Getting Off The Money Standard

...Our society makes them feel somehow that this work doesn’t count...

...A grapefruit is not only quantiratively different from a grape in the sense of being bigger, but also qualiratively different: it has a different taste, texture, and so on...

...What would happen if you were caught not owning something when you wanted to use it...

...It might even provide you with an interesting experience...

...Not only do Americans do more work without pay than they do with pay, but what they do is probably, on balance, better done, more useful, and less destructive than what they get paid for doing...

...Money was created to enable us to eliminate these qualitative differences and compare anything with anything else on a single scale of value...

...Reducing all things to one common scale of value makes it much easier to trade them...

...They have beautiful second homes, but when you pass by they aren’t in them, or if they are, most often they’re puttering about looking after the unending maintenance and equipment problems that such possessions demand...

...But if health is the goal, the money approach is not only “inefficient,” it’s a total failure...

...More and more of us are having to pay for fresh air and a tolerable environment...

...Money is not concerned with the unique qualities of experience...

...One of his associates points out that because of this “convenience” Hefner can’t just hop on a plane and go where he feels like going...

...I now have about 275 marbles...

...If my fantasies revolve around being a star or getting rich, then the activity is merely in the service of addiction...

...Each experience produces not only a degree of pleasure, but a certain kind of pleasure, with special meanings attached...

...You could buy it then, or borrow it, or rent it, or do without it...

...They work because they have to, and their labors are relieved neither by satisfaction with what they do nor with images of future success...

...The fact that their will is being thwarted is usually of more concern to them than the fact that a door is being opened...

...Furthermore, “during the physician strikes in Canada, the United States, England, and Israel, the death rate actually fell...

...rectal itching was discovered to be a common nervous symptom of the wealthy...

...Like all addictions, wealth addiction is self-reinforcing...

...If you risk nothing, you get nothing...

...This creates more janitorial work...

...But what harm is there in being thus prepared for every conceivable eventuality...

...0 J. Paul Getty bought his first stock at the age of eleven-100 shares of his father’s oil company at $5 a share...

...7% article is excerptedfrom his new book, Wealth Addiction, published by E. P. Dutton...

...L earning and growth are very difficult with wealth because they depend on experiences in real life, and wealth enables one to buy our of life...

...We tell him that oranges are worth twice as much as apples and give him enough money to have all he wants of both...

...Scott Burns points out that if all the work Americans do “for nothing” were paid for at a minimum hourly wage, the total would be greater than the total of all wages and salaries paid out in the United States...

...Papa gave me a dollar...

...Twenty cents for an errand...

...Radical mastectomies, routine in this country for breast cancer, “have no higher cure rate than the ‘lumpectomies’ that are routine in England...

...The mind shuns this test and tries to load the dice on every throw...

...It is true that some people will work harder for a monetary reward...

...To be an owner is to be a servant...

...they’re working to get the money and will distort their performance in any way possible to get it...

...We can distinguish between them by looking at the goal: is the energy invested in the activity because it’s an end in itself or a means to an end...

...But if you invent something to homogenize traded goods, it tends to homogenize everything...

...Your life becomes tied to mattera wall of possessions barricades you against the kinds of experiences that challenge you, change you, and lift your spirits...

...But this interest in the neurotic side of wealth began to wane as the psychoanalysts themselves became wealthy, and in recent decades they have tended to concentrate more on the anality of poverty and untidiness...

...Or do 1 do it because I have an image of the money I’ll make or the recognition and applause I’ll receive...

...Hugh Hefner, for example, whose passion for possessions has managed to make even sex boring, owns his own DC-9...

...Papa gave me 10 cents to go to the Post Office with a letter...

...What we want most of all is to be loved for who we are, without bait...

...By emphasizing our dependence on externals, for example, it weakens our self-respect...

...There are few people who can surround themselves with material possessions and not be bound by them...

...Counted my stamp collection-305...

...Furthermore, by locking us into ownership, distracting us and keeping us busy with janitorial services for our possessions, wealth addiction makes it harder and harder for us to see our lives in perspective-see that we actually have choices...

...The closets of the affluent are filled with ski equipment, golf equipment, scuba gear, camping equipment, cameras, water skis, and so on, as well as books on how to do all these things...

...There’s an old saying about the folly of trying to compare apples and oranges, but this is precisely what money is for: if apples are 10 cents each and oranges are 20 cents each, then an orange is twice as good as an apple...

...Whee...

...We are even trained to believe that camping in the woods-“getting away from it all”-is possible only if we buy a lot of “it all” and take it with us in the form of expensive camping equipment...

...P eople like to do what they do with some degree of skill...

...We don’t say “This sunset is worth three sets of tennis, one episode of Srarsky and Hutch, and a banana split...

...0 N ever own what you rarely use...

...Do I do it because I love doing it well and have an image in my mind of what it would feel like to do it even better...

...A congressional subcommittee estimated that in the year 1974 alone, 2.4 million unnecessary surgeries were performed, at a cost of $1 billion and leading to 11,900 deaths...

...They don’t enjoy the luxury of choosing between work that is inherently satisfying and work that is just a means to an end...

...A motel chain used to advertise that, in traveling, “the best surprise is no surprise...

...T he early days of psychoanalysis saw some promising beginnings toward a psychology of money...

...The more money people get, the more prone to wealth addiction they are, because they begin to think increasingly of those pleasures money can buy and decreasingly of all others...

...To breathe really clean air on land for more than a day at a time thus requires an initial investment of several hundred dollars, not counting the car that gets you back to nature in the first place and helps destroy it as you enjoy it...

...We begin to see our lives as a matter of necessity and compulsion rather than choice-we feel we have to work and scramble just to “keep up” (sometimes literally in the form of credit payments...

...A surgeon, asked why he nevertheless performed them, replied: “A radical mastectomy goes for $750...

...The more bait, the more doubt...

...It creates habits of mind and habits of behavior that keep us from seeing the way out...

...As they become immersed in material possessions the janitorial services escalate...

...This shrinks the time available for pleasure, and in response to the growing shortage people stockpile more possessions so that they will be instantly available should the need arise...

...But even middle-class people who have such choices often feel as if they were compelled from outside...

...Yet whether in travel or in everyday life, wealth serves to eliminate adventure and challenge, smooth over rough spots, tame the unexpected, and bury novelty...

...The fact is that people build homes, make clothes, raise food, create beautiful things, explore nature, build bridges, care for those who are sick, old, crazy, and helpless, make community decisions, teach, heal, and defend each other without getting paid for it, and always have...

...New products are invented literally every day, most of them absurdly specific...

...They scarcely notice how much work they do that isn’t for pay...

...Commenting on one such strike in Los Angeles, a columnist suggested that the sharp decrease in the death rate was due to the marked reduction in surgical operations...

...In the 18 months during which this diary was kept, there is only one reference to a playmate, and his strongest memory of an adolescent trip to Europe was the prices...

...When you can control what comes to you in life, life itself loses most of its excitement...

...If we stand willing to lose all of it, at any moment, then money will increase the options available to us, except insofar as the possession of the money distracts us from the innumerable options that don’t involve money at all...

...We need to create structures that will reinforce this healthy core-to create a functional equivalent of greed...

...w ithout money, how would you moti- vate people...

...Only work done for money is considered “real work...

...For myself and other travelers I’ve talked with, the unexpected adventures, surprises, and crises of travel have produced the most wonderful experiences...

...If we take the word “people” to mean everybody (since “everybody wants money”), then the question can be rephrased like this: “Without money, how would we get ourselves to do the work we want done?“ But people are constantly doing work they want done without paying themselves for it...

...Suppose we meet an alien to this planet and teach him all about money-and nothing else...

...This doesn’t tell us much about the difference between experiencing an orange and an apple but it’s extremely convenient in the marketplace...

...While one function of a doctor is to save lives, studies have found that “the fewer the physicians in a population, the lower the mortality rate...

...A simple mastectomy for $250...

...Freud and his disciples talked about the preoccupation with money displayed by the “anal personality,” one who was always hoarding and accumulating and tidying things up...

...What makes these entries particularly pathetic is that they are not those of a poor boy but of a rich one, and are relieved by so little else...

...Yet the process of avoiding some hypothetical future discomfort ties you to a chronic nagging level of real present discomfort...

...Having chosen repeatedly to prepare yourself against all future contingencies, it isn’t too likely that you’ll be able to walk away from your possessions or treat them lightly...

...And finally, wealth addiction, with its competitiveness, its concern with surfaces- with appearance, status, prestigeproduces a less open, more masked life, which in turn fosters loneliness and suspicion...

...They have also provided some painful ones, but if you don’t allow for the possibility of pain, you cut off the possibility of pleasure...

...For most people, working for money is merely habitual: they do it because this is the way it has always been...

...Just as TV, which exists for the purpose of entertaining us, tends to convert everything into entertainment, even the news, so money, which exists to create a common standard of value, tends to reduce everything to that standard, even nature...

...0n e of the main reasons wealth makes people unhappy is that it gives them too much control over what they experience...

...You have all these possessions to avoid being caught short, to avoid hassle and discomfort...

...0 T he heart needs to find out if love can be won without any control or manipulation or power or money...

...The wealthy tend to respond to frustrations and adventures with intense irritability...

...Your world gets filled up with the products of your own mind, and this deprives you of true novelty...

...If you go fishing with worms, you will catch whatever eats worms...

...This leads them to stockpile material goods-to buy more than they can use, which creates a vicious circle...

...another 550...

...One wonders why people bother to leave home if they are trying to avoid surprises...

...The problem is that the choice is not always a free one...

...They work on their homes, they make things, they do volunteer work for the community...

...Philip Slater has taught sociologji at Harvard and Brandeis...

...M edicine is the classic example of the distorting effect of money...

...Sold 12 copies of S.E.P...

...The lure of money may have made the surgeon quoted above willing and able to perform more and more mastectomies and to get good at it, and from an extremely narrow and shortsighted viewpoint this could be considered “efficiency...

...Possessions multiply: each one requires accessories for maintenance, enhancement, protection, and so on, so that each purchase traps us into further ones...

...We lose the feeling that we could survive or care for ourselves without the trappings of civilization- we feel incompetent, helpless, and then have to use money and status to prop ourselves up...

...Almost nothing is unexpected since wealth tends to protect you from the unexpected...

...Money is like a government agency- continually trying to enlarge its jurisdiction...

...by Philip Slater w e attach different kinds of meaning to our experiences and don’t usually try to compare or equate them...

...If you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won’t have any trouble finding lovers-but they will be people who love fame, power, or wealth...

...He has to plan every trip several days in advancearrange for pilots, food, flight schedules...

...Which do you think we’re going to say is best?’ Americans believe that dangling money in front of people makes them work harder and become more efficient...

...It would be helpful just to make people aware of this health-to make them realize that people will work for things other than money...

...In any case the trouble would be confined to the day it arose instead of pervading every day of your life...

...On the basis of this information he would never taste an apple, unless he had some whimsical curiosity about what an inferior experience might be like...

...It provides the wherewithal to cling to every outworn fantasy, pathway, or goal-to grasp every outgrown security blanket more tightlyin such a way that you never need to change or develop...

...It may make for a lot of clutter but what difference does that make if people like living that way...

...Copyright @ I980 by Philip Slater...

...This may involve a certain degree of passion and commitment hard to discriminate from addictive ambition...

...They try to translate their own fantasies into reality instead of tasting what reality itself has to offer...

...His diary at that age shows a boy already obsessed with money and accumulation: “Papa home-a quarter for my purse...

...But love isn’t fishing...

...Most people, of course, have to struggle just to survive...

...We like to fill our dwellings with objects that “might come in handy,” equipment for events that occur a few times a year, clothes for “special occasions...

...The catch is that they aren’t working to perform the task...

...Most of the “joys of ownership” turn out to be a tiresome bother...

...This is usually an enervating and disappointing pastime...

...They want to get good at it...

...1 become a success so that people will love me, but after I have become a success, can I believe in what I get...

...Nor is this an isolated or unusualexample...