Money Matters Again…

(excerpted from my journal… forgive the obvious rambling…bunga lang ng masusing pag-iisip!)

…for a long time (several years, actually), I tried to be content.  I always figured that once I started making my own money, I’ll be able to find time and space to seriously write.  Money sort of brings with it a kind of psychological independence that makes one believe that everything else will be easier from then on.  How wrong that assumption turned out to be.

And yet how pervasive.  Now that I think about it, money seems to be as complicated as sex.  Leave that off for now…

First let’s talk about money.  It is sort of necessary to get by in this day and age, but then when one really bothers to think about it, it isn’t – not really.  The real necessities are these: food, water and air.  Perhaps lower down on the list but certainly still important: shelter and clothing.  And what really makes all those things worthwhile is this: one’s good health.  Those are the real necessities without which a person could literally perish and die.  In the increasing complexity of the world, money came into being in order to simplify matters for human beings.  One can certainly spend the rest of one’s life providing those necessities for him/herself.  If it were really necessary, I can grow my own food, make my own clothes, and spend the rest of my time making a habitable dwelling of my shelter.  Money coming into being at this point is a blessing and not a curse.  With it, one does not have to plant seeds or keep poultry or sew one’s own clothes.  With the blessings of money, time frees up and a person is allowed the luxury of freed-up energy to devote to other things.

Money then has become a symbol.  That is, a symbol of a necessity, though understandably, nowadays the symbol has become the necessity.  And while we do not work to grow food or sew clothes anymore, we work in order to get money.  With more and more money, we get to surround ourselves with the feeling of security – that with enough of it, we will never be left wanting.  That with enough of it, we can substitute it for everything else that we desire in this life, thinking, perhaps, that it can substitute for anything.

And that was what I thought too, I guess.  I thought that with enough money, I can buy my way into becoming a writer.  Now that I think about it, it’s what I’m trying to do now, too – trying to be a successful writer (that is, a lucrative and income-generating writer) in order to buy more “writing time” and “writing reputation.”  I guess you could say that it only stood to reason: the more money I could make as a writer, the more I could confidently call myself a writer.

As it turns out, all I’ve been doing is trying to buy my self-esteem, and trying to “buy away” my fears and insecurities – inevitable for any neophyte, I suppose.  Apparently, I’ve fallen into a very tricky trap – I’ve substituted a symbol for the real thing.  Or more aptly, I’ve succeeded in creating a substitute of an incongruity.  Money is a substitute, or a symbol, for a necessity, and not much else.  Money is supposed to allow me the luxury of free time to devote to the “non-essentials” of being human.  Instead, I’ve mistakenly devoted my energies to accumulating money, thinking it was both the essential and the non-essential, bundling it all up in the symbolism, and devoting all that preciously freed-up time on it, perhaps trying to buy more time, but in reality wasting all the freedom that it has already given me.

You almost have to respect money now.  It’s a conundrum that not only holds the key of survival, but also the entryway into self-discovery – the jumping board off which you have to leave off and jump if you want to make your life mean something more than just basic survival.  Like I said, very tricky.  I guess the trick is in realizing that while it is a necessity for survival, it is not a necessity for everything else that makes us human.  And the challenge for us is both to survive, as well as to transcend mean survival.

~ by dwanderingmind on September 15, 2009.