MONEY

Seems to be the subject on everyone's minds these days. Despite a massive suicide attack on a Marriott in Pakistan and enough natural disasters to make you think you're trapped in a theater in the 90's, the subject of money is dominating the headlines. Except for the New York Post which has devoted its considerable journalistic talent towards covering a heinous cat murder in Manhattan.

"You don't need money to be happy." Bullshit. People who truly believe that have either too much or too little money to be given any serious consideration. Moreover the common reflexive disassociation of money from happiness also assumes that a positive emotional state is some sort of overriding biological imperative.

As usual, I digress. The point is, for anyone living in a society where they have the ability to read a facebook note written by a jaded failed academic and recovering compulsive gambler, money is an integral part of our lives. We go to school for 18+ years so we can get a job for 30+ years and then hopefully manage to enjoy 15+ years of blissful retirement, the carnival cruise, boca raton type not the clipping coupons to buy cat food for dinner type. So if life is a highway then your body is the car, money is the fuel and you pay for it with your time. The problem is that most people have to fill up 108 octane for about 40 hours a week and then get some piss poor mileage in between all too frequent stops.

You know the economy is bad when I have to make one analogy stretch so damn far. Apparently my comedic material is primarily ethanol based as well.

One of the few positive traits I can attribute to gambling would be a healthy detachment from the unholy reverence that most people place upon money. In other words I have a tendency to spend it as if it was going out of style. This freewheeling attitude towards money was fostered at an early age. I grew up in the poorest branch of a upper/middle or lower/upper income bracket extended family. My uncles had houses and a boat while my mother scraped together quarters to do laundry. I wasn't Oliver Twist by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't exactly champagne, caviar models and bottles the whole way either. The moral of the story is I learned that there was money to be made everywhere yet I didn't have any of it. A normal person would probably develop a strong work ethic at that point and work his fingers to the bone and make something grand for himself one day. But I'm a bit abnormal to say the least.

After trading one summer for a salary as a teenager I realized that the whole dollars for hours deal just wasn't my thing. Everyone said that there's no easy way to get rich quick, but everyone around me seemed to be trying to do just that. Wishing for a windfall while grinding their lives away. I fell prey to that philosophy as well. I somehow got it into my head that I would create an endless revenue stream as a professional gambler. So casually strolling into a billion dollar casino I plunked down stack after stack of increasingly large amounts of chump change. It wasn't long before the only thing chump like about the change was the person carrying it.

Before this turns into a 300 page chronicle of my misadventures, let's summarize. I learned that our society is structured so that very few can profit very handsomely from the endless toiling of the very many. Slavery was never abolished, they just call it salary these days. Whether it's 20k a year or 20 mil a year, as long as you have to trade your time for money, it's slavery. Because so many of us are slaves to money, money is damn important. Money is a fickle and cruel master that offers your greedy little heart ever more wonders while constantly pulling the treasures away leaving a tiny trickle of baubles to give you just enough of a fix to keep plodding along like a good little donkey.

I have just wasted many words to articulate a problem that we all know. In the next note i will offer some solutions or at least a new perspective. Until then think about why you drag yourselves out of bed every morning and why you can't wait for that IV drip of morphine aka direct deposit.

The struggle

Perhaps I do not pay enough attention to my every day tasks or maybe I need to undertake more challenging endeavors. Whatever the case may be, I have way too much time to reflect on the human condition, more specifically, this particular human's condition. Superficially that may seem a little too self-absorbed and conceited. But given that any thought I have or any perspective I attempt to view has to be parsed through my own formative experiences and limited frames of reference, I can only theorize upon the human condition through my own experiences. Even my attempts to walk in another man's shoes has to be filtered through my own shoe walking experience. That obscenely verbose Dickensian opening has enough CYA babble in it to make an M&A attorney feel at ease.

That being said, onto "The Struggle." The Struggle aka The Hustle aka The Rat Race aka The Grind aka The soul crushing spirit breaking nihilistic black hole force compression of emptiness that fills the mournful doldrums of your meaningless existence in the spare moments when your head is allowed out of your ass feeling. The struggle.

The Struggle is our attempt to carve out some semblance of meaning in this raging nexus of chaos called life. My biology is extremely elementary, but from my understanding, the general theory is that the underlying premise of every living organism is to multiply. An organism is born, it consumes, reproduces and dies. However evolution is painting quite a different picture.

I'll skip several eons and jump right to us clever little homo sapiens. We are born, we consume, we reproduce and we die. Not quite. We are definitely born and we definitely consume, but we don't always choose to reproduce and with all of this zany nanotech and biotech one day we may not die. The overwhelming majority of the world's population still reproduces. But there is an infinitesimal minority that chooses not to reproduce or at least not to do it "naturally."

Reproduction is a byproduct of a need to preserve the species. The reproductive cycle ensures that some form of the the species will survive, rinse, repeat. What if the next stage of evolution replaces reproduction with replication. Think of the inefficiencies of reproduction. The genetic improvements crafted by our physiology is a haphazard process at best that squanders significant amounts of energy on unsatisfactory copies. Furthermore the data loss caused by our ineffectual teaching/programming systems results in even further flawed replicas. But I digress, this is not a manifesto calling for cloning or the creation of a google based hive mind.

The struggle. We struggle with life every day. We struggle with our needs, our wants, our goals and our dreams. Wading through all of these conflicting impulses, we all stumble around, trudging forward like hungry zombies towards an hypothetical future state of bliss. For example we roll out of bed every morning off to school, work or the gym to try to get smarter, richer and fitter because we believe that attainment of those goals will bring us some sort of fulfillment to combat that crushing emptiness we feel all around us. We fill that abyss with everything from love and sex to cars and money. Somehow it never seems to last.

Getting smarter only serves to reinforce how much more there is to learn. Getting richer only reminds us of how much more there is to earn and working out only tells us that there's too much more to burn. From the day we are born we enter into a binding resolution with death. That inherent contradiction fills us with struggle. The design is quite flawed or perhaps divinely brilliant. That deeply rooted genetic knowledge of a timer counting down fills us with the struggle. We struggle every day to live knowing that one day we will die. Why?

Why do we struggle so hard? The PhD candidate cramming his head full of knowledge knowing that he will never have all of the answers, the captain of industry hoarding money while growing ever more fearful of losing it all with every dollar earned, the aging gym rat who feels the unyielding grip of father time pressing down on his bench press with each passing day. Yet in spite of this knowledge we still struggle. We push forward relentlessly despite the seemingly inevitable outcome. Why?

Because for all of our madness, or rather because of our madness, somewhere deep within the recesses of our minds, we believe that we can beat the odds. We believe that somehow some way we will bridge that last barrier to divinity.

So whatever it is that you're struggling with, don't give up because we're meant for more than that. Statistically we should not exist. Our planet sustains life because of a cosmic coincidence and we were formed by one sperm out of millions. Having beaten those odds there's no reason why you can't become a billionaire. Happy struggling!