When I’m stressed about money, I walk past the subway saxophone player without stopping — not because I don’t have a few dollars, but because reaching into my wallet might start a spiral I don’t want to be in at nine in the morning. I look at the check at dinner and resent a friend who ordered a cocktail when all I had was a Diet Coke. I leave the Central Park Conservancy letter unopened on the counter, even though I love that park, because thinking about whether I can give would mean thinking about everything else I don’t know.
The stress makes me unable to look, which makes me the opposite of who I want to be.
I know this about myself with unusual precision because I’ve been keeping my numbers for eight years.
The phrase isn’t mine. A friend in a 12-step program for people with money problems told me about it the year I was thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt and quietly drowning. You write down every dollar that comes in and goes out. I tried it using an app called AndroMoney, and within two years the debt was gone. Then I just kept going.
For eight years I logged everything: the Starbucks and the rent and the insurance copays, the cat food and the utility bills and the E-ZPass fines. After the debt disappeared I didn’t think much about what I was collecting. I kept it up the way I still eat smaller portions two years after losing the COVID weight — out of habit, not yet knowing I was also keeping a record of who I’d been.
Last month I exported all of it, ran it through AI, and asked some questions.
As it turns out, I had stopped for street musicians ninety-three times. I had given to KittyKind cat rescue seventeen times. I had handed money to people on the street forty-eight times. The years I gave more were not the years I made more. The correlation wasn’t with income.
This was disappointing in a way I didn’t expect.
Eight years, ninety-three musicians. One per month, roughly — and I’m a musician. I had been telling myself a story about the kind of person I was, and the data had a different story. These were the numbers of someone who meant to be generous but wasn’t quite.
Generosity, for me, is not a personality trait. It is a function of awareness. This is also the reason I built Carlo. When I don’t know how much I have, I’m afraid I have less than I do, and the fear makes me tighten up. When I know — when I can see that yes, I’ve set aside ninety dollars for spontaneous giving this month and only twelve has left my pocket; or that yes, I can pick up the check for a friend who’s been having a hard week — my hand opens. Not because I’m a better person that day. Because the ambiguity that was making me a worse one has lifted.
I’m a little embarrassed to write this. A better person might not need to count the cost of generosity before opening their hand. But counting gets me from my worst self toward something closer to who I want to be.
This morning I closed out April — my first month using Carlo every day — and I came in under budget. I’m sending the difference to the Jazz Foundation of America, which helps working musicians stay in their homes when illness or age or an accident takes the next gig away.
The numbers will tell you the truth about yourself, if you let them. And the truth is the only thing that gets you closer to the person you were hoping to be.