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I have decided this in light of the fact that as we gradually learnt to earn money rather than make food, I think our society began a turn for the worse.
I think that the more we concentrate on the $$, the more we lose out in our lives. Money also places a step between what we do, and what we get.
I was at work today, and as most of you know, my department has been outsourced. So all project work has stopped, and I'm sitting at work today staring at the wall wondering what projects I *would* have done if I still had any left.... as you do ... when I realised that what I do at work has *no bearing whatsoever* on the food I provide at home for my husband and friends.
I think a part of the process that lead to this realisation is that during my holidays, I made bread a couple of times, or rather baked bready products. Yes, I used a breadmachine to do the initial hard work, and then I shaped and rose and baked and served it. But the feeling of pleasure to just make this bread was immense! And what did it cost me? $1.50 for the mix, maybe a dollar in electricty and one and a half hours of my time. But the sweet buns rose like DD cup breasts, and the italian bread was nicely crusty and smelled of 'erbs and I'd even glazed them with a little milk. And I felt proud of the fact that I'd made this bread, from assembling it to the end. And then having enough not only for me and Cheshire and Mum and Dad and Brother and a friend was fantastic.
So I'm at work.... staring at the wall.... and realising how little work has to do with reality, which is a theme I have been thinking about for a while. But back to the money being the root of all evil. When you produce something with your hands, you have something you can hold up and look at, and admire, or throw it in the bin, or burn, or something physical and tangible in the real world. But I don't get that from work - instead, I get some blips on a screen and later I can translate those blips into tangibles like food and milk. But there's no relation between the work and the bread.
Going back to my diatribe on Starhawk, she talks about the Younger Self and how witches try to learn to work with, and then communicate back to, the Younger Self, to try and "balance" a person's internal workings. The Younger Self works with absolutes and tangibles and intangibles, and the Talking Self thinks in concepts and problem solving logically and in numbers (read dollars.) So as we grow further and further into the "Where's The Money" phase of existance, we've had to start realising the need to leave the money behind and thing of the tangibles. I mean that when I bake bread and feed it to people I love, my Younger Self is happy, feeling good, and making other people feeling good. Bread is a symbol; the wheat, the yeast, milk, sugar and salt, all working together to produce a single entity which would be tasteless without any of the parts, and it describes life and community the same way. My family without any of its parts would be .... very different.
So the way I'm thinking right now, our Society (as the external entity in which we all live) is getting deeper and deeper into the demands for money, which does not satisfy the Younger Self, and only satisfies the Talking Self. The individual in our Society (ie, myself, you lot reading this, the individual what makes every day decisions a and is affected by the societal silliness) is starting to look for ways to satisfy the Younger Self, hence the move away from Christianity and into more experiencial and different ways of living.
And example of this is insurance. I've yet to find an insurance company that wasn't paranoid. I've yet to find an insurance comapany that DOESN'T WANT THEIR CLIENTS TO BE SCARED, FRIGHTENED, AND AS SECURELY LOCKED IN AS POSSIBLE. It all comes down to money. I see advertisements telling me how evil people will break into my house, but that's ok, because the Insurance company will replace everything they steal. I refuse to be scared. I refuse to be frightened. I refuse to be as locked in as securely as possible. (Apparently that's also a very Sagittarian desire.) I've heard rumours that the ratio of crime to per head of population is the same now as it was 100 years ago. But when you open yourself to the daily onslaught called "the news" all you hear about it how frightening, scary, and dangerous the outside world is. Outisde world meaning outside your homes of course.
But so what if someone steals all my belongings. I have my husband. I have insurance. I take reasonable cautions, but I'd also like to be able to get out of the house in a hurry if there is a fire. They're just belongings, and sure some of them are irreplacable, but how often do you pull out the wedding photos for a gander anyway?
But Insurance companies think only in terms of the bottom line. The good old $$. They're not the only one though. And the police! Don't get me started with the bloody advertising they put out on TV. Just give in, don't leave your house FOR GOD SAKE JUST STAY STILL! IT'S TOO SCARY OUTSIDE TO EVEN GET YOUR NEWSPAPER! Someone will run you over when you bend over to pick it up! (Now that would be hard to explain to a dr .... I was bending over ... um... and it just rammed.... um... and there was this open condom.....somewhere....um...please get rid of it...LOL I am a sick puppy.)
Anyway, insurance companies are only an example. The societal expectation of "Money" in and for its own sake (shareholding for example.....another rant there later) drives actions like Accountants to question a $150 internal charge for a printer that their department owns but just isn't operational yet, or else deny a request for firewall software because he "doesn't see the point in it when it will shortly be someone else's problem." Insurance companies making people scared so that people a) buy insurance and b) they lock the house up so no one can get in or out without three codes, two keys, and some deadlocks in place. Police trying to "shock" people into not drink driving - we watch more horror and schlock than we ever had, and they think a stupid 30 second advertisement is going to make a difference?? But it all sends a subtle signal - stay home. Be afraid.
I think I drifted from my money rant and into the fear rant a bit. You get that. :-) I think money is over rated in our current society, and that as individuals we are starting to look for something to satisfy the other urges in life. I think that in Society there are the seeds of backlash against a purely financial drive - ie the companies that these days try to be more caring for the environment. There's a catchy phrase for them, but I can't remember. It's not just the environment, it's also trying to be nicer to the community and stuff like that. They have the power, they should be using it wisely anyway. Do those extra few cents in a shareholders paycheck provide any one with any particularly good feelings? I'd have to say ... not really. I just think that sometimes, what companies should do and what they actually do are two very different things.
Calli
I think that the more we concentrate on the $$, the more we lose out in our lives. Money also places a step between what we do, and what we get.
I was at work today, and as most of you know, my department has been outsourced. So all project work has stopped, and I'm sitting at work today staring at the wall wondering what projects I *would* have done if I still had any left.... as you do ... when I realised that what I do at work has *no bearing whatsoever* on the food I provide at home for my husband and friends.
I think a part of the process that lead to this realisation is that during my holidays, I made bread a couple of times, or rather baked bready products. Yes, I used a breadmachine to do the initial hard work, and then I shaped and rose and baked and served it. But the feeling of pleasure to just make this bread was immense! And what did it cost me? $1.50 for the mix, maybe a dollar in electricty and one and a half hours of my time. But the sweet buns rose like DD cup breasts, and the italian bread was nicely crusty and smelled of 'erbs and I'd even glazed them with a little milk. And I felt proud of the fact that I'd made this bread, from assembling it to the end. And then having enough not only for me and Cheshire and Mum and Dad and Brother and a friend was fantastic.
So I'm at work.... staring at the wall.... and realising how little work has to do with reality, which is a theme I have been thinking about for a while. But back to the money being the root of all evil. When you produce something with your hands, you have something you can hold up and look at, and admire, or throw it in the bin, or burn, or something physical and tangible in the real world. But I don't get that from work - instead, I get some blips on a screen and later I can translate those blips into tangibles like food and milk. But there's no relation between the work and the bread.
Going back to my diatribe on Starhawk, she talks about the Younger Self and how witches try to learn to work with, and then communicate back to, the Younger Self, to try and "balance" a person's internal workings. The Younger Self works with absolutes and tangibles and intangibles, and the Talking Self thinks in concepts and problem solving logically and in numbers (read dollars.) So as we grow further and further into the "Where's The Money" phase of existance, we've had to start realising the need to leave the money behind and thing of the tangibles. I mean that when I bake bread and feed it to people I love, my Younger Self is happy, feeling good, and making other people feeling good. Bread is a symbol; the wheat, the yeast, milk, sugar and salt, all working together to produce a single entity which would be tasteless without any of the parts, and it describes life and community the same way. My family without any of its parts would be .... very different.
So the way I'm thinking right now, our Society (as the external entity in which we all live) is getting deeper and deeper into the demands for money, which does not satisfy the Younger Self, and only satisfies the Talking Self. The individual in our Society (ie, myself, you lot reading this, the individual what makes every day decisions a and is affected by the societal silliness) is starting to look for ways to satisfy the Younger Self, hence the move away from Christianity and into more experiencial and different ways of living.
And example of this is insurance. I've yet to find an insurance company that wasn't paranoid. I've yet to find an insurance comapany that DOESN'T WANT THEIR CLIENTS TO BE SCARED, FRIGHTENED, AND AS SECURELY LOCKED IN AS POSSIBLE. It all comes down to money. I see advertisements telling me how evil people will break into my house, but that's ok, because the Insurance company will replace everything they steal. I refuse to be scared. I refuse to be frightened. I refuse to be as locked in as securely as possible. (Apparently that's also a very Sagittarian desire.) I've heard rumours that the ratio of crime to per head of population is the same now as it was 100 years ago. But when you open yourself to the daily onslaught called "the news" all you hear about it how frightening, scary, and dangerous the outside world is. Outisde world meaning outside your homes of course.
But so what if someone steals all my belongings. I have my husband. I have insurance. I take reasonable cautions, but I'd also like to be able to get out of the house in a hurry if there is a fire. They're just belongings, and sure some of them are irreplacable, but how often do you pull out the wedding photos for a gander anyway?
But Insurance companies think only in terms of the bottom line. The good old $$. They're not the only one though. And the police! Don't get me started with the bloody advertising they put out on TV. Just give in, don't leave your house FOR GOD SAKE JUST STAY STILL! IT'S TOO SCARY OUTSIDE TO EVEN GET YOUR NEWSPAPER! Someone will run you over when you bend over to pick it up! (Now that would be hard to explain to a dr .... I was bending over ... um... and it just rammed.... um... and there was this open condom.....somewhere....um...please get rid of it...LOL I am a sick puppy.)
Anyway, insurance companies are only an example. The societal expectation of "Money" in and for its own sake (shareholding for example.....another rant there later) drives actions like Accountants to question a $150 internal charge for a printer that their department owns but just isn't operational yet, or else deny a request for firewall software because he "doesn't see the point in it when it will shortly be someone else's problem." Insurance companies making people scared so that people a) buy insurance and b) they lock the house up so no one can get in or out without three codes, two keys, and some deadlocks in place. Police trying to "shock" people into not drink driving - we watch more horror and schlock than we ever had, and they think a stupid 30 second advertisement is going to make a difference?? But it all sends a subtle signal - stay home. Be afraid.
I think I drifted from my money rant and into the fear rant a bit. You get that. :-) I think money is over rated in our current society, and that as individuals we are starting to look for something to satisfy the other urges in life. I think that in Society there are the seeds of backlash against a purely financial drive - ie the companies that these days try to be more caring for the environment. There's a catchy phrase for them, but I can't remember. It's not just the environment, it's also trying to be nicer to the community and stuff like that. They have the power, they should be using it wisely anyway. Do those extra few cents in a shareholders paycheck provide any one with any particularly good feelings? I'd have to say ... not really. I just think that sometimes, what companies should do and what they actually do are two very different things.
Calli
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Being robbed
Date: 2004-01-13 04:31 pm (UTC)From:I wouldn't like to have that happen again. I don't believe in living in a complete fortress, but I enjoy the fruits of my labour and I wouldn't want someone to take them. So I will take some precations.
I am still upset at my favourite pair of dance shoes being lost with my luggage. I will never again allow I really like that is irreplacable to travel in the hold of an aircraft. This mainly means I take any jewelry in my hand luggage.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-21 01:49 am (UTC)From: (Anonymous)I agree and think that money is overrated, but it is also a powerful driving force for society and the economy. The economy is all about efficiency, but whether people have more free time in their lives now due to the supposed efficiency benefits is a debate for another time.
As a software engineer, I too question the value of my work. For me, work is rearranging characters which live on magnetic media and exist only in the virtual world. It isn't real. But I get paid for it. Yes, there is a lack of satisfaction from the fact that there is no real end product that you can put your hands on and touch (except I guess the CD the software will get burned to but that doesn't count).
Yes, that was the phrase!
Date: 2004-01-21 09:40 am (UTC)From:Thanks!
Calli