Answer to life’s riddles aren’t always so enriching

See if you can solve this riddle:

When I am absent you obsess over me, yet when I am present you act as if you don’t care. You will do anything to get me, yet once you do, you wonder why you ever bothered. I am important mainly in my absence. What am I?

No, you may not answer, “The story of my life,” even if you feel that way sometimes.

Let me put it another way:

What is green and crinkly and always in short supply?

Yes, that’s right, the answer is: Money.

I’ve been thinking about the odd nature of money since I saw “The Aviator” this weekend and heard this exchange (roughly paraphrased) between the young Howard Hughes and the aristocratic mother of Katharine Hepburn:

Aristocratic matron: We don’t talk about money here. We don’t care about money.

Hughes: (quietly) That’s because you’ve got it.

Aristocratic matron: (shocked) What?

Hughes: That’s because you’ve got it. That’s why you don’t care about it.

There’s plenty of truth in this exchange, as many of us have learned through its opposite corollary: If you have no money, you are forced to care about it just about every waking moment.

This is the crowning conundrum of money. If, when young, you resolve that there are more important things to life than mere money, you must resign yourself to a life of worrying about money, since you won’t have any.

Not that this is wrong. If you have a soul at all, you should resolve that there are more important things than unsanitary lucre. I just want you to realize that if your goal is never to think about it, a better solution may be to have big, fluffy piles of the stuff.

Yet it may not be quite so simple.

Having money is not exactly carefree, either. If you have large mountains of the green, you have to do something called “manage” it.

Managing a large sum of cabbage is not quite as big a problem as “managing” the complete absence of it, but still, it’s no fun. Instead of worrying about the spending of it, you have to worry about the maintenance of it

Think of it like having a big, slobbering, goofy golden retriever. You love the big galoot. He’s always fun to have around. Yet he requires constant care and feeding.

I see ads all of the time for financial firms offering “wealth management” services. These firms promise to put your money to work. Apparently, it is not enough to have wealth. It must be given a job.

So maybe we should think of having money as like having a big, strapping teenager hanging around the house during summer vacation. You can’t just let him lay around all day, playing Super Mario. You have to get him off the couch and give him chores. He must be put to work because … well, because the only thing more useless than a lazy teenager is lazy money.

So, your money becomes like a big, never-ending homework assignment. You have to monitor the stock market and pay attention to what the dollar is doing against the yen. You have to research stock picks and agonize over market timing. You have to read the business section and worry about issues such as “tax ramifications” and “front-end loads” and “peer-group performance.”

You can always pay somebody to perform your “wealth management” services. That is apparently the main advantage of having wealth – the ability to hire other people to manage it. Yet even then, your wealth manager will call you in for meetings and make you answer difficult questions such as, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” and “Do you have the stomach for a little risk?” and, “How do you feel, emotionally, about junk bonds?”

So it’s not that wealthy people don’t care about money. They certainly do. Just in a different way

So maybe the riddle should go like this:

When I am absent you obsess over me. When I am present you hire someone to obsess over me. I’m a pain in the backside either way. What am I?