Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing
is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it
comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think
of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it
comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think
of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
Stephen King
The currency marketers trade in has not changed even
if the methods have. Emotion is what we exchange.
if the methods have. Emotion is what we exchange.
Simon Mainwaring
All currency is neurotic currency.
Norman O. Brown
Virginia is a peculiar place. When more than three snow flakes band together schools close, Starbucks shuts down, and people stay indoors shaking in their little boots, frightened to death as if evil spirits were circling their homes.
Money terrifies individuals even more than snow flakes or the prospect of having their brains eaten by zombies. Tell somebody that you know of ways to improve their income and watch these chicken-hearted somebodies scatter in all directions, tails tucked tightly between their hind legs. Speaking of money induces a type of terror that candy carrying strangers and the bogeyman are infamous for. The money thing petrifies the eternal toddlers modern society seems resigned to consist of.
On the surface, people appear to be frightened by money and terrorized by ink on paper. Innocent gatherings of nulls and zeroes can be particular disquieting. The truth is that the occurrence of money triggers panic in people but money is not the cause of the hysteria it seems to induce. Human beings are scared of themselves. Goodness, they are scared and suspicious of their own breath.
Fear fosters fudged facts. Children don't lie because they are devious little used car sales people, politicians, or journalists. They learn to lie because they expect that honesty may come at a price of unpredictable pain levels. The make-believe realm of the lie promises relative safety and instant comfort. Lies come along as intimate friends, cloaked as life saving saints on first sight who often tend to morph into towering demons later.
Peeps lie to their spouses about money and they royally deceive their friends. People lie to their parents, siblings, and children about money. Individuals lie to their government about money--"Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today." Herman Wouk--and in the most ghastly ways of all, people lie to themselves about money.
The most fertile environment for fear and resulting lies is intimacy. Family ties breed family lies. The greater the level of intimacy, the more preposterous the lies it can hatch. The sudden appearance of money and even just the prospect of zeroes seem to toss people into the cesspool section of intimacy. Touch hat stuff and when you realize the dimensions of the emotional dog pile you stepped into, you may wish you had instead stuck to the simple story that you're actually just a harmless ax murderer with a foot fetish.
On the surface, people appear to be frightened by money and terrorized by ink on paper. Innocent gatherings of nulls and zeroes can be particular disquieting. The truth is that the occurrence of money triggers panic in people but money is not the cause of the hysteria it seems to induce. Human beings are scared of themselves. Goodness, they are scared and suspicious of their own breath.
Fear fosters fudged facts. Children don't lie because they are devious little used car sales people, politicians, or journalists. They learn to lie because they expect that honesty may come at a price of unpredictable pain levels. The make-believe realm of the lie promises relative safety and instant comfort. Lies come along as intimate friends, cloaked as life saving saints on first sight who often tend to morph into towering demons later.
Peeps lie to their spouses about money and they royally deceive their friends. People lie to their parents, siblings, and children about money. Individuals lie to their government about money--"Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today." Herman Wouk--and in the most ghastly ways of all, people lie to themselves about money.
The most fertile environment for fear and resulting lies is intimacy. Family ties breed family lies. The greater the level of intimacy, the more preposterous the lies it can hatch. The sudden appearance of money and even just the prospect of zeroes seem to toss people into the cesspool section of intimacy. Touch hat stuff and when you realize the dimensions of the emotional dog pile you stepped into, you may wish you had instead stuck to the simple story that you're actually just a harmless ax murderer with a foot fetish.
Unwrap the money issue and the sweetest folks will eagerly prove to you that they don't have the slightest sense of humor, no matter how often they have laughed with you in the past. Do you want to get a proper reading of a person's character? Ask them to give you $10. Are you paranoid about marrying the wrong love interest (again)? Bring up the subject of money for the next three dates straight and listen carefully. You are testing a potential business partner or you are interviewing a future employee? Give them a $100 bill for no reason and observe. Keep them talking about money for an hour. Watch whether their faces light up or go dark.
James Allen (1864-1912) in 'As A Man Thinketh':
Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: —
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.
Dr. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter (1935-2009), better known as Rev. Ike--God, I miss that man!--brilliantly transformed the last line into "Money is but his looking glass."
Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: —
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.
Dr. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter (1935-2009), better known as Rev. Ike--God, I miss that man!--brilliantly transformed the last line into "Money is but his looking glass."
Money makes things visible that would remain obscured otherwise. Money makes us pay attention to deeper, obscured issues. Money or better, a particular financial situation, is a symptom. That's why attempts to mend undesirable money situations fail: "healing" symptoms is absurd and counterproductive. You don't try to fix the temperature gauge in your car's dashboard when it tells you the engine is overheating. Money plays the role of such a gauge. Polishing your face's image on the surface of a mirror is not likely to improve your real visage. Money is awesome stuff but not necessarily for the reasons most people think.
When I complain about the lack of money, for instance, my complaining takes a prominent position over everything else, including but not limited to actually having money. Why else would I prefer talking about money's absence? People talk about subject matters they favor and what they talk about moves instantly to the center of their creative process. Leonard Orr: "Energy becomes what it thinks about." Complaining is a seed that inevitably leads to a successful harvest of multiplied complaining in the future.
You are the master of your present moment. You made it what it "is" to you. Reaffirm your perception of it and the permanence you establish will be the foundation of your profession. Whether you are conscious of this ongoing process or not is insignificant. Bitch about not having enough money and sooner rather than later you'll be really good at "not having enough money." Not-having-enough-money will come easy to you, it'll feel natural, and not-having-enough-money becomes the corner stone of your experience. Tens of millions of individuals have a masters degree in not-having-enough-money. I used to be a member of this inclusive club.
I used to be embarrassed about countless years of peddling that profession. Now I feel pride about having been there because it was a roaring success. Exploring the depth of its abyss was simultaneously an exercise in hardcore happiness. This is not the place where people typically look for self-confidence but here it gains an unrivaled solidity.
How can you help the so-called poor or even understand them if you haven't been schooled in their profession? Indeed, seeing oneself as poor and/or broke, having no or little money, and being miserable are professional endeavors. Poverty is a serious business. This business model is commonly deplored but it's a successful undertaking nevertheless. People tend to be more loyal to the no-money business than to money. If you want to increase your employees' loyalty, cut their pay or their hours. The more they hate you for doing that, the greater their love for the intensified sensation of hatred will be. I am a cynical bastard? Yes, but that doesn't mean all I just said is untrue and untried. My question at the beginning of this paragraph was a trick question, of course. If being poor is a successful profession, then there is no need to help the poor. The poor manage to be poor just fine without you. They may very well be better at it than you ever will.
My advice is for people to learn and master someone's profession before they succumb to their manic urge to "help." You may find this idea perverted but unless you have experienced being poor as a respectable business, unless you have enjoyed certain levels of professional success in being poor, and unless you have thoroughly indulged in the pleasures of competent poverty mastery, potential interventions in a poor person's life are as aggressive and out of place as if you were insisting on telling an accountant how to run her business. Did I forget it's patronizing, too? I guess, now I did.
Being poor is as decent a profession as carpentry or neurology. Having no money can be as satisfying a business as practicing law. The having-no-money business provides equally adequate opportunities to build a great reputation and be profitable. In fact, the having-no-money profession has gained unprecedented recognition and momentum over the last eight years. If you think nobody gets rich in the having-no-money business, you must be blind like a mole.
For the professionally poor and for the philosophically miserable, receiving money is insulting and painful. A real ruble turns complaints to rubble, and the occurrence of cash deprives the best of the joys of public suffering.
Some of us love having money, others love the subtle benefits that not having money provides. To each his own. The universe may seem cruel occasionally, yet it is a neatly organized environment. Unsavory mental conditions are required in case you want to receive money and bicker about not having any, simultaneously. Tough choices ought to be made.
What am I trying to say? Don't fall for people's deceptive behavior: when they appear to be upset about not having enough money, they want to be upset about not having enough money. Don't bother them with ideas that might help change their financial status quo. Don't offer any help, don't buy into their shady scheme, and certainly don't give them money. You'd do them a disfavor and sabotage their objectives.
Respect the fear of snow flakes and the absence of money. There is no problem in sight. Hence no solution is needed. Lack of money is a solution. Complaints about lack of money are solutions. Frustration is a solution and a form of experienced contentment just as joy is a form of being content. If you don't scramble to fix other people's expression of joy, why do you respond frantically when someone expresses discontent, sadness, or worry? Individuals have the right to their sadness as well as the right to feel despair. Despair is not automatically a question that demands an answer.
Poverty and lack can be extreme forms of prosperity and wealth. By the same token, being a billionaire can be result and expression of poverty consciousness, an overcompensation for the fear of dying penniless. "A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money," said W.C. Fields and if you keep your eyes open, you'll meet poor people with lots of money, rich people without $50 to their name, and any combination in between. There is a poor-rich continuum, if you will. No hard and clearly defined dividing line separates one from the other.
Particular numbers and measurements are not superior to smaller denominations or vice versa. When people become aware of their habits and patterns, different marks on the poor-rich continuum will be subject to choice. Yet even without conscious decisions, there is no correlation between quantity and quality. More is neither better nor worse than less. More of anything is neither morally superior nor inferior than less of the same thing. A heap of dough is neither inherently good nor is wealth a bad thing or evil. The popular attempt to punish or rein in "the rich" is as ignorant as the compulsive notion that absence of money is naturally a flawed situation, begging to be remedied.
After this somewhat verbose introduction, we shall visit a related issue that a friend of mine brought up:
"Intellectually, the understanding that money is ones and zeroes on paper has freed me up. However, there are some points worth looking at: until your basic needs are taken care of, money is more than that. For those who have money stashed away, maybe 'money is just inked paper' but for others it is not. It can't be an eternal truth even if there is one exception and half the world or more would qualify as an exception here."
Let's say that money is even less than 'ones and zeroes on paper'. The greatest volume of money in the economy will never be printed or minted. Simplified, it shows up as numbers in bank ledgers, rushes across computer screens as pixels, or it "exists" fictitiously during the handshake of two people.
Money may be used as a 'medium of exchange', a 'unit of account', and as a 'store of value'. Often money appears as the visible portion of agreements. It is valuable as long as all parties involved share the perception of and faith in its value. Additional beliefs, thoughts, and emotions that people may attach to and entertain about money are distractions and detrimental to any smooth transaction.
"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
Do you have something you could offer that may benefit somebody?
If you cannot answer that question in great detail, any thought about money is a waste of time. Whether you believe you need money, desire money, or you are not sure what you think money is remains meaningless until you can define something--a product, an idea, or a service--that somebody else perceives as valuable enough so they desire it.
If and when you find that somebody, terms of a potential exchange may be negotiated. Now it does matter what each of you thinks, believes, and feels about the medium of exchange.
"Until your basic needs are taken care of, money is more than that."
Well, yes and no. Money appears to be overwhelmingly 'more than ones and zeroes on paper' when I am not aware of anything I may have or that I can produce that another individual perceives as beneficial for herself. It's not true that money seems to be more than ink and paper in my perception because my basic needs aren't yet taken care of. No, when money appears to be larger than life, I perceive it as more powerful than me, and as unattainable because of my lack of self-worth. My refusal to create and market something that may benefit others makes me look worthless compared to any shiny combination of zeroes. Money seems to be more than ink on paper when my perception of reality is distorted. Money means everything to me when I feel small, like nothing, when I believe that any printed zero may be worth more than the null I feel I am.
Human beings create money. It does not happen the other way around. Money is not the source of your life nor of its necessities and pleasures. You are the source of money. Whether you receive $5 or $50,000 at a time, money slavery ought to end here.
A person who sees herself as less powerful than money has work to do or working for money will turn out to be pure masochism. When a dollar bill is more to you than inked paper, and you are weaker than ones and zeroes, you have accepted the most cruel God you could possibly find: yourself, in the state of obsessive negation of your value as a human being and certainly in utter disregard of your divinity. That would be a pretty dumb idea, non?
The things you believe you "need" or desire don't allow you to change your beliefs about money. Those are properties of RECEIVING and you have little or no control over them. Your growing awareness of what you have to GIVE will put money into a new perspective first, and then into your pocket. Interestingly, you have 100% control over all that you decide to bring to market.
Historically, anything and everything has been used as 'money': cattle, grains, cowrie shells, gold, slaves, women, bread, horses, camels, sheep, Hershey candy bars and American cigarettes (after WWII, on the German black market), silk, spices, beaver pelts, beads, guns, and even mill stones. The list is endless.
The most desperate person will have no problem determining that he is worth more than a Hershey bar but when it comes down to a zero on paper or a dollar bill, he is not so sure?
I don't blame anybody, I have been there myself, but whenever an individual looks at her financial obligations and believes that money is more than paper, she puts the cart before the horse. Money frequently startles people when they are frightened of realizing their own individuality, freedom, and power. That's what desperate people do. That's why their thoughts about money differ from the thoughts of persons whose basic needs have been met.
No human being has ever needed money, least of all the hungry, the poor, and those without shelter. You can't eat money, keep your family warm with it, clothe your loved ones, nor can you fuel a car with that stuff. People may need food, certainly water, perhaps a sweater, pants, shoes, and a roof over their heads.
The notion that an individual needs money is a neurosis. Neediness makes people feel small and look small. Whatever you may get by claiming 'need' will be limited and, when you actually receive it, it'll be stale and hardly enjoyable. If it's needed, it'll be spent by the time you'll get your hands on it.
100% of all your money is evidence of abundance. Even the last dollar bill in a person's pocket is a symbol of abundance. Had that dollar been needed by its temporary "owner," it would not be in his/her pocket any longer. S/he would have spent it.
Need is a lie. Always. The so-called need of money is an attempt to uphold a false belief. This belief is more important than the new experience that you can live without anything you believe you need. Sure, losing it or not getting it (at the right time) has consequences, possibly life changing implications. You can't maintain your belief in need and expect you will expand into and thrive on limitless possibilities and opportunities. Need smothers desire in its infancy.
People are frightened of desire, especially their own. They may have been married for ten years and yet they are terrified as far as intimacy is concerned: few people feel relaxed, safe, and free enough to talk to their spouses about their desires, money related ones and well, there are others that are frequently suppressed rather than openly communicated and enjoyed. People scream lies about their needs from the roof tops. The truth about their desires is an entirely different animal, condemned to live in dark, musty closets. Money, real money is locked in there too. Without the courage to open the door to uninhibited unconditional intimacy, desire, money, and the desire for money will die.
"And it can't be a claim or an eternal truth even if there is one exception. And half the world or more would qualify as an exception here."
Half the world's population lives on less than $2 per day and about a billion people have less than $1 a day, mostly women and children. I am sure you are aware of it. I don't peddle eternal truths. However, the perception of money is not what torments these unfortunate souls. Violence, war, genocide, rampant corruption, absence of rule of law and property rights, Malaria and HIV, to name a few, prevent people from even coming close to anything like money. Gathering enough fire wood is important for them. The philosophical issue whether zeroes stand for something or nothing is insignificant.
Money is an effect, not a cause. When people treat money as a cause, they are willing to compromise their lives for a chimera. Pain and self-sabotage are inevitable effects. People make money. Money makes nothing, it just sits on the same spot, patiently, until somebody decides to move it.
Below, you'll find a couple of accounts that show how money becomes what we think it is, not by its factual elements--the intrinsic value of fiat money is always near zero--but by way of collective ACCEPTANCE, BELIEF, CONFIDENCE in its exchange value, and FAITH that it will continue to work as intended.
Money is what we think it is and what we intend and negotiate to use it for. It has no objective value. You can alter and drastically increase the value of a $100 bill at a car dealership within a five minute negotiation. If you believe money "is" this or that, you cannot alter what it is. When you gain the awareness that it is nothing but paper, you can freely explore the limitations of intimacy and desire with other individuals until you find an agreement that works for everybody involved. The more rigidly you define money, the more limited will be its range of usability for you.
"Belief can fade: Countries that have been down the path of high inflation experienced firsthand how the value of money essentially depends on people believing in it. In the 1980s, people in some Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, gradually lost confidence in the currency, because inflation was eroding its value so rapidly. They started using a more stable one, the U.S. dollar, as the de facto currency. This phenomenon is called unofficial, or de facto, dollarization. The government loses its monopoly on issuing money—and dollarization can be very difficult to reverse.
Some policies governments have used to restore confidence in a currency nicely highlight the “faith” part of money functioning. In Turkey, for example, the government rebased the currency, the Lira, eliminating six zeros in 2005. Overnight, 1,000,000 Liras became 1 Lira. Brazil, on the other hand, introduced a new currency in 1994, the Real. In both countries, citizens went along, demonstrating that as long as everyone accepts that a different denomination or a new currency is the norm, it simply will be. Just like fiat money. If it is accepted as money, it is money." (IMF.org)
"Gold is something you can safely believe is valuable. Before 1971, gold therefore served as a physical token of what is valuable based on people's perception."
"Impressions Create Everything: The second type of money is fiat money, which does away with the need to represent a physical commodity and takes on its worth the same way gold did: by means of people's perception and faith. Fiat money was introduced because gold is a scarce resource and economies growing quickly couldn't always mine enough gold to back their money requirement. For a booming economy, the need for gold to give money value is extremely inefficient, especially when, as we already established, value is really created through people's perception.
That is why simply printing new money will not create wealth for a country. Money is created by a kind of a perpetual interaction between concrete things, our intangible desire for them, and our abstract faith in what has value: money is valuable because we want it, but we want it only because it can get us a desired product or service." (investopedia.com)
"And half the world or more would qualify as an exception here. I realized this when I was sharing this insight with a friend who blatantly disagreed and I could relate to it looking at his lifestyle and life situation."
You see, those who don't have much money and nothing to spare depend even more on negotiation and frugal spending than those who have plenty of dough tucked away. When people are intimidated by what money may be, above and beyond the paper it's printed on, they put money on a pedestal. Hope, fear, anger, frustration, sadness, and other attachments to money prevent clearheaded freedom to speak without getting cottonmouth, sweaty palms, or wobbly knees at job interviews or contract negotiations. I have seen people so frightened of their own bodily sensations that they gave thousands of dollars away just so they could leave the room faster.
Poor people cannot afford widespread intimidation by innocent zeroes, even less so than a well-to-do person, and I have met such people who didn't have much but would neither blink nor budge. My mother was the first specimen of that kind. My brother and I were often embarrassed when we witnessed her negotiating with business people who had never agreed to price negotiations before they met our mother. That would not stop our mom from asking for what she wanted. Took me decades to realize how much I learned from watching her while my bro and I cringed about her shrewdness. We didn't want to be affiliated with her. Now, I am proud of her and grateful for the lessons she taught me free of charge.
Poor, rich....the line between them is imaginary and entirely arbitrary. There is no such thing. Ask 10 people three days in a row where that line may be and you'll receive at least 30 differing answers but that's an issue for another newsletter.
If I don't have or make enough money to meet my financial obligations and desires, it is because I am putting too much meaning into ink and paper. The immediate result is that I am afraid to ask for money without inhibition, again and again, person after person, until I have the money I need and want. I know plenty of so-called rich folks who have the same issue.
Are you willing to ask for anything and all you want?
Are you willing to remain happy when you get nothing?
Are you willing to ask for everything you want indefinitely?
Overrating money is by no means limited to those who have little but it tragically and unnecessarily limits people's enjoyment of money, intimacy, and lively exchanges with others independent from income or assets.
What money means to you beyond the obvious of being ink on paper, both positive or negative, will always be the greatest barrier between you and money's acquisition.
The so-called poor would benefit from learning and understanding that money is nothing and that they themselves are the creators of the value that they ascribe to money.
Perhaps even I'll get that eventually.
Shalom,
Egbert
P.S.: Cetero censeo, hourly wages ought to be eliminated. Instead, both employers and employees will gain financially if employees received payments according to the wholesale market value of their output. Time based compensation creates inadequate business relationships and environments of mutual sabotage.
Jobs are coffins of individuality. Mass unemployment and mass employment are flip sides of the same coin: both employment and unemployment bury economic health. Both are symptoms of society's atrophy.
Oh, have you bought my book yet, 'How to Better Hate Your Job'? It's available on Amazon.com as Paperback and Kindle edition. You'll find it on iTunes as well. Jobs are the core problem of our dismal economic status quo, not the solution. Indeed, the cause of unemployment is employment.
Time based compensation insults human intelligence, suffocates productivity, and limits profits. Jobs and the resulting despondency foster brittle structures of authoritarian leadership, unsound systems that will inevitably fail. Let's talk about viable alternatives that equally serve profit interests and all people involved.
For seminars and speaking engagements about Money Psychology, please contact me via email.
"Intellectually, the understanding that money is ones and zeroes on paper has freed me up. However, there are some points worth looking at: until your basic needs are taken care of, money is more than that. For those who have money stashed away, maybe 'money is just inked paper' but for others it is not. It can't be an eternal truth even if there is one exception and half the world or more would qualify as an exception here."
Let's say that money is even less than 'ones and zeroes on paper'. The greatest volume of money in the economy will never be printed or minted. Simplified, it shows up as numbers in bank ledgers, rushes across computer screens as pixels, or it "exists" fictitiously during the handshake of two people.
Money may be used as a 'medium of exchange', a 'unit of account', and as a 'store of value'. Often money appears as the visible portion of agreements. It is valuable as long as all parties involved share the perception of and faith in its value. Additional beliefs, thoughts, and emotions that people may attach to and entertain about money are distractions and detrimental to any smooth transaction.
"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
Milton Friedman, Economist (1912-2006)
Do you have something you could offer that may benefit somebody?
If you cannot answer that question in great detail, any thought about money is a waste of time. Whether you believe you need money, desire money, or you are not sure what you think money is remains meaningless until you can define something--a product, an idea, or a service--that somebody else perceives as valuable enough so they desire it.
If and when you find that somebody, terms of a potential exchange may be negotiated. Now it does matter what each of you thinks, believes, and feels about the medium of exchange.
"Until your basic needs are taken care of, money is more than that."
Well, yes and no. Money appears to be overwhelmingly 'more than ones and zeroes on paper' when I am not aware of anything I may have or that I can produce that another individual perceives as beneficial for herself. It's not true that money seems to be more than ink and paper in my perception because my basic needs aren't yet taken care of. No, when money appears to be larger than life, I perceive it as more powerful than me, and as unattainable because of my lack of self-worth. My refusal to create and market something that may benefit others makes me look worthless compared to any shiny combination of zeroes. Money seems to be more than ink on paper when my perception of reality is distorted. Money means everything to me when I feel small, like nothing, when I believe that any printed zero may be worth more than the null I feel I am.
Human beings create money. It does not happen the other way around. Money is not the source of your life nor of its necessities and pleasures. You are the source of money. Whether you receive $5 or $50,000 at a time, money slavery ought to end here.
A person who sees herself as less powerful than money has work to do or working for money will turn out to be pure masochism. When a dollar bill is more to you than inked paper, and you are weaker than ones and zeroes, you have accepted the most cruel God you could possibly find: yourself, in the state of obsessive negation of your value as a human being and certainly in utter disregard of your divinity. That would be a pretty dumb idea, non?
The things you believe you "need" or desire don't allow you to change your beliefs about money. Those are properties of RECEIVING and you have little or no control over them. Your growing awareness of what you have to GIVE will put money into a new perspective first, and then into your pocket. Interestingly, you have 100% control over all that you decide to bring to market.
Historically, anything and everything has been used as 'money': cattle, grains, cowrie shells, gold, slaves, women, bread, horses, camels, sheep, Hershey candy bars and American cigarettes (after WWII, on the German black market), silk, spices, beaver pelts, beads, guns, and even mill stones. The list is endless.
The most desperate person will have no problem determining that he is worth more than a Hershey bar but when it comes down to a zero on paper or a dollar bill, he is not so sure?
I don't blame anybody, I have been there myself, but whenever an individual looks at her financial obligations and believes that money is more than paper, she puts the cart before the horse. Money frequently startles people when they are frightened of realizing their own individuality, freedom, and power. That's what desperate people do. That's why their thoughts about money differ from the thoughts of persons whose basic needs have been met.
No human being has ever needed money, least of all the hungry, the poor, and those without shelter. You can't eat money, keep your family warm with it, clothe your loved ones, nor can you fuel a car with that stuff. People may need food, certainly water, perhaps a sweater, pants, shoes, and a roof over their heads.
The notion that an individual needs money is a neurosis. Neediness makes people feel small and look small. Whatever you may get by claiming 'need' will be limited and, when you actually receive it, it'll be stale and hardly enjoyable. If it's needed, it'll be spent by the time you'll get your hands on it.
100% of all your money is evidence of abundance. Even the last dollar bill in a person's pocket is a symbol of abundance. Had that dollar been needed by its temporary "owner," it would not be in his/her pocket any longer. S/he would have spent it.
Need is a lie. Always. The so-called need of money is an attempt to uphold a false belief. This belief is more important than the new experience that you can live without anything you believe you need. Sure, losing it or not getting it (at the right time) has consequences, possibly life changing implications. You can't maintain your belief in need and expect you will expand into and thrive on limitless possibilities and opportunities. Need smothers desire in its infancy.
People are frightened of desire, especially their own. They may have been married for ten years and yet they are terrified as far as intimacy is concerned: few people feel relaxed, safe, and free enough to talk to their spouses about their desires, money related ones and well, there are others that are frequently suppressed rather than openly communicated and enjoyed. People scream lies about their needs from the roof tops. The truth about their desires is an entirely different animal, condemned to live in dark, musty closets. Money, real money is locked in there too. Without the courage to open the door to uninhibited unconditional intimacy, desire, money, and the desire for money will die.
"And it can't be a claim or an eternal truth even if there is one exception. And half the world or more would qualify as an exception here."
Half the world's population lives on less than $2 per day and about a billion people have less than $1 a day, mostly women and children. I am sure you are aware of it. I don't peddle eternal truths. However, the perception of money is not what torments these unfortunate souls. Violence, war, genocide, rampant corruption, absence of rule of law and property rights, Malaria and HIV, to name a few, prevent people from even coming close to anything like money. Gathering enough fire wood is important for them. The philosophical issue whether zeroes stand for something or nothing is insignificant.
Money is an effect, not a cause. When people treat money as a cause, they are willing to compromise their lives for a chimera. Pain and self-sabotage are inevitable effects. People make money. Money makes nothing, it just sits on the same spot, patiently, until somebody decides to move it.
Below, you'll find a couple of accounts that show how money becomes what we think it is, not by its factual elements--the intrinsic value of fiat money is always near zero--but by way of collective ACCEPTANCE, BELIEF, CONFIDENCE in its exchange value, and FAITH that it will continue to work as intended.
Money is what we think it is and what we intend and negotiate to use it for. It has no objective value. You can alter and drastically increase the value of a $100 bill at a car dealership within a five minute negotiation. If you believe money "is" this or that, you cannot alter what it is. When you gain the awareness that it is nothing but paper, you can freely explore the limitations of intimacy and desire with other individuals until you find an agreement that works for everybody involved. The more rigidly you define money, the more limited will be its range of usability for you.
"Belief can fade: Countries that have been down the path of high inflation experienced firsthand how the value of money essentially depends on people believing in it. In the 1980s, people in some Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, gradually lost confidence in the currency, because inflation was eroding its value so rapidly. They started using a more stable one, the U.S. dollar, as the de facto currency. This phenomenon is called unofficial, or de facto, dollarization. The government loses its monopoly on issuing money—and dollarization can be very difficult to reverse.
Some policies governments have used to restore confidence in a currency nicely highlight the “faith” part of money functioning. In Turkey, for example, the government rebased the currency, the Lira, eliminating six zeros in 2005. Overnight, 1,000,000 Liras became 1 Lira. Brazil, on the other hand, introduced a new currency in 1994, the Real. In both countries, citizens went along, demonstrating that as long as everyone accepts that a different denomination or a new currency is the norm, it simply will be. Just like fiat money. If it is accepted as money, it is money." (IMF.org)
"Gold is something you can safely believe is valuable. Before 1971, gold therefore served as a physical token of what is valuable based on people's perception."
"Impressions Create Everything: The second type of money is fiat money, which does away with the need to represent a physical commodity and takes on its worth the same way gold did: by means of people's perception and faith. Fiat money was introduced because gold is a scarce resource and economies growing quickly couldn't always mine enough gold to back their money requirement. For a booming economy, the need for gold to give money value is extremely inefficient, especially when, as we already established, value is really created through people's perception.
That is why simply printing new money will not create wealth for a country. Money is created by a kind of a perpetual interaction between concrete things, our intangible desire for them, and our abstract faith in what has value: money is valuable because we want it, but we want it only because it can get us a desired product or service." (investopedia.com)
"And half the world or more would qualify as an exception here. I realized this when I was sharing this insight with a friend who blatantly disagreed and I could relate to it looking at his lifestyle and life situation."
You see, those who don't have much money and nothing to spare depend even more on negotiation and frugal spending than those who have plenty of dough tucked away. When people are intimidated by what money may be, above and beyond the paper it's printed on, they put money on a pedestal. Hope, fear, anger, frustration, sadness, and other attachments to money prevent clearheaded freedom to speak without getting cottonmouth, sweaty palms, or wobbly knees at job interviews or contract negotiations. I have seen people so frightened of their own bodily sensations that they gave thousands of dollars away just so they could leave the room faster.
Poor people cannot afford widespread intimidation by innocent zeroes, even less so than a well-to-do person, and I have met such people who didn't have much but would neither blink nor budge. My mother was the first specimen of that kind. My brother and I were often embarrassed when we witnessed her negotiating with business people who had never agreed to price negotiations before they met our mother. That would not stop our mom from asking for what she wanted. Took me decades to realize how much I learned from watching her while my bro and I cringed about her shrewdness. We didn't want to be affiliated with her. Now, I am proud of her and grateful for the lessons she taught me free of charge.
Poor, rich....the line between them is imaginary and entirely arbitrary. There is no such thing. Ask 10 people three days in a row where that line may be and you'll receive at least 30 differing answers but that's an issue for another newsletter.
If I don't have or make enough money to meet my financial obligations and desires, it is because I am putting too much meaning into ink and paper. The immediate result is that I am afraid to ask for money without inhibition, again and again, person after person, until I have the money I need and want. I know plenty of so-called rich folks who have the same issue.
Are you willing to ask for anything and all you want?
Are you willing to remain happy when you get nothing?
Are you willing to ask for everything you want indefinitely?
Overrating money is by no means limited to those who have little but it tragically and unnecessarily limits people's enjoyment of money, intimacy, and lively exchanges with others independent from income or assets.
What money means to you beyond the obvious of being ink on paper, both positive or negative, will always be the greatest barrier between you and money's acquisition.
The so-called poor would benefit from learning and understanding that money is nothing and that they themselves are the creators of the value that they ascribe to money.
Perhaps even I'll get that eventually.
Shalom,
Egbert
P.S.: Cetero censeo, hourly wages ought to be eliminated. Instead, both employers and employees will gain financially if employees received payments according to the wholesale market value of their output. Time based compensation creates inadequate business relationships and environments of mutual sabotage.
Jobs are coffins of individuality. Mass unemployment and mass employment are flip sides of the same coin: both employment and unemployment bury economic health. Both are symptoms of society's atrophy.
Oh, have you bought my book yet, 'How to Better Hate Your Job'? It's available on Amazon.com as Paperback and Kindle edition. You'll find it on iTunes as well. Jobs are the core problem of our dismal economic status quo, not the solution. Indeed, the cause of unemployment is employment.
Time based compensation insults human intelligence, suffocates productivity, and limits profits. Jobs and the resulting despondency foster brittle structures of authoritarian leadership, unsound systems that will inevitably fail. Let's talk about viable alternatives that equally serve profit interests and all people involved.
For seminars and speaking engagements about Money Psychology, please contact me via email.
It is important to remember that the money game is not a game to be taken seriously. People in our society tend to take money too seriously. A sense of humor is required when discussing money. It is as important to be able to lose money gracefully and to experience failure as well as success without losing your humanity.
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
Norman O. Brown (1913 - 2002)
Nothing belongs to you.
Paramyogeshwar Sri Devpuriji (Babaji)
