Caracas, Venezuela. Can you spot the difference between wealth and poverty?
Being poor is a condition that is extraordinarily difficult to escape. This means that you were likely born into it or experienced something financially or physically devastating. At the opposite end of the spectrum is “wealthy.” These two conditions have similar contexts in that both are hard to get rid of. Like Chris Rock says (paraphrasing), “Shaquille O’Neal is rich, but the guy who signs Shaq’s paycheck is wealthy.” Being born into poverty creates a condition that is nearly impossible to escape without some serious dedicated help and/or an element of luck.
Being broke results from a series of choices — whether conscious or unconscious. This means, you had money or the potential to earn money but lost/spent/chose not having it anymore — big difference to being poor. For the record, everybody ate ramen noodles in college, but not everybody was born at the wrong place at the wrong time in history. The fact that you ever went to college or even learned to read means that you have had more privilege and opportunity than most humans in the history of our species.
Choosing “poverty” is becoming a popular mantra in the plight of conserving resources and living simply and sustainably, but this is sort of deceiving because poverty usually connotes many ill effects (early death, disease, inhuman living conditions, physical danger, lack of rights). What is really happening is that people are choosing to live outside the current system of finance. Of course, without money these concepts evaporate and wealth is measured in what you control or how much powerful influence you have within a community.
How you make your living matters and how you spend your money matters. Just because you can make money at something doesn’t mean you necessarily should. This is a prime challenge for our future because it is difficult to weigh the impact of our individual decisions knowing that living means consuming. It’s sometimes difficult to reconcile that your profession may be contributing inordinately to degradation, and to find the fortitude to abandon this lost lifestyle. We’re not really trained to think like this.
However, if you give a shit about the future of this planet, there has never been more to worry about in terms of your own personal actions, yet — the grocery store isn’t exactly taking “good intentions” in exchange for fresh vegetables. Plus, despite any animosity you may feel about modern finance or the consumption culture, it exists, and we have some role in its propagation.
The message here is that we don’t need a lot of money to live well, but we sure could use some good ideas. We don’t need to consume a lot to have rich lives, but we could sure use a plan to make that happen. What we do need to do is support each other while challenging each other to live outside of ignorance. Deprivation is an art form that is not easy to sustain without support because the human mind rejects it amidst perceived opulence. Deprivation feels unnatural while sitting around a barbecue, but is the ultimate form of conscious control.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
The misconception is that we, humanity, are not and cannot be collectively ‘wealthy’. We are, we can be so if we so choose. True ‘harmonic’ wealth is more than money, it’s our time, it’s our relationships, it’s social capital, it’s the quality of life.
And it is this appreciation of quality (what is valuable, what and who is ‘adding value’) over quantity (more, more, more) that is the answer and solution to our collective societal malaise. It’s happening, we are saving ourselves – and no one has to be ‘broke’.
Now here’s a good idea, which will not on it’s own solve the problem but go a very long way if enough people get involved, and that is Time Banking: http://www.timebanks.org/
You hit on a number of good thoughts and ideas here. Let me expand some.
I know what it’s like to have no money when everyone around me and my family has plenty. Worse, they didn’t comprehend what it was like for me and my family – not a clue. Talk about feeling left out! I know what it’s like to not have food on the table and worry everyday that you won’t be able to care for your family.
But we made choices and did what we (I’m talking about me and my great wife here) thought was best for us, our futures, and our children. The point is…we made choices that had nothing to do with anyone else. Many of them were really hard and scary. Many other people told us we were wrong – wasting our time.
Now I make what most people would consider a lot of money but I and my wife both feel strongly that we’ve earned every penny and we also know it could all be gone tomorrow. We don’t live lavishly by any stretch of the imagination but we do enjoy life.
Now, here’s the point. Been working with a leadership team at a local YWCA about basic money management. These wonderful women are trying to help other women get out of horrible situations, mostly abuse, drugs, homelessness, and, to your point, Tommy, abject poverty. These “Y” women realized that they weren’t very good at managing their own money so they wanted to learn so they could help others. That’s why these women are so great.
Our first session was about what money means. We never even got to a single number, checking account, or any tangibles. I simply asked them what money was to them. The answers were insightful. Safety, security, freedom, self esteem. Several were afraid to talk about money. Others had never thought about it. One actually had a fear of it. All because of when they were children. Their parents fought about it. Divorced over it. Or, NEVER discussed it. They, in general, associated money with negatives.
I also learned that they tended to not make choices about money (or anything else). They bought what everyone else was buying. They wanted what was being marketed to them. What they saw on TV. Impulse buyers. Had no idea where most of their money went and felt the same feelings my wife and I felt when we didn’t have and weren’t able to have what “everyone” else had. The room was filled with self-esteem issues.
We talked about choices, not money itself. It’s all about making choices.
I believe everyone, and I do mean everyone, has choices. They just don’t know it and they don’t know how to make choices. Nobody teaches them about that because so few understand it. Especially in our current society.
Here’s a challenge for your tribe, Tommy: This week find someone with low self-esteem and money problems. Help them make a simple choice about almost anything. Show them that they can overcome fear. Then do it again. Then again. You’ll feel rich if you succeed in helping someone else.
Excellent post, Tommy, and you too, OneGuy. Thank you.
Great perspective OneGuy.
You have me thinking…We have lost touch with our AUTHENTIC selves! You and your wife seem to have been deeply committed to a common VISION – in touch with your VALUES and PURPOSE – and you lived life accordingly. You stayed TRUE to what you believed in. BEAUTIFUL! BRAVO!
It seems to me that this is the key. It goes far beyond choices.
We’ve become such a mindless (vs. mindful) society – not really able to separate from the marketing, social issues/expectations, our upbringing, etc. We don’t LISTEN – to our hearts, our intuition, our families – because we don’t ask. And if we do ask, we don’t wait for an answer (or we hear the answer we are seeking).
Ahhha – Perhaps this is really a crisis of INTEGRITY?????
I went on an intense spiritual journey (rooted in YOGA)in the 1999 – 2003 window…driven by an epiphany – “There’s a TRUTH and you’re not living it”. Let go of many attachments including top producer in advertising sales + six figure income, the Italian shoes and incredible clothes, New Age stuff (even my Tarot), competitive fencing, rock climbing, drinking, sex (to name a few).
It took great effort to separate my self from my SELF.
The small self was wound pretty tight around my accomplishments – as I was a perfectionist, a smooth operator, a control freak.
In the first phase I jumped out of airplanes (it’s about the freefall not the parachute) whitewater kayaked myself to near death, hiked rim to rim at the Grand Canyon (twice) and Half Dome and Yosemite/Sierras(a week at a time with a pack).
Had the second epiphany after losing it on some whitewater. The second phase took me down the path of deep, spiritual YOGA.
Turns out, all is/was a quest to create INTEGRITY in my life. It sounds simple. It is a life long practice. LOVE is INTEGRITY. INTEGRITY is pure LOVE.
Isn’t there some way to have a stable currency so that savers aren’t punished by inflation and everyone can make a decent living?
Tommy – aren’t you also saying that we need to define our “movement” with great care? And to re-direct/contribute our skill set to the cause?
For example: are we choosing poverty or choosing New Prosperity? (prosperity redefined, of course!). Then let’s get on with the definition.
Are we deprived or are we Revived?
Are we dropping out or Opting Out?
Maybe it’s time to start collaborating on the way – in words, in ideas – that we define our movement.
Oneguy: thanks. i’m one-handed, so skipping the caps,,,
your story illustrates well what i mean about the money making the decicions for people.
think of how many things (story of stuff) we have gotten used to accepting just because producing them (plastic bags, water bottles) and then disposing of them creates cashflow while just saying “no” “puts people out of work”. (as opposed to any vague ‘costs’ to some possible ‘future’ planet) In the meantime, we expect our kids to “just say no” to sex, drugs, and country music. I feel strongly that the ideal (idealism is ingrained part of human brain function/imagination) way to moderate all of these economic/waste decisions is to moderate the speed of the cash at the source of demand decisions: sales tax. A prebate makes it socially progressive at the bottom while economically/ecologically moderating/recessive in general.
That’s the idealism for political discussion. In the meantime, you just addressed one great realism action to take.
susan marie wrote:”For example: are we choosing poverty or choosing New Prosperity? (prosperity redefined, of course!). Then let’s get on with the definition.
Are we deprived or are we Revived?
Are we dropping out or Opting Out?
Maybe it’s time to start collaborating on the way – in words, in ideas – that we define our movement.”
Some of my favorites:
Instead of “prosper”, which implies money and dead wealth, think and say “thrive”, which implies life and action.
Instead of steady state ownership or arbitrary judgments of things we have or do or make, think in term of the RATIO between our usefulness vs our consumption, and how that will constantly be in flux as we change our local sphere and our Selves. The less consumption, the less we have to make up for with production. There will be good days/years/systems/people and bad ones. The goal is an overall direction toward being good for a future we cannot plan. Food will get you through times of no gold, but food requires constant work and replenishment. Gold will stay shiny and heavy and doesn’t rot. Everyone wants to have gold and buy food. Everyone NEEDS to have food, but not gold.
Somewhere in that dissonance is our battle to be more useful than consumptive to ourselves and everything Not Self, perpetually traveling into the future as we are living right now, right here.
http://www.dieoff.org/page150.htm
From today’s LA Times: Bamboo Charlie in his private universe…will make you smile. It’s a reminder that there is always a place for kind and gentle in this world.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bamboo-20100705,0,3781304.story
Free Man,
Thanks for the link, and sort of addresses Will’s question. I think a “currency” is value. Value for value. The medium of exchange is the easy part, but the paradigm shift is what counts.
OneGuy,
Good work. It’s not so common to have discussions about money and what it means. When you start probing and asking tough questions, most people can’t come up with competent answers because, as you put it, they’ve “never thought about it.” It’s an easy thing to take for granted.
Susan,
I’m ready to collaborate. Strangely, in my notebook a few days ago I wrote, “statement of definitive purpose.” The so-called movement is very ill defined, leaderless, and scattered. I observe many of the leaders asking questions like, “where’s the leadership?” I’ve noted that people used to the fringe are usually not so comfortable in these positions. I’ve noted that we’re spread out all over the world.
I’m ready to collaborate.
So far I have been blessed in life and not experienced being poor. Have experienced less aflluenence from time to time but fortunately not poverty. Your picture and 1st sentence were a powerful visual and statement. Immediately what came into my mind was “your thought was wrong.” Why? Go to France 1789, very poor & very rich. It changed over night and not in a way that was pleasant for many. History may not always repeat itself, but often rhymes, I have heard. Could it happen here? I hope not, but don’t know anymore.
What would you be willing to die for?? Your Starbucks latte, your house, your bank account, your family, your freedom? Those guys that signed the Declaration of Independence knew that everything was on the line, when it was their turn to hit the paper with the ink. They were finished sitting around on their butts, drinking tea, discussing alternative life styles, speculating on the latest tobacco futures and other such benign bullshit.
The world is an imbalanced state and nature doesn’t stay that way very long. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes bring nature into equilibrium. Confrontation, revolution, invasion bring societal balances into equilibrium. Unless the world has changed I would expect that at some time soon the guys on the left of the freeway will have some discussions with the guys on the right side of the freeway.
P Chrisco,
My wife grew up on the left side of this picture. It took two generations of a whole lot of directed, disciplined, & intelligent work in order to break out (plus some luck). It had little to do with acquiring more stuff though, and much to do with living a potential.
She has many tales of the type of horrible existence that defines this type of life where safety is never assured. The trick to getting the guys on the left side of the picture not to fuck with the right side is “just enough.”
Just enough to give hope. Just enough to keep them alive. Just enough to not go insane. When the hordes of poor no longer have “just enough” that’s when shit gets really crazy. Caracas is getting ripe for such a thing, and I think we’ll see more of this type of unrest in the future.
I was in Caracas for a month last year and it is a very tense place filled with some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. It’s a strange environment where people are scared to death to go outside and thoroughly enjoy family at a level I’ve never experienced before.
I’ll add this from the Archdruid:
“People use money because it gives them a way to exchange their labor for goods and services, and because it allows them to store value in a relatively stable and secure form. Both these, in turn, depend on the assumption that a dollar has the same value as any other dollar, and will have roughly the same value tomorrow that it does today.
The mismatch between money and the rest of economic life throws all these assumptions into question. Right now there are a great many dollars in the global economy that are no longer worth the same as any other dollar…Those dollars have the same sort of weird half-existence that horror fiction assigns to zombies and vampires; they’re undead money, lurking in the shadowy crypts of Goldman Sachs like so many brides of Dracula, because the broad daylight of the market would kill them at once…
As long as most people continue to play along, it’s entirely possible that things could stumble along this way for quite a while, with stock market crashes, sovereign debt crises, and corporate bankruptcies quickly covered up by further outpourings of unpayable debt. The problem for individuals and families, though, is that all this makes money increasingly difficult to use as a medium of exchange or a store of wealth. If hyperinflation turns out to be the mode of fiscal implosion du jour, it becomes annoying to have to sprint to the grocery store with your paycheck before the price of milk rises above $1 million a gallon; if we get deflationary contraction instead, business failures and plummeting wages make getting any paycheck at all increasingly challenging; in either case your pension, your savings, and the money you pour down the rathole of health insurance are as good as lost.”
On economics and thriving:
Take the population of one of the city blocks on the right of the picture, and an equivalent number on the left, and drop them on identical, uninhabited planets with earth-type environments.
Which one would thrive immediately?
Which one would you rather be part of?
That’s how I look at the future usefulness of a human activity. Perhaps, those on the right would not waste time bickering over the gold while they all starve to death…but I doubt it. Those on the left would do what they already do: seek what is available and use it to improve their lot or to survive.
‘Freedom’ would come after breakfast. Eventually, someone would invent money and breakfast would be cheap and the world would become divided into those with money to buy breakfast and those forced to serve it before they can eat any, unless there is a better way to moderate the power of the money to make choices into nonthinking acts.
Tommy – On leadership/Collaboration:
Having served in leadership roles, in uniform, one knows how much easier it is ‘to lead’ when everyone ‘knows’ who the boss is and has committed to following the leader and the leaders orders.
Something that I have recently realized, that may be obvious to some – but was not to me, is that it is in and through action that we can become leaders. In an organic structureless asymmetrical movement that lacks an established vertical hierarchy, it is action that defines us.
Doing is leading. Lead, and others will follow.
Thank you Tommy for doing this, thank you for leading.
I need to read a lot more of this blog, but -thus far- I’m on board and will follow.