of my day job is understanding the “frames” of the people I work with, then acting as the neutral 3rd-party to provide them advice in their best interest, uninhibited by the confines of their frame.

Like all of our frames, their frames make it challenging to see the bigger picture. A great example – I loved the conversations I had in late July and early August about the flash crash.

The same goes for relationship problems, career advice, “forks in the road,” etc.

Talk to someone outside your frame. What advice can they give you?

Framed

Thanks again to Anthony and Canandaigua Lake for the inspiration today.

Do you think you know yourself well enough to define the confines of your frame?

I have my doubts about my own. But I still try to feel around in the dark for it.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article, join 8500+ subscribers who read my 2-minute weekly email, where I send you links to the smartest financial content I find online every week. You can read past newsletters before signing up.

-Jesse

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