I call it financial impotence, this notion of not having enough money, because it has the same characteristics as sexual impotence. And men will never talk about sexual impotence, no matter how close you are to someone, but financial impotence is an even greater barrier. And, I broke that omerta. I had people walk up to me in the grocery store - Several people, coming up to me and saying, "Gosh. Let me tell you my story." People are so pent up with their sense of financial impotence, that they're dying to get it out!

We all live in an ongoing series of calamities. I don't know of any individual who doesn't have a series of calamities. Life doesn't operate where, you make a certain amount of money, you pay your bills, you move on from day-to-day-to-day. No! What happens is, you make your money, you pay your bills, and then a new bill comes up that's completely unexpected.

Yeah, we could have done things differently. But - If we'd done things differently, we wouldn't be who we are. We are the sum of the choices we make. Even the bad choices we make. I made a lot of bad choices, but on the other hand, I am who I am, and I'm proud of my work, and I'm proud of my family, and those are also the product of choices, including financial choices, that I made.

Our own personal salvation is to say, "I'm not going to judge myself, or let other people judge me, by my economic worth." We can't, obviously, control how other people will judge us, but - Life's too short to worry about those things. We can't control those things, but we can control how we feel about ourselves. And we work towards that. To say, "My life has been a success. Even if my bank account doesn't indicate it."

For me, the moral dimension of life is that you are committed, to doing everything that you do, with a sense of excellence. That is the morality of writing, that you try and write as excellently as you possibly can. Or of teaching, or of childrearing, or of friendship. Of anything you do. And, I do try and live, as best I can, with all of the errors that I make, y'know, a value-driven life. And that is defining values as trying to give everything you do, everything you've got.

We have stagnant wages in America. We have stagnant, even declining net worth in this country. That's part of something that's much larger than any single individual. And that is something that is way above my pay grade, to be able to deal with, but it's something I deal with on a daily basis. All my life, from the time that I was very small, my feeling was always, that there's a moral dimension to life. And it's not the moralistic dimension to life, that we often hear about, that's rather church-y or whatever.

Today, the average family has enough financial reserves to keep going for about three weeks. That's it.