Do you have a dependable job?
Can you purchase a house and vehicle suited to your station? Can you afford the time and money to maintain them? Do you pay for services and restaurant meals when you are too tired from working? How much of your salary goes to pay credit interest, insurance costs, the pharmacist and other expenditures to maintain this job? Taxes take a cut too, more if you smoke or drink or drive for work. Should I mention those empty unpaid hours commuting away from family, or how much you are contributing to carbon emissions? Yes, its dependable all right, if you keep on this treadmill you will always be dependent on a job.
Just how dependable is this way of life, anyway? It only functions properly if a person is not too young, too old, too damaged, too poor, or too ill. Those among us without money are stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, dysfunction and hardship. When you can afford to get to a grocery store, the small quantity you buy is much more expensive than the larger size you can't afford. You must have a permanent address to be connected, drive, receive social and medical assistance and even vote. In our society, to be alive costs money, so what are you to do when you don’t have any?
In both lifestyles, either way, we all work as hard as we can to survive our incarceration in this world of monetary supremacy. We slave, every day the same, at endless meaningless toil. The years of our lives slip by as each day we silently watch the clock and count down the time until we can go home. Finally where we have wanted to be all day, burned out and tuned out, we watch the screen and sleep, only to rise and start again.
Our existence reduced to a fog of worry, guilt and helplessness under the power of money. The people profiting from our anguish can well afford to manipulate things in their favour. We are so submissive, even governments openly profit from this manipulation. It is destroying our healthcare and keeping people sedated and confused.
Those who can pay for perceived perfection, like celebrities and moguls, are worshiped and honoured. To their denigration, as we vicariously and viciously verify value from their visualization. The masses, perhaps unwittingly, trying to imitate this expensive illusion, give consensus to its pretense. A constant bombardment of seductive paid messages and social cues keep this compulsion alive.
The pleasure of buying the newest thing, clothes not yet worn or sights not yet seen, is a powerful intoxicant. The desire to spend, the urge, the indignant justification, it seems so urgent at the point of purchase. The need is fleeting, but the craving relentless and the fix never enough. Just like with any addiction, this distractful preoccupation with money makes us forsake other things of value.
The perfection precept is also used to isolate and humiliate nonconformists into silent submission. Are we cursed to believe we’re inadequate and unacceptable if we don’t have all the things we want? This belief can leave us feeling forsaken, confused, and insecure about who we are and what we want from life. Disappointments leave us bitter and full of negative judgement thoughts about ourselves, and others.
As a result, we all show up, but never show ourselves. We use disguises to face the world and deceive people to get what we want from them. She is not the person she appears to be when she smiles at you from the page, the TV, or beside the cash register. Everyday we put on blinders so we can pretend, like everyone else, not to see our bondage. We hide from our suffering with drugs, lust, gluttony and crime.
Dark obsessive oppressing greed has created a cut throat unforgiving, uncompassionate culture which is causing so much hardship to the entire world. Do we really believe the notion that mother earth has been rendered worthless, all used up and wrecked beyond repair? How else can we justify the way we slave, exploit, buy and then just throw away? It is wrong to believe the poor and suffering have somehow caused their own demise and we are above reproach. Poverty and slavery, exploiting this planet and her people, should not be accepted as the natural progression of our age.
In devoting ourselves to money we have erroneously put our efforts into an imaginary reality. Basing our existence on irrelative assumptions has continually had a negative impact on the quality of our lives. It feeds our insatiable compulsions, keeping us hostage like spoilt self-indulgent children, perverting our needs and skewing our values. Everything now askew and distorted we can no longer see how it really is.
If money is so great why hasn’t it satisfied our needs yet? The idolization of money will be the downfall of modern society. After all, money is only paper, a number, a key stroke, a digit in a computer. It is abstract, inanimate, changeable, transient and subjective. Still its lack of value is destroying the fabric of our present civilization.
How difficult life is made for people, when everything they want can be purchased, but everything they really need cannot. You can’t buy loyalty in a new box, your mate off the rack, or put your life’s dreams on layaway. You can buy the cutest puppy and end up with a horrid dog. Wanting only what’s advertised, one misses free things more precious and valuable we could ever dream. Life is never as advertised; advertising is way overrated.
Don’t give up your human birthright to buy into this “emperor’s new clothes” mentality. It is more important to chase a good life than money to buy things, and a good mate is better than a beautiful one. Being fixated on having everything denies the reality that sometimes you just need some things. Life is wasted on vanity and ego grasping, neither is ever satisfied.
No longer can we pretend to connect our happiness to things that ultimately only bring us sorrow, and disconnect ourselves from what ultimately will bring us joy. Accept this and let go of the delusions of this age. It is not too late to remove the blinders and masks to see our existence in another light. Success is in convincing our beast to walk the path free of society’s monetary manipulations. Our natural state is not in the clutches of the pursuit of money, if it were, contentment and prosperity would follow us to work each day.
