Money
Money makes the world go round, they say.
No. 33: Money
You’re a kid. What’s work? Life is play time, besides nap time and homework time and school time.
You’re an adolescent — a teen. Life is play time still, only fun seems to cost you now. You ask your parents for some cash to go to a movie or get lunch or dinner with friends. Sometimes you get lucky, usually not. Soon, you’ll earn the privilege to drive.
To drive! The end of sketchy skateboard rides, when small pebbles wield the power to visit annihilation on your face and limbs. Of course driving isn’t free. There’s fuel. Maintenance. Your parents ask do you even have a clue how much insurance costs? And that’s to say nothing of registration.
You’re a teen looking for a job. Here your life as an American worker begins. Clock-in, clock-out, pocket a wad of cash. Repeat. It feels good to make money. If you smack your mouth a bit, you can taste independence. But be careful! You don’t want to become too self-sufficient. The most you’ve ever spent is sixty on a video game at GameStop, and it hurt. You’re hoping mom will buy the next one and keep buying your food and clothes and pay your phone bill and the insurance and the registration, too.
Still, you know where this is going. More money will be needed. Doubtless, it will. You take what you can get, searching for jobs with a criteria never hinged on fulfillment but always on pay. Necessary evils are nothing you can’t handle if it means good times later on.
“Hang?” your friend, who has the day off, texts.
“I wish! Gotta work. Meet up when I get off?” you reply, and while it sucks, it feels natural and almost satisfying, like you're an adult having to go to work and not liking it but doing it anyway because that’s what adults do. To make up for it, when you get off and accept your wad of cash, you’ll celebrate not working after having worked with too much beer and a couple joints and maybe even a plate of surf ‘n turf fries that cost twenty.
If you’ve chosen to draw-out your adolescence a little longer, you’re in college. This is play time on steroids. You’re learning, meeting people, trying on new identities, indulging in gluttony, sex, seeing new places, and, yes, working — only now things are getting serious. College is a place to etch out what you might do, jobwise and otherwise, for the rest of your life. What’ll it be? Business, Marketing, Communications (whatever that is)? Presumably these capitalized jobs are the fulfilling ones. Certainly they’re the better paying ones, but they’re the fulfilling ones, too, right?
. . . right?
You’re an adult working full-time. Maybe you’ve opted for high-paying not-fulfilling, or maybe it’s low-paying very-fulfilling. If you’re really lucky, it’s high-paying very-fulfilling. Then auto-pilot. The years fly by. You’ve evolved into a full-fledged American worker. The days when a job was a means to an end are gone. It’s impossible to see it that way now. Your work takes up too much of your time, forcing you to face the music, and whatever dissatisfaction bubbles up as a result is summarily destroyed with crafty excuses and self-aimed lies. Thank God for family and friends and the weekend beach day, for movies and social media and TV, for food and for drink and maybe for drugs. This is how you get by.
This bleak projection is the big reason I chose to study not what seemed in demand, but what I loved: literature and writing. These studies felt useless, and that felt good. I was happy to be a poor, scraggy writer living in bush, notebook in hand, sharpening my pencil with my teeth. This would be my fate — I accepted that — because who would hire a literature and writing major?
Turns out, a lot of people.
The wads of cash got bigger. Having all but forgotten my instinct to render myself useless in a capitalist world, I became useful. I stopped reading and writing for fun and charted a path towards corporate success. Sure, I was still writing — I was still a Writer — and this kept me sane. But a writer doing what? Making money for myself and the businesses I worked for? It’s remarkable how easy it is to fall unconsciously into an ergonomic black chair at a desk space cleared just for you, with all the snacks and coffee you’ll ever need, as a white, college-educated Californian.
So I made adjustments.
I vowed to appear to play by the rules until I didn’t have to any more. I got a job that was high-paying very-fulfilling non-demanding, giving me the freedom I needed to focus on my creative endeavors. I thought carefully about what I wanted, what would make me happiest, and how the people who inspired me arranged their lives to combat the soul-sucking nature of living in a country that’s manic over money matters, or didn’t.
That’s when I noticed almost everyone in my life had creatively distanced themselves from the lifestyle of an archetypal capitalist. See: My mother, the teacher. My father, the craftsman. My brother, the firefighter. My girlfriend, the nurse. My friend Matt, the screenwriter. My friend Chris, the scientist. My friend Fred, the educator. My friend Jackson, the painter. My friend Josh, the filmmaker. My friend Alex, the improvisator. My friend Ryan, the carpenter. My friend Anthony, the surveyor. My friend Colby, the cop. My friend Mia, the chef. My friend Rachel, the brewer. My friend Winston, the illustrator.
Of course, none of us can detach completely from capitalism, and none of us have to. Contributing to something is something beautiful, especially if you’ve found some unique and creative way to add to the plot. My aim is for the work I’ve done to amount to something I can be proud of when my last end comes and I can no longer be proud, happy, sad or anything about anything. My work should do more than replenish stores that always need replenishing. It should enrich the soul, a vessel that’s always filled up but not always in great shape, changing states from worse to better depending on what I choose to do and love doing.
Where I see my purpose clearest is in art, weird and misshapen and existing there for no particular reason, just there, with no instructions attached and no correct way to go about making or interacting with it. Art is an island in a choppy, capitalist sea, a refuge where everything a person needs is provided for and where you wont be bothered by the ships on the horizon busy battling among tall waves.
You’re an artist, and the world considers you outsider, a heretic, a leper, a madman without use. You spend the whole of the day scribbling combinations of words on blank paper for yourself and the chance reader, perfectly useless, until one day, everyone else realizes their most important contributions are useless too, and they come to make use of you. ♦