Money screws everything up
“To live outside the law you must be honest.” – Bob Dylan
What is money?
What is too much money?
What is enough money?
Why do we have to earn a living?
Why don’t we save enough to retire in our 40s?
What is retirement without money?
And the list goes on and on.
Truth is, we don’t spend nearly enough time looking into, or at, or anywhere close to asking what is money, despite the fact that it comes to and does order so many of our lives.
You might ask, is there anywhere it doesn’t show up?
I don’t think so, and it has a nasty, almost brutish habit of ruining everything. I mean, we’re never settled or if we think we are, there’s usually something that comes from left of centre to upend our plans.
There are so many things that trouble me about money, not least the way that it seduces us to believe that absent money we’d die a slow and painful death. And we probably would in this day and age but it hasn’t always been like this.
On my better days, I’d like to think we could find the soul of money or at least see it as a living thing and not as a plague on all our houses but then I’m thrown into reverse the moment I try to conceive of a world where I didn’t have to go to work to pay those damn bills.
I do have a plan, not to do without money but to lessen its grip on me but this far out it looks reckless and ill-conceived but perhaps that’s how it’s meant to be.
Growing up, money was sacred. Sacred in the sense that I was made to understand that it was meant to be treated with grace, humility and a degree of reverence. If something cost £10.00, I was meant to understand that there was labour, hard labour in the money. Woe betide me if I didn’t!
My parents, much like my generation, never questioned money. When they did it was usually in the bailiwick of “we can’t afford it” but then I couldn’t understand why they seemed to have money for cigarettes or the things that they liked to do. School wasn’t much better. I don’t recall a single lesson devoted to money. Arithmetic, yes, and how to get a job but money was never discussed. And as for any form of initiation, you’re having a laugh, right? I mean where would you have gone? Or who would you have spoken to? And as to knowing if you’d crossed the Rubicon to the promised land, I’m not even sure what that would have looked like.
If I think about those few people who have money, it appears to be no more and no less than a means to a materialistic end. In other words, their justification for all that ingenuity is to show off their wares. But they appear to have very little connection to the money, less still the stuff. If I asked any of them to map out the consequence of us all aspiring to the same way of being in the world, they’d probably say: “Fill your boots.” But what then? How quickly would we perish on the anvil of our anthropocentric needs and wants?
If I dig deeper into money and look back on all the arguments, angst and anger that have shown up apropos of the canticle of money talk, it appears to be the root cause of so much which has only added to my little pile of stones called ‘regrets’.
Even now my wife and I can’t seem to agree on very much when it comes to money. I’m ready to abandon ship and see where we both end up (I’m convinced the Universe has its own plans for us); she’s scared about “losing it all” which is code for saying doing without money for the first time in her life.
I don’t want to sound flippant but when you’ve had to and have done without, there is a different arc to life. In my case, it’s not that I want to challenge myself to see if it’s possible to live without money, but my current modus vivendi isn’t helping my soul one little bit. And it’s just putting things off and as I’ve said before, there is such a thing as too late.
In the end, as with so many things that I write about, this post barely scratches the surface of this complex compendium of sorrow and despair. Note I did not say anything about how the fact that money doesn’t equal happiness and whilst that’s certainly true, there will be many people who believe that absent money or a certain amount of it, it’s not possible to exist in this world, nor be content. I don't want to judge them but I’m not convinced that we need money – certainly to the degree that we believe we do. Instead, if there’s a conversation to be had it’s how we could create a more village-minded way of being in the world where if there was a need to trade anything, we could be more imaginative than to revert to our money paradigm.
What do you think?
Do you think it possible to be in this world without money or is it an inevitable consequence (now) of being human?
Take care.
Love,
Julian
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash