May 6, 2007
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Earn Money
Someone once said to me “You should try to earn enough money so that you can do whatever you want.” I’ve heard many a similar statement in the past about the importance of wealth in this society. But it doesn’t ring true to me. I could maybe see the argument of earning as much money as you can so that you can feel secure and not have to fear a sudden unexpected event, but earning enough money to grant you additional freedoms doesn’t make much sense to me.
For one thing, I hate to break it to people, but there is no amount of money that would really let you do ANYTHING you want, and the more I observe it seems that it will do little to help me do what I want. You won’t earn enough so that you can defy the laws of physics or make one equal to zero or obtain magical powers. What’s more, no matter how much money you spend right now we simply can’t travel to alternative dimensions (yet), alter our brains so that we can read minds or perform telekinesis (yet), travel to other wolds and meet alien species (yet), or make ourselves live forever (yet). Nor is it likely that we will gain those capacities any time soon and quite unlikely during our life time.
Nor can you through wealth ad deterimination change the world in which we live in more realistic ways. You won’t create universal peace. You won’t convince everyone to be more charitable and abandon the darker angels of their nature. You just won’t end war and crime and unhappiness and create a nirvana on this earth. You won’t through wealth alone save the planet from this relentless trend toward environmental destruction. Maybe you can help. Your wealth might be spent in ways that make us closer to those extremes, but yor wealth alone won’t be enough and history has shown that many of the poeple who have contributed the most toward bettering the human condition did so without the advantage of being filthy rich. Many were dirt poor. And many of the rich, trough my personal observation, seem to be pushing the world in the opposite direction although usually unknowingly. Because I enjoy airing the platitudes let me just say that the reason is thus: money is power and power corrupts.
But even on a more personal level the idea fails. People say that by earning enough money they’ll be able to live their dreams, travel the world, and be happy. But what are those dreams really? Are they to be rich and famous and have your creative or intellectual works well accepted and beloved by the world? No guarantee that money alone will get you that. People might hate what you do.The world may reject your works. You might not be very good at anything according to the standards by which society judges.
Are they to meet someone and fall in love and have a story book wedding and raise good kids you can be proud of? No guarantee that wealth alone will help you find real lasting love. No guarantee that your children will be anything at all that you might expect them to be. And worst of all there’s no guarantee you will be able to maintain your happiness against the probability of unexpected unstoppable circumstances such economic recession, disease, natural disaster and all the rest.
Is your dream instead to travel and see and learn all that you can? Do you dream to experience a little bit of everything so that you know your life wasn’t wasted? Well, that’s good and all and money will certainly help with that, but you’ll never experience all that much. You’ll go far and wide and see many things but you’ll miss a whole lot more of very interesting things you can see and learn and experience without the need of great wealth if you just open your eyes and look about you and see all the wonders right here that are there to see. And neither travel, nor knowledge, nor experience REQUIRE wealth to obtain. You can walk out your door right now and start hitchhiking across the country and I guarantee you’ll see and experience a heck of a lot. Turn on your comptuer and start browsing the web and I guarantee you’ll learn more than you bargained for. A lot of it will even, perhaps surprisingly, be true. You might have trouble when you want to leave the country without much money but you can probably find a way. After all you don’t need to be a billionaire to get a passport and buy a plane ticket. You do need money but you don’t need to “earn as much as you can.”
So what value is wealth really? Someone please explain it to me. It doesn’t seem to me to create possibiities at all, just mix around the probabilities a little.
I’d say try to be rich if you want to and enjoy the striving for it and will enjoy being in that state. But don’t try to be rich because you think it will magically transform your life. You’ll be bound for disappointment.
