THURSDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2016
Why do I, or you, need to make money? Believe it or not, but there are people stupid enough to forget the answer every now and then, and then it falls to someone in the vicinity to explain.
I am one of these simple-minded people. Fortunately, I have enough complexity within me to awaken from my trance after a few minutes, and then I can usually scrape together enough brain cells to formulate a response.
The explanation goes like this:
Reason number 1. You need to survive (if you don’t want to survive, none of this applies to you). To survive, you need money to buy food, pay rent, and pay for water and electricity. You also need to buy clothes and occasionally medicine. It will also help if you do something that will make it easier to survive a year from now, ten years from now, and when you are much older than you are now and probably cannot or wouldn’t want to work anymore. Your survival may also be closely linked to the survival of people close to you for whose survival you are responsible. This means more money for food, clothing, medicine, and other items.
Reason number 2. If your survival has gathered enough momentum, it makes sense to make your survival worth the effort – otherwise, what’s the point? To make your survival worth it, you need to do things you enjoy. That means you’d need money to buy books or play sports, or go to the movies, or cook for the fun of it, or dozens of other things that people do for pleasure, or because it makes them feel happy and generally positive about life.
Reason number 3. You might want to assist others in their struggle for survival (doing so might even be something that makes your own survival worthwhile). Odds are good that you will need money in your efforts to help others.
Reason number 4. You may also want to assist other people in their efforts to make their survival worth the effort. Again, it’s not always necessary to lay cash on the table, but it will probably ease the process.
So, there you have it – or perhaps rather, there I have it, once again. We need money to survive. We need money to make our survival worthwhile. We need money if we want to help others survive, and we need money to help other people change their opinion if they think their survival isn’t worth the effort.
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