Wealth & Money Quote by Ralph W. Sockman

Sockman’s line reads like a sermon with a balance sheet in its pocket: a moral warning disguised as household budgeting. The genius is the metaphor’s cold practicality. Regret isn’t merely sad; it’s expensive. Anxiety isn’t just unpleasant; it’s debt. By translating emotional habits into financial self-sabotage, he sidesteps the piety trap and lands on something more persuasive for a modern, management-minded conscience: you are misallocating resources.

The intent is discipline, not denial. “Let us not” frames it as communal resolve, a leader’s language that turns private rumination into a shared civic practice. He’s not arguing that yesterday doesn’t matter or tomorrow won’t arrive; he’s arguing that dwelling and pre-dreading are predatory lenders. “Interest” is the sharpest word here: it implies compounding, the way a small regret can metastasize into a worldview, how a single mistake becomes a permanent tax on attention. “Borrowing in advance” names the subtler vice: treating imagined futures as already true, then living as if payment is due now.

Context matters: Sockman preached through the Great Depression, World War II, and early Cold War unease, eras when “bankruptcy” and “troubles” weren’t metaphors so much as daily headlines. The subtext is a leader’s attempt to protect psychological stamina when external events are uncontrollable. He offers a portable ethic: stewardship of the present. Not optimism, exactly, but solvency - the refusal to let time be looted by emotions that masquerade as responsibility.