The Worth of Borrowing and Lending Money

Jacob Waiswa, Peace and Conflict Program,
Makerere University

Money influences standard of living and eases the struggle to reach life goals. There can be relentless strive to reach one’s life goals, with or without money. Both the lazy and hardworking characters develop strategies relevant to meeting their immediate and long term needs.

It is believed that working hard everyday yields good results. However, there are a lot of cases that show success in people’s lives, who are known to have worked less to attain it. It is at this point that the aspect of luck begins to mean something to admirers.

While hardworking people incur equal amount of effort to attain much-needed development levels in life, the lazy ones look for short-cuts. Of the two categories of individuals, the actions of the hardworking person are most acceptable.

It is widely understandable that hardworking people excel in all their endeavors and eventually become wealthy. The lazy ones either resort to ‘unacceptable’ means to success or choose passive living, so that their survival costs are met by the hardworking group, through begging.

The race to success is accelerated by social status of one’s family, size of social support group, and the nature of social influences from ones social environment. The challenges faced to reach life goals arouse given emotional, psychological (justification of the need), and behavioral state or orientation.

With a supportive social environment, an individual will have a positive outlook towards life, a strong attitude to achieve his or her life goals, high confidence, high self-esteem, enthusiasm to perform well at work, ability to take action steps, passion towards work, critical problem-solving skills, and resilience along the path to success.

Unfortunately, not everyone reaches his or her dreams, a measure of them or even, at all, make begin a journey to register achievements. The fact that some people work so hard for nothing while others do very little or nothing to succeed is an everyday puzzle. Such inequalities cause animosities, for which God and earthly leaders are usually blamed.

Hardly do people accept roles for their failures, so much that even when they have the means to work out their way to success, they keep blaming other people for their woes. Otherwise, it can be true that some people are just not doing enough to change their bad situations for the better. If they did, probably, they would not clamor. Or perhaps steps used to achieve their goals are the ones worth questioning.

In modern times, the greater pressure to meet primary needs, as food and sex, is helped by money. Its absence prompts people to resort to aggressive behaviors and other unethical ways to have those needs. The non-assertive ones resort to self-destructive ways, as substance abuse and suicide to cope with the symptoms of depression.  

Borrowing is one coping strategy that many economically-hurt people turn to for temporary relief. Events towards pay-back, however, resurrect depression and associated psychological symptoms. Like it is for smokers and alcoholics, people find themselves borrowing, until it becomes a hardened habit.

Borrowing, though, is an acceptable channel to reaching one’s economic objectives. But its enslaving nature places it among the most evil practices worth giving no legitimacy to. Failure to pay back the loan worsens existing miseries of life as the feeling of guilt and pressure to pay back the loan triggers health concerns as hypertension, headaches, and even death.

As pressure to meet primary needs builds internally and from the outside of the individual, he or she is compelled to seek relief through borrowing. And when the relief is found, the individual regains the much-needed sense of calmness and total cessation of the reason to pay back the loan. It becomes more of the lender’s concern.

And because the pressure to seek the loan was emotional rather than a well-intentioned and reasoned-out process over time, the individual will only feel victimized of the ‘fact’ that he or she has to pay back the loan. It seems to him or her as an issue of the past, not now. He or she will struggle away from the new pressure to pay, whether he or she is able to pay or not.

It is at that level that criminalization of the individual takes root. Under criminal procedures, there must be evidence before prosecution takes effect. However, court action worsens the victimization effect more than it solves, and will move to cement hatred between and among relationships.

Traditional borrowing is based on brotherly and friendly relationships, aimed at bailing out loved ones or those cared for, where signing of contracts is never a big deal. The borrowers are motivated to pay back, basing on the need to preserve existing relationships between them and the lenders.

The emotional-based borrowing pays no attention to that; instead, it pushes individual to downplay the need to pay back the loan at any cost. As would be expected, the relationship soon falls apart. Mending the relationship not only calls for paying back the loan, but also rebuilding it.

It takes years to build an exciting relationship, but a little while to break it. It is the reason that influences more caring people to desist from placing business and money matters at the center of relationships. They find it better to give out money without strings attached than to lend it out expecting pay back, sometimes with an interest.

The approach strengthens existing relationship and prevents the ills of broken relationship from developing. And the borrower will be saved from the adverse health outcomes as depression, pressure, stress and associated psychosomatic manifestations.

In cases where the lender cannot afford the amount of money the borrower needs, he or she would explain why he is willing to give the stipulated amount, more over without expecting it back.

And if the person approached for financial assistance can not at all donate any money, it is wiser to acknowledge lack of it than to promise or feel guilty for not fulfilling the ‘obligation’ to give. Free giving and free receiving can then be a solution to modern-day problems; both at individual, national, and global levels.

It is important that emotionally-driven people limit their plans within the available resources, until a time when the amount of resources at their proposal increase to support new ideas. Before that happens, new ideas should remain in files awaiting action.

At some point the kind of patience is needed, as it remains clear to the would-be borrower that the long-awaited time for activating ideas will come. And when that happens, individuals will not have to put pressure on themselves or others. Instead, they will be elevated to new levels of life, happiness and good health.