money ain't but a thing 1 of 3

MONEY AIN’T BUT A THING

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note: a huge thank you to the mystery minion who sent #10 cans of storage food ( again! ).  Consider your readership dues paid for the next year.
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I was motivated to write this article from a combination of two minions comments, one some time ago and one recently.  So props to you, yo!  The first was that the more money a prepper had, the more they were likely to piss it away and have less to show for it whereas a poor prepper thought out each purchase and ended up with better preps, cheaper.  The second comment was that by being out of debt he was living a much higher quality of life than others making far more money ( but being in debt ).  There was actually a third comment, about how well an LEO position paid in my old home town, which also lit a fire under my subconscious to come up with this article idea, which is just a mash-up of two or three ideas.  Money ain’t but a thing, yo.  It doesn’t do you as much good as you think, either in this life or in preparing for another. 

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Money is a tool to be used.  Not an end to itself.  A hammer, by itself, is a clever steel shape.  But not even very aesthetic.  It isn’t a piece of art to admire.  It only gains value when you use it as a tool.  Money should only be valued for its use as a tool ( a substitution for barter to reward labor ).  Yet most people, and I mean like 99% of folks in a modern society, place a mystical religious icon value to it, to be valued for itself rather than what it can accomplish.  We are a nation ( or a globe ) consumed daily with the worship of the false idol of money for monies sake.  We always claim it is a valuable tool, but then we act like the tool itself is more valuable than what it accomplishes.  A hammer will always have use as a tool, even if we run out of steel nails.  Money, on the other hand, is a company chit only good for use at the company store, and only good as long as the company doesn’t go bankrupt.  Which they all do.

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Fun filled fact.  The worlds longest running company lasting something like 1500 years.  That is not a typo-one thousand five hundred ( although, note, I might be off a smidge here as I’m going by memory ) years.  The first government subsidized temples in Japan were built by them, and even right before bankruptcy they still built the odd one or two.  This construction company ran uninterrupted all those years, through violent civil wars and complete economic disruptions, and then finally succumbed a few years ago.  NO company on earth lasts anywhere near as long, and they usually don’t even outlive empires, which are rather fragile things themselves.

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All that money you lust after, it has value as a barter facilitator right up to the moment your economy bites the big one.  Then it isn’t even worth much as toilet paper.  If my best buddy in the whole wide world, someone I trust with my life, came to me and said, hey, I want you to pay me gold for a stack of promissory notes  which I’ll redeem every payday, with interest ( and he worked at a good paying job which was very dangerous ), I think I would tell him to kiss my ass.  His word is solid, but his ability to pay is compromised.  That is the money in your wallet.  Good as gold, until the day it ain’t.  Yet people act like money is the most important thing in their lives.  Romances are built on it, marriages flounder on it, up to half of all waking hours are devoted to acquiring it.  Otherwise intelligent people stress over not having an excess of it ( nobody wants too little of it, unable to feed and shelter themselves, but everyone worries about not having far more than that minimum ).

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Now, I’m the last one to throw a stone in a glass house, accusing others of materialism.  I don’t buy a whole lot of preps ( or perhaps I do compared to others spending far more on shelter and transportation ), as I’m pretty well squared away even if you can never stop as you never have enough of everything, but I buy the heck out of reference books.  It is a sick addiction, and I can’t even convince myself that it is even an investment anymore.  I still learn something new every day, and gaining knowledge is never a waste, but I could learn the same with free library books and the Internet.  At this point, I’m collecting dead tree trophies.  So, we all buy too much crap, then convince ourselves it is to beat inflation or to invest with a soon to be worthless currency, or it is for the End Of The World ( same as investing, one could argue ).  These are not invalid arguments, but they are also cop-outs at times.  I’m not even worried about what I’ve spent, but more about having to go cold turkey and suffer withdrawals.

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So even someone who cares very little about money can fall for its Siren call.  Sure, when I was a young punk ass teenager, I fixated on money as I had very little ( I tried working a weekend job but there was the transportation issue as well as the free time issue and I felt it wasn’t worth it ).  And when I joined the military I pissed it all away on nothing of substance.  But by then I had read and re-read and read a couple of more times ( the beer budget was always competing with the book budget in those days, and I didn’t have a huge library so I kept reading the goods ones over ) Long’s book on living without a salary and I realized my initial disdain for work was correct.  And I’ve had an uneasy relationship with money since.  It was a good thing I didn’t love it more than life itself, since the evil demon spawn of Lucifer took almost all of it for twenty years ( in working 33 years I’ve seen about 10 years worth of my pay ). 

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More Tomorrow.

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