Debit, Credit…MEDIC!

-By David Klumpp

Doing my monthly budget is making me stop believing in math.

Sure, I realize that, at some level, the great discoveries of Fibonacci, Brahmagupta, and Newton must hold true.  But when it comes to what I spend, I don’t trust them any more.  I start seeing loopholes and conspiracies.  “Something is horribly wrong here,” I mutter to myself, “There’s no way I blow $1800 a year on coffee.  Maybe I just don’t understand how to multiply.”

One by one, the concepts I thought I understood are engulfed by doubt.  Logarithms lose credibility pretty quickly.  Next is anything that tries to tell me about the wonderful compound interest I would be making if I were making any interest at all.  But soon suspicion seeps down to the more basic stuff.

Here is an example.  Math dogma tells us that multiplying a number by 12 is supposed to be the same as adding 12 copies of that number together.  But after half an hour hunched over a spreadsheet, this seems crazy.  “There’s no way 40 dollars a month is 500 dollars a year,” I cry in frustration, “It’s only, like, 40 dollars!”  And maybe I have a point.   How do we know this “theory” has our best interests in mind?  Have you ever actually added 40 to itself 12 times?  I have, and I’m going to keep on doing it until I get a result that makes good common sense.

The rules of addition fare no better.  I’m told that the order in which you add things isn’t supposed to matter, but how do I know that (A+B)+C equals A+(B+C)?  Have I tried it with every single number?  If my food expenses are much greater than my household expenses, it actually makes sense that I should move toiletry items over to the food column.  Think about it.  Food expenses won’t really change, but household expenses will drop by almost a third!  It’s very simple.  Without “math” to hold me back, I would have no reason to doubt the obvious.

Maybe the problem is not so much that I stop believing in math, as that I believe in it too strongly.  Once I fire up Quicken, anything seems possible.  These numbers will add up, if I can only stay faithful, and not give in to temptation—the temptation to accept the physical world as ultimate reality.  When I tell my friend I need to “work on my budget”, I don’t mean copying down receipts.  I am literally going to move numbers from column to column until my budget realizes it’s going to give up before I do.  Reason is no match for endurance.

As my trust in reason fades, I learn to stop worrying about every single number.  Sure, I could try to track my vacation expenses, but why bother?  “I might jinx it,” I reason.  Everything will work out, as long as I don’t stress.

Elementary school textbooks are always trying to make math apply to students’ daily lives.  This seems like a bad idea to me.  As soon as someone is forced to apply math to problems in the real world, they face a conflict of belief systems.  The situation is much like watching the nightly news.  On the one hand, the footage is right there, and you’re seeing it with your own eyes.

On the other hand, nothing that depressing could possibly be true.