August 22, 2019
Money makes the world go ’round. Every day I’m hustlin. Money; that’s what I want.
Have you ever done a Google search for songs about money? It’s endless. You’d probably only find more titles about love.
We are taught about the need for money from birth. or pretty close to it. We’re taught to have a good work ethic. To earn what we want. To value according to cost and effort required to attain. We faithfully enter the workforce to contribute our effort to the collective economy and to be able to have and do what we want in our blossoming lives. But do we ever stop to think about just how completely fucked up that entire template really is? There may be a period of idealism for many when they’re teenagers or in the early twenties and are able to retain the dreaminess required to see past the exhaustion of existence, but fewer and fewer even get that luxury. We’re hustling in high school. Raising money for our underfunded schools; trying to pay for whatever fun we want to have since few parents have the extra income necessary to support their kids’ entertainment. Who has time to imagine a world where peoples’ lives are built around something besides economic survival?
So few are willing to question our feedback loop of workwork/rest, workwork/rest, our inexorably monetized world that they are shunned as Socialists and Commies and considered unworthy of serious attention. But the system is destroying, well, everything. It’s on the brink of destroying the goddamned planet. How much more obvious can it be that something doesn’t work than to witness its decimation of the *actual* planet? And yet the dollar and obsession with it continues to reign supreme. Are we collectively sedated by the few comforts our lives afford us? Is the ability to spend a couple hours with the kids at the end of a long workday with a beer in hand so seductive that we can’t see the 50 hours a week we spend with people we often don’t even like (much less respect), and for so little recompense that we can barely afford that beer? Do we not recognize how fucked up it is to sell this paradigm to our kids? Hey honey, I want you to be happy so work hard and maybe someday you too can be a wage slave. It’s psychotic.
So what do we do? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. A big element of my decision to leave my comfy, safe, Happiest Place on Earth job was my conscience. I vowed from the time I really understood Capitalism and its poisonous corporate universe that I would do as little as possible to contribute to its dominance, and I would certainly do my best to not benefit from it. But divorce and kids have a sobering effect on one’s idealism and I sucked it up and cashed those paychecks. But when my youngest graduated from college and left home, I realized that I was now staying by choice and not necessity. I had to go. So here I am, no longer suckling the Disney teet, but what else am I doing? What can I do in support of a sustainable economic system, one that allows all to succeed in their chosen way? Success defined by net worth is the only success we recognize. We wave our flags celebrating our freedom but there is no freedom without economic security, so are we not all actually enslaved? There are so many other ways to have a fulfilling life. Actually there are nothing BUT better ways to be fulfilled. We just don’t recognize or value them. How do I spend the remainder of my life fighting for that kind of society?
I don’t have an answer yet. But posing the question is necessary to find an answer. Stay tuned as I struggle toward it. What I know right now is that money is very much not the answer.
Solidarity.
dawnhalloran 