The definition of insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Yet that’s exactly what we do. On Ramit Sethi’s podcast about couples and their financial issues, he talks about a common source of insanity: budgets. We tell ourselves we should really keep a budget. That will solve our financial problems, we tell ourselves, as many guests on Ramit’s podcast do. It’s a cliche piece of financial advice that runs almost invariably into the fact that it may be easy to write a budget, but almost no one manages to keep one.

Yet here we are, beating ourselves up about not keeping a budget for a period of time, and then, we try a budget again…and the cycle repeats. As Ramit recently instructed one couple:

“If something doesn’t work for you, stop beating yourself up. Find a different way to achieve the goal. How many times have you tried to do a budget? Many times! And it doesn’t work. So what was your reaction to that? What did you tell yourself? ‘We’re bad. We’re irresponsible. We need to buckle down and try harder.’ None of that feels good. So lesson number one is: if something doesn’t work, stop beating yourself up, find a different way to achieve the same goal.”

Marcus Aurelius talks about how crazy it is that we just go on staying the same person we’ve always been, trying the same things we’ve always tried. Musonius Rufus said many of our problems are a result of ‘following wretched habits.’ In this “fight against habit,” Epictetus would say, “try the opposite!”

The goal of being on top of your finances is a good one (check out The Wealthy Stoic for some practical strategies). But as the expression goes, there are many ways to skin a cat. In life, just hoping we will magically change is a dead end. So is throwing more and more willpower at a problem. As Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations, if there are brambles in the path, go around!

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