Every time I put Fred (my dog) on a leash he gets himself hung up. Trees, swings, BBQ’s, picnic tables… anything with legs is like kryptonite for his brain. Ping pong tables are his absolute nightmare.
I’m pretty sure he has no idea that the leash exists… until he can’t move. And even then…
I was freeing Fred for the 777th time… patiently explaining the concept of a leash… wondering if he’d ever get it. And it occurred to me that people are no different. We too are tethered, hung up, and unaware of it.
Society holds our leash. And we are forever wrapping ourselves around money, relationships, and health. Other stuff too, but those are the biggies.
The social condition
The instant we’re born people start turning the screws on us. Shaping us into the people they think we should be. Equipping us with the skills and beliefs that they have determined are “best for us”.
Please and thank you. The pledge of allegiance. Right and wrong. Religion. School. Responsibility. Home. Career. Marriage. Family. You know the dance.
I’m not saying these are bad things. “Please” and “thank you” make the world a happier place… even if people don’t mean it. And repeating the pledge of allegiance has proven an effective guard against insurrection. We all benefit from stability.
But I’m also not saying they are good things. For my money, there is no scarier horror story than a people under the spell of a great force… unawares.
So… are we a happy balance of individual and collective, inoculated against the fat tail risk of widespread sociopathic behavior?
Or are we suffering from mass hypnosis? Hundreds of millions of Manchurian candidates programmed with trigger phrases like “one day only sale”, “low interest rates”, “security”, “till death do us part”, “responsible adult behavior”, “family first”, “health and happiness”, and the like.
When millions believe that there is one “right” way for you to go about your life. When you look around and see masses waiting in line to pay too much for crappy coffee and shitty chain restaurant food. When you recognize that you are bobbing around in an ocean of people who are pursuing the same dreams, in the same ways, with the same tools… you’ve gotta admit, it’s far more likely that you live in “The Prisoners” village than a free society.
If you really think about it — and that’s a BIG if, because most people don’t want to think — but, if you’re one of the few who do, you will eventually come to this realization: in ways great and small, social conditioning has disfigured your view of the world.
It brings some interesting questions to mind. Where does society end… and we begin? Are we too far gone to figure that out? And… does it matter?
I’ve spent a lot of time playing with those questions.
Ideas
All ideas have their time. For example, a common school curriculum was effective at bringing a shared core of ideas to the citizens of a far flung country that had little ability to stay in contact with itself.
But times change. We don’t need school anymore. Tv and the internet do schools job much more efficiently.
The thing is… we’ve been conditioned to rely on school. Even those who recognize its poor educational value have built its free day care into their lives.
And the institution of school has developed an immune system. A protective infrastructure that identifies threats… and eliminates them.
This story is at play throughout our society.
Accordingly, it’s highly unlikely that anyone of us will ever get entirely “off leash”. So to find the next ideas… and what we’re capable of… leash management – you know, trying to keep from getting hung up on the same booby traps – is key.
But to do that, we’ve first got to recognize the leash is there. You’ll laugh to hear that more than once Fred has chewed his leash in half… and gone nowhere. He does not seem to be able to connect the dots between it… and his reduced mobility.
And as dumb as that sounds, I did the same thing. When I first stepped out of “the game”, I hovered within a thousand miles of California, where I used to live… for a year. When I went into Mexico, I hovered a few hundred miles from the US border for several months.
It took me a looong time to recognize that I was free to move about at will.
Since, I’ve been wandering the Americas… flaneuring. I didn’t make that word up. It’s a non-deadbeat sounding way of saying I haven’t been doing much but observing life and thinking about it.
I have deeply explored human performance, and by extension the human condition.
No I didn’t hole up in a library and read about it. I did it the old fashioned way…
… I lived it.
I stripped my life back down to bare wood and started over. At 48!
Mid life crisis? From the common perspective of society… absolutely.
But move your mental vantage point just a few degrees from where it is – if you can – and you might see a self-inflicted intervention.
After years of living with money, I wanted… no, it was more than that, I needed to live without it… or, with as little of it as possible. After years of pretending to “security”, I needed to face insecurity. After decades of domesticity… I had to be wild.
You may be wondering why I felt the need to do any of that.
Yeah… I wonder about that too.
I wish there was some super-cool answer. Like… it was all part of some carefully crafted master plan that ended with me flying rescue missions in a top secret, experimental helicopter that launched from a clandestine lair deep in a pristine wilderness, like Airwolf’s Stringfellow Hawk. But it wasn’t. The truth is far less glamorous… and flattering. For some reason, I couldn’t stop myself. I simply had to KNOW what it was like.
Often this adventure has been fantastically rewarding. Occasionally it has been… well, I think we’ve all heard about the deranged optometrist who fell into his lens grinder and made a spectacle out of himself.
Along the way I’ve consulted thousands of people in dozens of countries. Professional athletes. Big time coaches. Little time coaches. Bankers. Investors. Therapists. Scientists. Teachers. Business owners. Explorers. Captains of boats. Captains of industry. Janitors. Bankers. Government officials. Criminals. Money launderers. (Yes, there are subtle differences between those last four) Also, villagers, and subsistence farmers. The list continues…
Some of those conversations were amazing. A few were scary. Two or three made me want to tear my head off and light it on fire.
This 3 part series is born from all that. In it I’m going to have some fun playing with the big three that we all get our leash tangled in… money, relationships, and health.
The usual shenanigans will ensue. I’ll say some crazy sounding stuff. Invent a few words. And cobble together some unique lenses to view these topics through.
I’m not saying I have this stuff all figured out. I don’t. And I’m not offering you any prescriptions or solutions. Your life is yours. I have no stake in how you live it. I’m just thinking out loud… so to speak. Wondering… is the way we’re living, the way we want to live?
All I ask of you is what any half-baked thinker would ask: that you open your mind just enough to give it all a fair shake. When you disagree with me – and you will – please ask yourself if it’s because there’s no way that what I’m saying can be True, or because there’s no way that you want it to be true.
Ok. I’m ready whenever you are…
PART 1 – MONEY
Money is our most pervasive myth.
In the way that water can find it’s way into every little nook and cranny… money wiggles its way into every aspect of human life.
A brief history
Pre-money, people bartered. But equivalence was often an issue.
Also, a lot of the stuff they bartered… like livestock, pots, tools, grain and the like was tough to move around with. So they converted it converted to symbols.
The first “money” was actual symbols. Miniature cattle, or tools, or pots that one carried in their pocket. This turned out to be a big pain in the ass. Sometimes literally, when one sat on one of their pointier symbols.
Eventually, money evolved into coins.
Later gold became the standard because it was rare and held a widespread, constant value.
But as the amount of goods and services grew there wasn’t enough gold around to pay for them all, if gold was to stay at a constant value. So gold was abandoned in favor of fiat, which is what we use today.
The hoarding games
I’ve visited several villages where people still prefer barter to money. If the efficient use of resources is your thing, you’d like these places.
For example, the Garifuna of the Caribbean use money when they deal with the outside world. Amongst themselves they prefer to barter. Trading net mending for fish. Fish for butter and eggs. Butter and eggs for a table and chairs. You get the picture.
It does one person no good to have more fish than they can eat. Or to have more eggs and butter than they need. Or more chairs than butts. So a balance of goods and services emerges. No hoarding.
But when real things are converted into abstract ones… there is a perceived benefit to stockpiling. The hoarding begins.
And it continues way after one surpasses what they can use… multiple houses… and cars. I have a friend who is terrified to swim in very deep water. I’m always trying to explain to him that there’s no functional difference between fifteen feet and fifteen hundred feet.
The same is true with money. The value of whatever one has beyond what they can use, is purely psychological.
The joy of having problems
The BIG idea behind money of course, is the belief that it can free us.
It can NOT.
You’re stressed to the gills over making your house payment. Car payment too. And property taxes will soon be due. If only you had the money to pay it all off. You’d be free.
There’s a knock at the door. Your long lost Uncle Ollie, whom you’ve never met before, just bit the dust and he left you some money. As luck would have it… enough to pay everything off.
You pay it all off.
Life is good.
For awhile.
But then… the house you always wanted pops up on the market. It’s reachable.
A new model car appears and makes yours look shabby. No “successful” person transports themselves around in a shabby vehicle. Also, a 120” flat panel is released.
You work hard. You’re “responsible”. You deserve that stuff.
In only a short while you’re back in the boiling water.
Freedom is a state of mind. The person who believes that a certain amount of money will magically flip a switch in their head does not understand anything about human nature. Whatever we do or do not have… we are always in the same space. The basic truth about human life is that our joy is found in the process do ridding ourselves of our problems, not in being rid of them.
The Truth of this is staring you square in the face. Your boss is no more free than you. Nor is your boss’s boss. And this holds true on up the line.
I have been a consultant to some of the richest people on earth. They still report to work every day.
Money is not wealth
Mistaking money for wealth is a critical error.
Wealth is tangible things like cattle, property, lumber, health, energy, knowledge, fitness… and the free time to enjoy them.
Money is merely it’s symbol. Like the word “tree” is to an actual tree.
Yes, money can be converted into wealth. But until it is, it is only a symbol.
Let’s play a game. I’m gifting you two million.
You’re welcome.
We’ll throw a few filters on your two mil, and see where it takes us.
For starters let’s say you put it all in the bank. Every morning you wake up, get a cup of coffee, open up your banking app, and look at your bank balance. All those zeroes give you the warm fuzzies.
But then one day you think, the Kardashians have a nice crib… I should too. So you spend it all on a house.
The next morning you wake up in your new rich man house… get your cup of joe, and check your bank app.
Minus thirty dollars! Shit, you forgot that your bank charged a fee for letting your balance drop below one million. Shame on you!
According to the bank, you’re worse than broke.
But you are, in fact, wealthier than you were yesterday. You’re just looking at a cash flow problem.
Believe it or not, this is exactly what happened in the Great Depression. The wealthiest nation on earth woke up one morning to find it had a cash flow problem. On that fateful day, the United States was comfortably resting in a nest of the exact same bounty of resources as it had the day before. The same number of factories and fields. The same labor force. The same collective might, intelligence, and imagination. But confusing money with wealth led to all sorts of banking bullshit and economic mumbo jumbo. And that ultimately led to the citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth suffering for years… while living in the midst of plenty.
Total absurdity.
If you find that hard to believe, let’s invert it. You’re lost in the great wilds of Alaska. A thousand miles from civilization… in the middle of winter. You have no cell service. But you do have a handy dandy bunch of tools, and a “Building Log Cabins For Dummies” book.
You also have that two million I gave you, in cash, in your backpack. Apparently, you don’t trust banks.
The money can’t help you. Your wealth in this pickle is true wealth. The natural resources around you, the knowledge of how to use them to survive in wildness, and the energy to make it so.
The only thing all that cash would be good for: a fire so you didn’t freeze to death.
Imagine striking that match.
Sleight of mind. The illusion of security
Security is another storyline in the money narrative. To have money is to be financially secure. Being financially secure is lazily extrapolated into general security.
To be honest, I’ve fallen for this too.
This sleight of mind reveals our intense dislike of uncertainty.
We believe that life will continue to go on the way it has gone on. The sun will continue to rise. We will gradually age. The economy will steadily grow. Of course, there will be localized hiccups. But the overall trend of life will be as it always has been.
Therefor, if you have enough money saved up to endure the hiccup… you’ll be secure.
The thing about life is… it goes on the way it has gone on… until it doesn’t.
I awoke early one morning… a morning like the hundreds that had preceded it, to find my wife… the mother of my children, our chief boo boo fixer… lying dead on the floor. The reaper standing over her… rubbing it’s boney hands together like a fly over an unattended burger.
I knelt over her in total despair. Then I remembered… I had years worth of cash saved at the time. I reached out in my mind to the reaper… hoping to strike a bargain.
No deal.
At that very instant the reality of life pierced my mind like a diamond tipped bullet. There is no such thing as security. (Need I remind you that we are all standing on a spinning rock that’s rocketing through an unimaginably vast and violent universe?)
And money? In the most important moment of my life, facing that crisis I’d been saving for… money was proven impotent.
My knowledge of CPR, being fit enough to perform it solo for more than eleven minutes, AND my wife’s willingness to return were what saved our family that morning.
Uncertainty is baked into life. Your response to it reveals how honest you are with yourself.
Your money or your life… or… I’m better than you
Let’s play another game with your two mil: You’re lying on your death bed. It was a surprise that this happened. You were healthy only days ago. And had many exciting projects on your plate.
I imagine it’s often this way.
And as you draw your last breath Christopher Walken appears. (It would have to be Christopher Walken… don’t you think?) Anyway, he has an offer. One more healthy week of life… guaranteed. After which… no promises. Maybe another 30 years. Maybe 30 seconds.
The catch? You leave the hospital with nothing more than your gown. That two mil is forfeit.
Do you take the deal?
Hell yes you do. A guaranteed week of life is more than you currently have. And when you walk out of that hospital… as naked as the day you were born, you will know the joy that Ebenezer Scrooge knew that Christmas morning.
Therefor, if you are alive… and healthy, which you hopefully are. You have an asset that you would pay at least two million for.
In other words, you’re wealthy!
But since everyone around you is also alive and ostensibly healthy too… you probably don’t feel so wealthy.
Because another aspect of money is… it’s a way we keep score. A way we compare ourself to others.
Comparing is a destructive habit.
Someone tells you you’re attractive. That feels good.
But then you think… attractive compared to what? So you ask if you are more or less attractive than that person in the corner… the one in the blue shirt.
Less, they say.
Good feeling gone.
Idle hands, wastrels, the lazy, and the theory of just deserts.
When Belize gained it’s independence from Great Britain in the 1980’s, it packed up all of the machinery that automated the incredibly demanding job of sugar cane harvesting (Belize’s #1 export)… and sent it back to England.
Why?
To create jobs.
Here was a chance for a country to firmly plant both feet in the 20th century. Instead they opted for the 16th.
Work and money are inextricably linked in our minds.
The poor are poor because they’re dumb and lazy. The rich are where they are because they are smart and industrious. This is the theory of just deserts.
That makes money a sign of virtue… for people who have never explored beyond their postage stamp sized parcel of ‘reality’. Or, maybe I should more accurately say that if they have.. it’s been to explore the world through the twisted filter of The Four Seasons. Which is basically a high priced service that superimposes their postage stamp sized reality on the world.
Luxury travel is a way of going somewhere without ever having to arrive in a foreign place. Who wants to deal with the hassle of someone else’s language and customs? Obviously if these fuckers had any brains at all they’d all speak English and eat burgers and fries.
The smartest and most industrious people I have met, live outside of the game. They have fashioned a life of peace and dignity for themselves that the 99% couldn’t imagine… and therefor aren’t able to recognize for what it is.
The theory of just deserts is lazythink. An artifact of an era that most want to keep behind us.
The problem with linking work and pay is we no longer need humans to do much of the work that’s daily done. Baristas, factory workers, line cooks, waiters, and checkout clerks of every kind, are already unnecessary.
Soon technology will be able to kick truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, and pilots, and college professors to the curb too.
And if we make full use of all of this marvelous technology… we will have more and more goods and services available than ever before…
… and also fewer people than ever before will be able to afford them.
Unless we are willing to delink work and money.
What the muckety-mucks in Belize didn’t recognize… what we still don’t recognize, is that the purpose of machines has always been to free people from labor. Think dishwashing and laundry machines.
In other words, the machines work for both the manufacturer AND for society.
But… profit. Companies NEED to make a profit.
I agree. No one should be expected to conduct any business without the incentive of making a profit. The problem is we equate profit exclusively with money. Why can’t we rethink profit? Couldn’t it be the ability to live with dignity in a beautiful place? Or some other form of REAL wealth?
The suggestion is that we’re operating with an outdated system of accounting. Until we get that sorted, we will think of machines solely as a means for reducing a companies overhead. And that’s an us or them scenario.
How ironic it is to be living in the technological age, and be unable to make thorough use of our technologies, because of our hang up with money.
The difficulty with all this is that it’s not easy to explain this to the world at large. Because we are the descendants of centuries of relative material scarcity.
But that scarcity no longer exists. And just as it was once difficult to get everyone on board the round earth bus (it still is in the NBA), it is hard to get it through to the common sense of society that our thinking about money is obsolete.
Mo money mo happy?
And now a message from our sponsors: A family gets into a shiny new car. They’re all wearing clean, crisp, new clothes. The kids have new school backpacks.
As they back out of the driveway we look through the car windows at their smiling faces. In those windows we can also see the reflection of their sparkling McMansion.
Happy parents taking their happy kids to school.
Along the way they pass older cars. Only one parent is driving those kids. They pass kids walking to school… alone. They’re wearing older clothes, and have older backpacks. None looks happy.
The message is clear. More money, more happy.
Is it true?
Not for me.
I have lived in McMansions, and in a 9’ x 8’ camper. I’ve had lots of money, and none. The biggest difference between those states, for me… the brand of beer I drank.
Whatever sentiments that accompanied those experiences were provided solely by me. One thing I have discovered in my latest experiment is that ALL conflict is self-conflict. We’ll get to that later on in the series.
My experience has brought another question to mind: if we are so adaptable… why don’t we just adapt ourselves to the simplest lifestyle? We’ll also tackle that later.
There’s no doubt that money can make life easier. It’s easier to move about. And it can make some problems go away. Especially in the third world.
But easier is rarely simpler. Get used to solving your problems with money and they have a way of reoccurring… and at progressively greater expense. And it has been my experience that most people do not use money to make their lives simpler, or better.
Over the last year we three (myself and two teenage boys) have survived very comfortably on less than $5,000 US. When the pandemic kicked in and pushed pause on our nomadic lifestyle, we found a big ranch and worked out a deal where we bartered a few hours of labor for food and a place to park.
We’re like ranch hands in the old west. And the experience has been extraordinary. We are all stronger, healthier, and more capable than when we checked into this place.
In fact, this – – the worst year the world has had in my lifetime, the fifty-sixth year of my life, the lowest yearly income of my entire working life – – has been the best year of my life.
I’m not suggesting you should live like me. Nor am I recommending any way of life to you. Your life is yours. I’m only sharing my personal experience.
But I find it interesting that although this simple, off the nipple of the system way of living, is how 99% of humanity has lived since the dawn of society… it does not even show on the radar of your average “highly educated” first worlder.
When you have been conditioned to see “A”… “A” is all you can see.
Total Dependency
Only 100 years ago the ability to feed, shelter, clothe, entertain, and otherwise care for oneself was the common knowledge of every sane person. I doubt even one in ten first worlders has that knowledge today.
We pay for that stuff now. And we are less free because of it. We have in fact been trained to be totally dependent on the system for our survival. Which only accentuates the importance of money.
The geniuses among us have agreed to let the bankers reduce our life reduced to a single financial metric. A credit score. Which, for all intents and purposes is your life score. Which, of course, is based upon how well you serve the system.
Wasn’t the system invented to serve us?
Anyway, what an impoverished view of human life.
Security is again the premise lurking behind our life score. And again the premise is utter bullshit.
After a lifetime of studying human decision making the GREAT Daniel Khaneman said that we the people don’t really think. We find someone we want to trust, and adopt their position.
Referred thinking works better for the referror than the refer-ee. And the US banking system is a bad entity to want to trust. It has stolen more from the inhabitants of this world than every non-performing loan ever issued in the history of man.
One second order result of this total refusal to think is a person paying $2,000 for monthly rent because they couldn’t qualify for a mortgage with a $1,200 monthly payment. If they can find someone to rent to them.
The upshot of ALL of this is the feeling that life is nothing more than a long and drawn out financial exercise.
And if you take it up the fanny enough times… you’ll get a few years at the end of your “one wild and precious life” to do whatever you want with…
… maybe.
Truth
Like Santa Claus, right and wrong, and lines of longitude and latitude, money is nothing more than a creation of the human imagination.
Therefor, everything associated with money, like monetary theory and economics is also imaginary.
If every human vanished from the face of the earth tomorrow… animals would still exist.
Natural resources and gravity too. The planets would still orbit the sun with Swiss precision. The seasons would still change. And there would still be earthquakes and hurricanes.
But money and economics and money theory and every other theory and “science” associated with that stuff would disappear with us.
In other words, money is just another creation of the human imagination. Another faith based system. And like all faith based systems, it only has the power that we project onto it.
Next up… relationships.