Archive for the ‘Money’ Category

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Too Busy

6 July 2019

What keeps us too busy? Our jobs, our lives, taking the kids to soccer practice, making money to buy all the extras in life that we think we need. Making money is behind most things that we do, that and preparing our children to follow in our footsteps.

Is it a conspiracy? Sort of. I don’t think that some secret group sat down and decided to make us all wage-slaves by addicting us to the pleasures of the consumer culture. But employees who are not too aware of the evil things done on their behalf around the world are preferable to employees who are politically active and take the time to understand the consequences of their actions. Citizens who are satisfied by consumerism are preferable (from the perspective of the government) to citizens who are asking if there is more to life than the culture of consumption and making enough money to pay for it.

Too many of us are…

  • Too focused on career and family to think about our place in the world, what our country stands for, what our country is doing so we can enjoy cheap gas and cheap food.
  • Too busy to think about where our food comes from.
  • Too busy to make good food choices.
  • Too busy to learn the difference between good food and bad food.
  • Too busy to learn that the food choices we make affect the way other people live in other parts of the world and the whole world’s environment.
  • Too busy to care that watching mainstream news for 30 minutes does not make you well-informed.

I confess that I’ve rarely been that busy. I’ve always taken time when I wanted to and never been obsessed with winning the rat race…or even entering the rat race. If I had, I would have accomplished much more than I have in common cultural terms.

Of course I’m busy now, with two kids and a full-time job and getting ready to be poor.

Posted in Family, Money | Leave a Comment »

Retirement

1 September 2011

I want to retire in 6 years, when I’m 62. But my boys will be looking at college in the near future at that point, and it’s a little hard to conceive of retiring then.

Are other people so beaten down and empty-headed that they can’t think of anything they’d rather do with their life than work? Is that why so many people don’t retire until they die, or retire and then go back to work?

Posted in Money, Working | Leave a Comment »

Shrinking Paycheck

14 February 2011

So Wisconsin’s new Governor Walker is attempting to bust public employee unions. I know we’re all going to have to make sacrifices, but he’s going about it in a shitty way. I’m betting my paycheck is going to shrink by 5-10% this year.

Anyway, we’re going to have start being more careful about our expenditures than we’ve been in the last couple of years. This is probably just the beginning of a long decline. This is what all the money and financial bloggers have been predicting for years, that the decline will seem relatively slow to those of us experiencing it, but major losses will take place over a twenty-year period. That’s what Sharon Astyk always said, that there probably won’t be dramatic drops in income or standards of living, but that more and more people will enter into what she calls normal human poverty.

This is all part of the financial meltdown, climate change, and peak oil trio of disasters we’re facing.

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I Do Love My Country

9 May 2010

In case, based on recent posts, anyone is wondering.

But we’re on the wrong path. For us to be the kind of people we can and should be:

  • We have to get away from the senseless consumerism that drives the lives of so many of us.
  • We have to start making things here again.
  • We have to remember that money really does have value and the world is not going to keep loaning it to us forever for no reason just so we can buy more jet skis.
  • We have to remember why we exist as a nation in the first place, which is to give each of us the freedom to live our lives in liberty and to pursue happiness. And excessive taxation to satisfy the greed of others takes away freedom just the same as a police state does.
  • We can be poor as long as we have standards and ideals and rise above the level of dumb beasts. No doubt there have always been both kinds of poor people in this country, but one gets the impression that few of us, no matter how much money we happen to have, live our lives based on ideals any more.

I think the financial sector of the economy has taken over the country and is treating us as if we don’t care about anything more than we care about money. If we have become that people, then we need to un-become that people if we are not to become slaves as well. If we are not yet that people, we have to act as if ideals matter more than money.

Posted in Corporate Control, Money, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Learning the Value of Money

20 March 2010

One way to describe what’s happening in the world, and especially the US, right now is that we’re all learning the value of money. We’re learning it anew if we’ve never known it before, and we’re being reminded of it if we’ve only forgotten it.

If every day feels like Christmas, then you’re not living in reality, you’re living in a fantasy world. If, as an individual or a nation, it seems as if the laws of nature have been bypassed or cancelled, be assured they have not.

Money has value. If the place where you live does not tie the value of its money to a commodity, then the value of your money will vary (inflation and deflation), but it does have value. If it seems as if everyone has more money than they used to and that the level of material things in your culture increases more and more over time, be assured that the books are still in balance and that someone else in the world has less. Imbalances such as that can exist for a long time when defined in terms of a human life (that situation could be all the reality an individual knows), but the day of reckoning always comes.

It is that day of reckoning that we face in the next few years. You prepare for it by acquiring tangible assets, by saving, and by preparing to live without money as much as you can. But you cannot prepare yourself for it fully, no matter who you are how much you’ve got now. You can only do your best and bear in mind that flexibility and learning will be required.

Posted in Financial Meltdown, Money, TEOTWAWKI | Leave a Comment »

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