divorcing from money

I suspect that our current national crisis has more to do with our relationship with money than any other factors. Everyone claims to live their life in the pursuit of happiness, but we have lost sight of what will give us true happiness. We work more to spend more, instead of spending less so that we have more time off. Why work until you are seventy years old so that you can spend your retirement in an old folks home, and saddled with debilitating diseases brought on by years of office stress?

A friend recently argued with me, stating that we all need money to survive. I am not denying that, but I do disagree with *how much* money most people believe that they need to survive. Everything is relative, and it is interesting that in some areas of the country folks can live comfortably on less than $20k a year. Why the difference? Is it simply the housing market and cost of living, or does it have more to do with the decisions that they have made and the objects that they purchase? I suspect that it has more to do with the latter, which would mean that location isn't the only thing holding us back.

Granted, it is difficult to change your lifestyle when you are surrounded by a community who lives differently. Imagine an Amishman trying to live in Los Angeles. It is also difficult when certain money-hungry cultural and regional traditions or beliefs have been embedded into our lives. Look at our current approach to nearly any holiday, and you'll understand what I mean. It's easy to say that you're not going to buy into yet another holiday that is being used as an excuse to give gifts and expensive throwaway greeting cards, but what kind of guilt do you experience when your friends and families haven't made the same decision, and they send you a gift or card for which they will not receive one in return?

The marketing industry has crept into every nook and cranny of our personal lives, and will not be happy until they've raised the expenditures for every holiday to the point of taking on more debt. Colored eggs and candy were once adequate to put a smile on any child's face for Easter. Now we've got $300 inflatable vinyl rabbits for the front lawn. For Halloween, we now have greeting cards and plastic tombstones to purchase. Next year, it may be faux cadavers and an inflatable hearse.

Weddings have already passed into the realm of deep debt. It's fairly common for parents of brides to take on a second mortgage to pay for a wedding. Does anyone really need a Hummer limo and an $8000 wedding dress? Even if you aren't a parent or a bride-to-be, as a member of the wedding party, you'll have expensive attire to rent, shower and wedding gifts, time that you'll need to take off of work, and bachelor and bachelorette parties (with bottomless booze and strippers) to fund. Maybe if you're lucky, in addition to that dress that you'll wear maybe one more time before you can't fit into it anymore, you'll get some nice bridesmaid gifts out of it. And with our society's relaxed attitude towards divorce, there's no guarantee that this wedding will be a unique event. Give it a few years, and the idea of reciprocal gifts for all who attend the wedding ceremony will be commonplace.

There's nothing wrong with a gift here and there for a special occasion, but let's not get carried away. We just need to simplify things and quit making the special events of our lives revolve around how much we have spent. In a nutshell, we need to quit spending money as if it were going out of style. Then again, maybe that is exactly what is happening...we just haven't (as a nation) caught that sort of "fashion bug" yet.