Hard to figure out if one should work harder then necessary to gain more objects and experiences. It seems like the thing to do until you start wondering what is wrong with what one has now. Thinking back in the past, I felt the richest when I had very little. It is only in the times when wealth has been created beyond my capacity when it does not feel that it is enough. An ironic and cruel twist in it all.
—–
Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins
or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He
needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with
gas, and a female companion. But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money
with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the
development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate
food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth….
Money is a measure of wealth, and we invent money as we invent the Fahrenheit
scale of temperature or the avoirdupois measure of weight… By contrast with
money, true wealth is the sum of energy, technical intelligence, and raw materials….
No one goes into debt except in emergency; and therefore, prosperity depends on
maintaining the perpetual emergency of war. We are reduced, then, to the suicidal
expedient of inventing wars when, instead, we could simply have invented money —
provided that the amount invented was always proportionate to the real wealth
being produce. If we shift from the gold standard to the wealth standard, prices
must stay more or less where they are at the time of the shift and — miraculously —
everyone will discover that he has enough or more than enough to wear, eat, drink,
and otherwise survive with affluence and merriment….
It is not going to be at all easy to explain this to the world at large, because mankind
has existed for perhaps one million years with relative material scarcity, and it is
now roughly a mere one hundred years since the beginning of the industrial
revolution. As it was once very difficult to persuade people that the earth is round
and that it is in orbit around the sun, or to make it clear that the universe exists in
a curved space-time continuum, it may be just as hard to get it through to “common
sense” that the virtues of making and saving money are obsolete….
A leisure economy will provide opportunity to develop the frustrated craftsman,
painter, sculptor, poet, composer, yachtsman, explorer, or potter that is in us all — if
only we could earn a living that way. Certainly, there will be a plethora of bad and
indifferent productions from so many unleashed amateurs, but the general longterm
effect should be a tremendous enrichment of the quality and variety of fine
art, music, food, furniture, clothing, gardens, and even homes — created largely on a
do-it-yourself basis…
Here’s the nub of the problem. We cannot proceed with a fully productive
technology if it must inevitably Los Angelesize the whole earth, poison the
elements, destroy all wildlife, and sicken the bloodstream with the promiscuous use
of antibiotics and insecticides. Yet this will be the certain result of the technological
enterprise conducted in the hostile spirit of a conquest of nature with the main
object of making money….
It is an oversimplification to say that this is the result of business valuing profit
rather than product, for no one should be expected to do business without the
incentive of profit. The actual trouble is that profit is identified entirely with money,
as distinct from the real profit of living with dignity and elegance in beautiful
surroundings…
Alan Watts On Wealth.