Why all the big fuss over money? We give our lives over to it. We turn it into a secular surrogate for fundamental religious notions of heaven and hell. We fashion our lives around its pursuit and then punish those who (even hypothetically) might keep us from maximizing our own little allotment of it. We crave it, despise it, revere it, and fear it. All of us. Whether we are an idealistic hippie bemoaning our lack of rent funds, or a type-A commodities trader bemoaning the sudden fall of pork bellies, we are entranced, smitten, and bedazzled by the concept that underlies the whole mesmerizing mind-game.
Through all this, we seem to have forgotten something simple and primal–We’re making the whole thing up!
We invented spreadsheets and equity instruments and compounding interest rates. We invented free-markets and amortization tables and Wal-Mart wage slaves. These are our creations. They don’t exist except through our mass consent. When we stop consenting, they will no longer exist. They are boogie-men of our guilty collective conscience, made to look hard as stone through the fearful lens that our security-minded soccer parents ingrained in us.
So when times get tough, instead of screaming in barnyard circles like so many chicken littles, shouldn’t we instead take pause to laugh? A properly experienced crisis reminds us that who we truly are is crisis-proof. Money is a mind-game we willingly play to distract ourselves from a more fundamental fact–as humans our creative nature is unshifting, uplifting, and inherently unassailable.
How’s that for a frightening fact of life?! It means we’re each 100% responsible for every single thought that enters our head-space, including those that seem so viscerally to exist outside of us….like money.
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Testfy!!
This is exactly the sort of thing we need to remember now more than ever. Everyone is so ready to give away power, control, responsibility to some faceless “them” and then we point a collective finger at “them” for victimizing us. it’s a silly cycle and an unnecessary one. thanks John!!