Money motivation

28th April 2012
Saturday

I have never been very good with money and to be honest can't get very excited by it.

I once read that it is in the nature of modern man to always want 17% more money than he has. This economics of want has, in many people's opinion, led to a breakdown in our civilisation which increased dramatically with the advent of the industrial revolution.

The desire to want more inevitably leads us to filling our lives with the pursuit of money and the means of acquiring more. Ironically, this invariably means we have to work more and end up with less time for ourselves; the more we have, the more we want; the more we want, the more we have to work; the more we work, the less time we have to spend enjoying the so-called fruits of our labour.

This has led to the creation of a society in which people plan their lives around once-a-year holidays during which time they hope to be able to relax and enjoy themselves.

What a sad state of affairs.

Ultimately, this results in a total alienation between a person and his work and the world with which he now has little real contact.

The only cure for this lack of satisfaction with life while remaining part of the present widely accepted society, is through the getting and consumption of things.

By leading this kind of life, we are unable to truly fulfill ourselves and we become mere hollow and empty shells trying to seek enjoyment from the material products of other people's efforts.

One gains a momentary sense of happiness through spending money and acquiring another new dress or a slightly bigger iPhone or iPod, or iPad. The happiness doesn't last for long and we find ourselves in a continuous cycle of wanting and getting and discarding and wanting and getting.

In recent years, there has been a boom in the number of people professing to be able to give motivation, encouragement and guidance on how to live a more fulfilling existence. The internet is overflowing with various motivational gurus offering services on self-discovery and self-help. One thing they mostly have in common though, unfortunately, is that they give advice on how to get rich.

Through my approach of universal application, this would be unsustainable and unfair until such time as we were to able to arrive at the inevitable endgame of such a pursuit.

The planet has limited resources and money is also limited. By encouraging some people to get more, we are limiting the amount other people can have; we can't all get rich. The only way to be able to justify the pursuit of money as a guiding philosophy would result in a state whereby everybody were as motivated as anyone else and we all ended up with the same amount. We would all then have enough to be able to live and there would be little incentive to want to pursue more. We would end up in a situation whereby the world's wealth were fairly and evenly distributed.

This is not what the life-style gurus are advocating. They are playing to our innate sense of greed and are hoping that we are all as greedy as they are and that we will give them our money for telling us how we can get rich like them. All they will tell you is to follow their lead and set up a website like theirs and hope to squeeze money out of people who are not as clever as themselves.

This is because for most of them, they are just normal folk trying to satisfy their own material desires and there isn't any money in telling people that they would find the greatest pleasure and fulfillment by giving up their worldly possessions. Although... but no; you couldn't persuade people that the only way to enlightenment was for them to give you their money - that would be too transparently hypocritical surely. Through disguising their greed by hiding it amongst other people's own greed, they hope to part fools from their money.

I liked Bob Proctor's ideas surrounding The Law of Attraction. It partly ties in with my beliefs on positive thinking and the body being unable to go where the mind hasn't already been. I can see Bob Proctor's and many other life-style gurus extension of this from, what was for me, a quite pure belief into a means of attracting more material gains for themselves. Positive thinking is extended into thinking about wealth and the mind leading the physical body into situations that attract money or luck or means of getting rich or rich people who help you get rich.

When I actually met Bob Proctor in London, I felt nauseous - he came across to me like some kind of Evangelist lining his path to heaven with gold and his followers were like people possessed speaking in tongues.

Burt Goldman professes to be able to help you communicate with your doppelgangers in parallel universes. His website on Quantum Jumping states that whenever we are faced with choices in life, a new parallel universe is created in which another self lives out the alternative life to the one that was created as a result of the choice that was made. We have all heard of this kind of fanciful explanation of the universe and while it is quite interesting, we don't really believe that it actually happens. His students do, though, and have written about their experiences. At a cost of US$100 his students receive tuition on how to switch universes and gain knowledge and help from our other selves. What I can't understand though is how you are able to ensure that you do not end up in a parallel universe where it has all gone wrong - I know there must be a lot of those where my doppelgangers live, poor things. I am going to give the free course a go and although I have received discounts on the full course so that I could now do it for US$29, I shan't be parting with my money.

I can't help but feel disgust at people who take money from those less fortunate and obviously disturbed, especially when, if you do the math, the website owner must be doing pretty well. So well in fact that if he really believed he was helping humanity, he would offer his services for free. The lame excuses that he needs to cover the costs of running and hosting the website don't really hold much water. After a lifetime spent setting this up and with 300,000 students already, even if they all paid the discount rate he would still have earned around US$9 million. If they have paid the full rate it would be closer to US$30 million. Why would he need your money?

There are some honest and more believable life-style gurus and one of those is Steve Pavlina. His free website has a lot of very practical advice on how to live a better life from when to end a long-term relationship to how to cook brown rice, how to be a man, why you shouldn't have a religion, why you shouldn't have a job, the meaning of life and how to be an early riser. He has over 400 blog posts and they are all divided into easily searchable sections. Yes, there does seem to be a lot on how to attract money and get rich without having to do much work but this is what modern man wants to hear.

Steve Pavlina's website earned him US$53 in the first month he decided to monetise it and this was five months after he set it up. He now has over 2 million visitors a month and people donate money depending on whether they feel they benefited from his advice and how generous they are. His website now earns him more than US$1000 a day.

If we take the beginning of the present recession as starting from the time of the collapse of worldwide stock markets in 2007, we are in the midst of one of the longest recessions we have known. Stock prices took more than 20 years to recover from the famous stock market crash of 1929 and Japan's stock market will probably never recover to pre-crash levels. The Nikkei stock market index has had trouble breaking the 10,000 mark and maintaining its position above this psychological barrier for a long time now and this is an index that stood at close to 38,000 in 1989. With an aging population and increased overseas competition especially from places like India but more so, China, Japan will never be the monster economy it once was.

The lesson we need to learn as human beings is how to live in harmony with our world before it is too late. With a population of 7 billion now and predicted to increase to 10 billion over the next 40 years or so, we are pushing to the limits the planet's ability to sustain life on earth. Especially so when we consider that 5 of the 7 billion people alive today are aspiring to become middle class consumers who will all want more houses, more TVs and more cars; a frightening prospect indeed.

While it may be impossible to persuade the old world en masse to give up its wealth and luxuries, more and more people may be happy to do so and live a life of simplicity and purity like the Man Who Quit Money and went to live in a cave in Utah, or Mark Boyle, the Moneyless Man and founder of the Freeconomy Community.

This summer on my way back to England to see the kids, I am going to work at Earthway Experience in Sweden for a short time. This is a permaculture centre where I shall be helping to plant a food forest which will become a destination for people who want to experience a more holistic approach to life as lived by our paleolithic ancestors. It is situated near Lake Siljan, the most beautiful lake in Europe which was created 370 million years ago by a meteor crashing into the earth. People will be able to stay on the site, bath in the lake and eat from the forest during their stay while learning life supporting skills such as foraging, hunting and preserving food.

Now that, rather than living a life surrounded by the latest gadgets, is the kind of life I would like to live.