I am going to start this one by giving a few caveats. Writing has made me acutely aware that everyone, including myself, has rose colored glasses. People will always see things through the lens of their own experience. People will interpret things differently. People will hear things differently. Sometimes extracting something completely different from what is meant. I’m trying to learn to be okay with that. I want to convey messages as best as I can. It’s a learning process. And sometimes it needs me to tap into my own life. I worry that it may sometimes appear tone deaf, given my experiences are not going to be everyone’s. But I’m going to reference something that resonated with me. It comes from a video called Sobriety. In this video, the spirited woman gives the spirited man advice. Advice on how to best help someone. And she gives him two rules. The first being the most important one here, the rule that he only talk about his experience. This is an article about something that is more emotional than people think. I could try to capture all the angles that come with the topic. But I honestly don’t think I can. What I can do is capture my own experience. The gist of this article is this: money good, no money bad. That’s the main message. It’s a pretty obvious message. The rest is commentary. If you are prone to outrage, please drop off here. save your time. Everyone else, let's get into it.
Of DVDs That Came in Cases
I remember back then when there were DVDs of five or so movies, complete with the nice case they came in. At the time, I had just gotten into reading Harry Potter - someone in the school bus had the entire collection. I kept bugging my dad to buy me the movie collection. And every night, I’d wait in anticipation when he came in the house. Waiting to see if he had the DVD in hand. There were many night of disappointment. One time, we took a trip to the coast for holidays, and while we were walking the streets of Mombasa, I saw a vendor with the collection. I asked my dad to get it for me. He promised we’d come back for it, or something of the sort. We never did. I was probably pissed that I didn’t get the Harry Porter DVD for a long time. It would seem I had to wait for Christmas and watch the KTN marathons they sometimes ran.
Another memory, this one from high school, relates to getting chased away from school for non-payment of fees. Not that my fees were never paid. They were always paid on time. This relates more to night prep tuition fees, which weren’t paid through the bank, probably because they went straight to the teacher’s pockets. Our school had a policy of chasing students who had ANY balance away sometime in the third week after opening to get the money. I always had the money, but I’d withhold paying it when I got to school. Just so that I’d get chased away from school, go galivanting in the nearest town for a day (mostly to eat some fish, chips, and play PlayStation) then go back to school and pay the amount. I saw it as a break from school.
Of Needs and Wants
Why am I telling these stories? Well, first, to illustrate that I’ve always been a nerd, and will forever be one. Second, to show that I was kind of an asshole kid. I wanted something and kept asking for it until I got the gist that it wasn’t coming. Probably a good lesson to teach a kid, otherwise he becomes even more of an asshole with time. Also withholding fees to get chased away? Dad would have been royally pissed at me if he found out. I sometimes tell these stories to my sister and she looks at me shocked as fuck. That’s how I know I’ve seen and done some shit. But ultimately, I use these stories to point out that I got pissed because I didn’t get this thing I wanted, while we were taking a holiday trip across Mombasa to Malindi. It might not seem like a lot right now, but to plan all that, not for one person, but for a family, must have been taxing, and expensive. And here I was getting pissed at not getting a DVD. And the lesson from this is that while I didn’t have everything I wanted as a kid, I certainly had everything I ever needed. And that’s partly because there was always money for what was needed.
A Different Way of Existing
There’s a YouTube channel called The Financial Diet that explores the ideas around money a lot better than I can. One of the things that came up in a discourse on wealth and poverty is that people on the different ends of the spectrum have a very different way of existing in the world. Someone who’s comfortable, moneywise, is a lot more flexible when doing things. He can miss the cheaper morning bus, and take the more expensive afternoon one. He picks the stuff he needs in the supermarket without really keeping track of the total cost. He probably doesn’t really know the price of the things he picks. He just knows he needs them. And that’s enough. This is the importance of money. It allows you to not worry too much about some things. Maybe by doing so, it allows you to put more focus on the things that matter to you. Money doesn’t solve your problems, but it sure as hell makes solving them easier.
God Understands Money
Religion is one of the most universal things we have. Different cultures, on different continents, even before colonialization, had some sort of religious belief, whether centered on one god or many. But regardless of religion, there is one thing we pay our respect to. It’s the thing we dedicate five, six days to, while only giving God one. It’s the thing that actually puts food on our tables. A roof over our heads. It’s the one thing that even God understands. ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.’ This, Jesus said while holding a coin up. In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus says something that science understood just recently. ‘To he who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance. To him without, even the little the has will be taken away from him.’ It’s what we call non-linearity in chaos theory. Or in layman’s terms, the compounding effect. In short, it is better to have, than to be without.
The Price You Pay
As for the price you pay for money, it varies. For most people, the price for money is their time. Some people pay more. Some people pay less. But for most of us, it involves giving away the most productive years of our lives away. Some people pay it with what society deems to be less dignified ways. Even as society is the one consuming the less dignified products of such enterprises. People will have different rationales for what is the acceptable cost. The other side of the coin (pun intended) is what to do with the money. That’s on you. People have different emotional reactions to money. Just as I am not in the business of telling you how to feel, I am also not in the business of telling you how to use your money. As for what amount is enough, that is more influenced by your environment than it is by any objective number. An NFL player making a million dollars a year is wealthy by most metrics. But he will feel certifiably poor given his teammates make ten times as much. It’s irrational. But as I mentioned above, money is a lot more emotional than we’d like to think. And with emotions comes irrationality. I know, sounds harsh, saying that people are usually irrational. But I will say this. There are rational people. They make up approximately two percent of the population. They are called psychopaths.
The Glorification of Trauma
Now, on to the thing I have been worried about while writing this article. Privilege. I recognize that I have it. And all the above comes out through that rose colored lens. Someone might say that I don’t really know what struggle is. And they wouldn’t be wrong. I recognize that there’s something beautiful about struggle. It strengthens resolve in a way that can’t be achieved any other way. I really believe this. On the other hand, glorifying struggle - and trauma - doesn’t quite feel right either. And yet it has become a business. Our grandparents are from the generation that struggled against colonialism. My grand-uncle one time told us stories of him fighting with the British. But this was a one time thing. A moment of reminiscence. For most of that generation, these stories are rarely told. Maybe because struggle comes at a cost. And glorifying the struggle would be glorifying the cost.
On the other hand, we celebrate winning wars. Rarely do we celebrate maintaining peace. We celebrate people that have and overcome trauma. Rarely the ones that never experienced it. We celebrate someone losing weight. Rarely the one that never gained it in the first place. We celebrate cures. Rarely do we celebrate preventions. I think its because of man’s need for spectacle. No one ever gets credit for preventing a hundred things that never happen from ever happening. And preventing a hundred things from ever happening is a lot of work. A lot. It’s someone that chose not to launch nuclear warheads (yes, there exists that person). It’s someone that has been working out all their life, four times a week. It’s someone sacrificing his/her wants so that those that come after him/her don’t have to worry about what they need. Privilege is not cheap.