Scar Tissue – The Best Interest

A deep wound. A terrible burn. The remnants of a life-changing surgery.

Scar tissue is the body’s natural way of healing after an injury. When the skin or other tissues are damaged, the body rapidly produces collagen fibers to close and strengthen the wound. This repair process often results in scar tissue. Its appearance and texture differ from the original tissue because it’s laid down quickly and without the original structure.

But scar tissue carries memory with it, too. The same event that burned us or cut us can create emotional and psychological wounds. Or, quite often, an event that leaves no physical mark can create deep “memory scar tissue.” I, for example, have some “memory scar tissue” from driving in the Buffalo Blizzard of 2022. No physical damage. But there’s a mental wound in my brain that gets hyperactive when it snows, like your uncle’s knee that aches when a storm’s on the horizon.

These mental scars, forged from intense or traumatic experiences, shape the way we think, react, and feel long after the proximate event itself has passed. These scars can protect us, making us more cautious. But they also limit us if we never learn to heal or reframe the story behind the scar.

Financial Scar Tissue

If you’ve educated yourself enough on personal finance and investing, you know money’s mental and psychological aspects. It’s much more than numbers. In fact, I’d argue that most people struggle with the mental and psychological way more than they struggle with rational arithmetic.

Sometimes, you need to hear a first-hand account – a real story – for that fact to sink in.

Last week, I was blessed to hear two stunning anecdotes of this type. And I want to share them with you.

Both Great and Depressing

The first powerful lesson comes from an elderly lady I met with. She’s a delightful woman. Kind and funny.

She was born in the late 1930s, just on the tail end of the Great Depression. By the time she was 16, 18, 21, etc. – ages where we really start to shape our personal worldviews – it was the 1950s. The Great Depression had been done and dusted for 20 years.

But I’m sure, even though she didn’t realize it as a child, the echoes of the Great Depression surrounded her. She was swimming in it! Think of the adults and role models in her life and their experiences as adults in the Great Depression. All those echoes, those lessons, those fundamental changes in American life – they all informed the person she grew up to be. And yes, they inform the person she is today in 2025.

Regarding financial planning, she and her family saved and invested wisely for decades (!). She’s living off less than 1% of her portfolio assets annually. As we’ve discussed here regarding withdrawal rates, 1% per year is low, low, low. Doubly so for someone her age.

And yet, this woman looked around the room at her children (in the meeting with us), my colleagues, and I, and she said:

“Thank you for all you’re doing. I just want to make sure you understand: I do not want to run out of money.”

If all we do is look at the math, we’d conclude:

“What a silly thing to say! Someone withdrawing 1% per year – let alone someone at age 85+ withdrawing 1% per year – with never, ever, ever run out of money!”

But if we pause and zoom out, remembering where she came from and what she’s been through, the lightbulb goes off. Ah ha!

This is Great Depression scar tissue. It’s still there 85 years later. It’s still there! It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact! It’s real.

We might think, “Well, the numbers simply don’t justify feeling that way.” And I agree. The numbers alone don’t justify her concerns. But that memory scar tissue didn’t manifest on its own. Just as with a real scar – it got there through burns or cuts or other traumatic injuries. Traumatic. This woman’s concern – her memory scar tissue – is borne out of real financial trauma.

It doesn’t just disappear with a few off-the-cuff lines of retirement math.

No Chicken

The second story comes from a ~45-year-old man. As nice and humble as you can imagine. The definition of “salt of the earth.”

25 years ago, he started his career in a blue-collar, technical, manual labor field. Work, work, work. He progressed one step at a time. And now, for the past couple years, he’s managing the entire company’s manual labor workforce of 1700 employees. That’s serious progress.

But to explain where he came from, he told me this story:

“I’ll never forget it. Our daughter was young at the time, and we were in Wegmans [grocery store]. I walked over to the meat department and got one of those packages of chicken breast and put it in the cart. My wife stopped and looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry honey…but we can’t afford chicken.’“

Just imagine that. What could that chicken have cost?

But the budget was tight. Kids are expensive. Income was hard to come by.

Fast forward to today, where he’s leading a team of 1700 (!) employees, and his compensation matches his responsibility (we’re talking easily within the top 1% of all earners in the country). Hard work really pays off sometimes, and he’s the kind of human who deserves it. But he admitted to me,

“l’ll never forget hearing that we couldn’t afford chicken. And sometimes I still feel like that’s still my relationship with money.”

And once again, we might think, “Well, the numbers simply don’t justify feeling that way.” And I agree. The numbers alone shout out, “Eat nothing but chicken for the rest of your life!!!” But his memory scar tissue didn’t manifest on its own. It got there through burns or cuts or other traumatic injury. Traumatic.

I’m not sure if it was disappointment, sadness, shame, a combination, or perhaps a different emotion altogether. But the feeling that you cannot afford a “simple” grocery item for your family…that sticks with you. It leaves a mark.

And even as life goes on and the financial floodgates open, that scar tissue sticks around.

But what about you? And me? We don’t have any finanical scar tissue. Right?

Blind Spots

First scars, now opthamology?

Not that I’m becoming a medical expert, but I do know this: we all have two blind spots in the middle of our visual field. According to some eye doctors I know, the “optic nerve blind spot” is a small area on each of our two retinas where the optic nerve exits the eye, containing no photoreceptors, and therefore incapable of detecting visual information.

And the great irony is that most of us are ignorant (or blind, you could say) to those blind spots. If you don’t believe me, or if you’ve never tried it, here’s how you test your blind spots for yourself.

Most humans in history have gone their entire lives without realizing their blind spots are there. Trippy!

But you know what? I’d argue that most of us – you at home, me typing this, my two examples above, etc – we go our entire lives blind to our memory scar tissue. Blind to our trauma. Blind to the long-lasting effects that define our very lives.

We make daily financial decisions as a function of long-held beliefs. Some logical and well-thoughts beliefs. Others as a function of pure trauma.

Yet again, this is a time to call upon David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” speech. Long-time readers know it’s one of my favorites. Specifically, the opening story: the parable of the fish.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

We’re so immersed in it we forget it’s even there. Or as Wallace said, “…the most obvious and important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Just like our blind spots.

Just like our scar tissue.

Thank you for reading!

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-Jesse

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