Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim Nor, Ph.D.
Across different economies, income levels, and professions, a quiet paradox is unfolding. Today’s youth are more educated than any previous generation, and professionals have access to tools, platforms, and financial products like never before. Yet, financial progress remains fragile and uneven – often stalling altogether. Savings are delayed, investments put off, and long-term planning is repeatedly pushed aside.
Conventional explanations tend to individualize the issue: a lack of discipline, poor financial literacy, or weak planning habits. But emerging evidence from behavioral economics suggests the problem runs deeper than personal failure. It’s about how modern environments shape our behavior. This column introduces the NBEL finance model – a behavioral framework that explains how financial inaction arises not from ignorance, but from the misallocation of human energy, attention, and expectations. The model identifies a pattern increasingly visible among both youth and working professionals: Noisy, Busy, Easy, and Lazy.
Noisy: Wasting Attention
Modern life is bombarded with demands for our attention. Political debates, social controversies, 24/7 news cycles, and digital platforms all pull us into emotionally charged engagements. This is what the NBEL model calls “Noisy.” Being noisy doesn’t mean being uninformed or disengaged. Instead, it reflects a tendency to invest significant cognitive and emotional energy into activities that don’t improve our financial situation. These activities often feel urgent and meaningful, but they don’t contribute to our financial growth.
Psychologically, noise fragments our focus and drains mental resources. Economically, it represents a low or zero return on attention. When we invest too much of our daily energy into areas where financial outcomes won’t improve, less remains for activities that can actually build income, skills, or assets. Noise isn’t about having too much information—it’s about misdirected effort.
Busy: Wasting Time
Noise often leads to busyness. The second element of the NBEL model – “Busy” – captures a familiar condition for both students and professionals. Schedules are full, workloads are heavy, and days are packed with tasks that demand constant attention. Yet, despite all this activity, our financial position often stays the same. For young people, this might mean juggling school, part-time work, and side projects without significant income or skill leverage. For professionals, long hours may sustain income, but they leave little time for financial planning or restructuring. Psychologically, busyness leads to decision fatigue. Complex financial decisions are avoided because they require sustained attention and emotional energy. Economically, busyness comes with a hefty opportunity cost: time is consumed, but little value is created. It gives the illusion of progress, while quietly maintaining stagnation.
Easy: Wasting Potential
As noise and busyness pile up, we often turn to simplicity. The NBEL model extends the idea of “Easy” beyond just convenience or default choices. It also includes the tendency to favor simplicity over a deeper understanding of complex issues. This can mean accepting financial advice without scrutiny, engaging in activities that seem beneficial but aren’t, or avoiding complicated financial decisions by labeling them unnecessary. While these choices offer temporary relief, they often restrict opportunities and hide potential risks. On a behavioral level, simplicity feels safe and manageable. Economically, though, it leads to movement without momentum. Without deeper comprehension, simplicity can quickly become fragile.
Lazy: Diminished Hope
Over time, the misallocation of energy leads to exhaustion. In the NBEL framework, “Lazy” isn’t about a lack of effort or moral failure. It’s the result of prolonged fatigue combined with a diminished belief that financial effort will lead to meaningful progress. When expectations collapse, motivation follows. This stage is marked by withdrawal – financial plans are postponed, reviews are avoided, and long-term thinking feels pointless. What may look like laziness is often internal resignation. Psychologically, this mirrors learned helplessness.
Economically, it results in stagnation – not because effort has stopped, but because hope in progress has faded. In this sense, laziness isn’t indifference; it’s exhaustion.
The NBEL Cycle of Financial Inaction
The behaviors in the NBEL cycle are repetitive and noisy, leading to wasted resources on activities that don’t yield financial rewards. The result is perpetual preoccupation with things that offer no tangible results. As long as we prioritize convenience over understanding, we won’t gain any real financial momentum.
Laziness is less about moral failure and more about the cumulative effect of continuous energy misallocation. This isn’t about a lack of motivation or intelligence – it’s the result of modern systems that compete for our attention, encourage constant busyness, make deep learning difficult, and provide few clear paths to financial success. Digital finance systems, too, have reshaped fundraising by focusing more on incentives and behaviors than on individual goals. These systems, old and new, subtly shape our spending habits, and even when we aren’t making progress, we’re still behaving rationally – we just don’t realize it.
A Modest Reorientation
Breaking free from the NBEL cycle doesn’t require more effort, more activity, or consuming more financial information. These solutions often make the problem worse by amplifying the noise, busyness, and fatigue. Instead, what’s needed is a modest reorientation of how we allocate our energy.
Redirecting attention from constant reactions to genuine understanding – even in small, deliberate steps – can have a meaningful impact. Spending just one focused hour each week evaluating an existing financial decision, without the pressure to optimize or act immediately, can restore clarity and confidence. This practice helps rebuild expectations – the belief that thoughtful financial engagement can still lead to progress. And in the end, it’s our expectations, not our motivation or discipline, which form the foundation of sustained financial action.
Conclusion
Financial inaction is rarely the result of laziness in the traditional sense. More often, it’s a gradual process in which people exhaust their attention through noise, stay busy with tasks that don’t provide financial leverage, and settle for simplicity that avoids understanding and limits potential.
Over time, these patterns erode confidence and hope until what appears to be laziness is really a form of fatigue and resignation. The NBEL finance model doesn’t assign blame or suggest personal failure. Instead, it explains how modern environments shape our behavior. In the study of economic behavior, recognizing how systems influence our choices is a crucial first step toward restoring agency, rebuilding hope, and re-engaging in financial decision-making in a deliberate and sustainable way.
Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim Nor, PhD. is the Minister of Rural Development and Resilience in SouthWest Somalia and Former Permanent Secretary of Office of the Prime Minister.