Neil Postman And Financial Advice: Don’t Be Limited By The Tools

The Tools of Financial Advice Shape The Advice: Prophetic Insights From Neil Postman

I first read Neil Postman in college — 2008 or 2009, around the time when iPhones were becoming the standard and BlackBerries were becoming embarrassing. I was taking a course on the philosophy of technology and the professor made many references to Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as we read other headier classics.

Postman’s argument in his book used television as an example. He argued that TV didn't just change what we watched — it changed what we could think. Every technology medium (like TV) carries its own logic, its own rules about what kinds of ideas can exist inside it. Television demanded speed (segments of a show), image (you needed to look good), and emotional immediacy (quick for the audience to process). Complex arguments don't survive on television. Grief that takes three years to process doesn't fit in a segment, and ambiguity that resists resolution doesn't make good TV.

So those things disappeared. Not because anyone banned them. Because the medium couldn't hold them.

What struck me wasn't the critique of television — it was the underlying principle. Technology doesn't just reflect what we value. It shapes what we're capable of valuing. The medium quietly rewires us to want what it can deliver.

That insight was obviously relevant in 2009 when smart phones were beginning to shape our behavior. Even more so when we started accessing Facebook, then Instagram on them. We started craving experiences and emotions that could be communicated in the medium– oftentimes at the expense of richer experiences and more complex emotions that social media couldn’t capture.

The principles of Postman’s insights have followed me into the financial advice industry, because this industry has a medium too. And I don't think we've reckoned with what it's doing to us.

The medium of financial advice is the tech stack — portfolio management software, financial planning tools, a CRM, a custodian portal — and the product shelf: investment funds, insurance products, annuities, tax strategies, estate vehicles, charitable giving structures.

These tools are impressive and represent decades of genuine innovation. I'm not arguing against them. But Postman would ask: what do they make possible to say? And what do they make impossible?

Every planning software has fields to fill and goals to define — retirement income, tax efficiency, risk tolerance, estate distribution, time horizon. These are the categories the medium can hold, so these become the categories through which clients understand their entire financial lives. It's a sophisticated menu. But it's still a menu.

What the software can't hold is harder to name. The client who wants to retire early not for leisure but to spend more time with an aging parent. The impulse to write a large check to someone in need — not as a charitable strategy, not optimized for deductions, just as a human act. The quiet, growing sense that accumulating more might not be the point anymore. These things don't have fields.

I've watched wealthy people purchase a home in a state they have no connection to, around people they don't enjoy, where they'll spend a few months each year — simply to capture favorable tax treatment. Their advisors ran the numbers, the numbers were excellent, and the plan was optimized. Somewhere in that optimization, nobody asked: Is this a good way to spend your life? It doesn't fit the medium, so it didn't get asked.

Consider the opposite: a client who wants to write a large, impulsive check to someone in genuine need — no donor-advised fund, no planned giving strategy, no tax optimization, just generosity in its most unstructured form. How many advisors, trained by their tools to think in plans and products, would steer that client toward something more efficient? How many clients, conditioned by years of planning conversations, would second-guess the impulse themselves?

Postman's warning was that we don't just use our mediums — our mediums use us. Television didn't only change what we watched; it changed what we considered worth watching, and eventually, what we considered worth saying at all. The medium of financial advice is doing the same thing. The planning conversation has become coextensive with the planning tools. If it doesn't fit a product, it doesn't become a strategy. If it doesn't optimize for something measurable, it doesn't make the plan. The richer, stranger, more human questions about money get edited out — not by any advisor's intention, but by the medium's logic.

What if some of the most fulfilling things we can do with our money don't fit neatly into a financial plan? What if real generosity — impulsive, sacrificial, tax-inefficient — is more meaningful than the structure that optimizes it? What if your money has something to say about who you are and what you love that your financial plan has never given it a chance to say?

These aren't anti-planning arguments. Planning matters. But Postman's insight is that every medium teaches us what to want from it — and eventually, what to want from life. The industry — advisors, firms, technologists, product manufacturers — should be asking a harder question than how do we make our tools better?

The harder question: what are our tools leaving out?

Because whatever they're leaving out, our clients may be quietly forgetting to want.