Note: I am on Substack now as well. Article is also on there. Here is the link to that. Please subscribe if you want, or not. I am hoping to write one piece a week.
Also, some news: The tracklisting for HOW IT'S GOING has been finalized. Vinyl should be finished sometime first quarter of 2024. I will be releasing new music soon after the release cycle for HOW IT'S GOING finishes. New territories. For now, some music videos are coming.
Hope you like this essay.
Much love.
I dont want to get too personal, but i don't have a billion dollars. Nor, I'm guessing if you're reading this, do you. I also do not have a million dollars. I don't know about you. I'm guessing no. I am not a detective.
Being broke, strapped for cash, or "financially challenged" is a hard burden to bear. With inflation and correlated rising food costs, plus ticket prices for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, it can be hard for people to feel like they're getting ahead, because they most likely aren't.
But there are ways to feel better about this situation. No, silly, not, "work more." And, no, silly, not "profound spiritual wisdom that has lasted the ages." I'm talking about five things that I also will start doing to feel better about having less, starting now.
Firstly, everybody is trapped in a body. No matter how rich or powerful you are, you still have hangnails, unwanted hairs, and the looming presence of your inevitable demise. Plus, trips to the dentist.
But being trapped in a body levels the playing field immensely. You may live in a single room house, be it cabin, apartment trailer or other, and some rich person might own, say, two houses- wait, sorry, broke brain here, let's rephrase that- they might own TEN houses but they are still trapped in a certain room and have to physically move to the other rooms of their other houses.
You ever go to a beautiful mansion? Invited? During the day? Me neither. But when you're in those homes, you see a myriad of rooms, but what is the reality of this situation? If you own seventeen bathrooms in a house, you still can only be in one. You don't get to experience more of the stuff you own simultaneously if you have more money. You are still a bipedal mammal, trapped in your flesh and bone, trying to floss but forgetting to, constantly, until you finally get dentures. And so they shuffle to the next place through limited and disappearing time to do...to do...to do what, exactly? Eat food? Be on their phone?
Because, secondly, everybody is on their phone.
Think about this. What is a certain celebrity doing at this moment? As I am over thirty, I don't know of any current celebrities and therefore all my references will already be outdated. Maybe I'll make up a new one, and, as the only two things that seem to neither be created nor destroyed is matter and a certain exact number of famous people on magazines at grocery store racks, I will call them "Al Bill Rickstyon." So, what is Al doing right now? Why, if he's anything like me or you, he's on his phone. Which is comforting. I'm writing this very piece ON a phone in Valdez, a place whose motto is, "if it's not pouring rain enough to get you to cry tears you can't even feel, it ain't home." And I see photos, online, of rich men with new and improved faces going zip lining or whatever. It's even sunny. But they're sharing it on Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, AOL and probably your uncle's Geocities site.
The point I'm making is these people are on their phones all the time. Billions of dollars, they could experience any delight or thrill known to humanity, and there they are, scrolling away. They don't even get better movies than we do. They have to watch rehashed and oppressive and dulling Marvel movies, some they're probably in. Their prestige television is still seen by those who make thousands of times less than they do.
There's a clip from the show The Kardashians where everybody sits on sofas on their phones. I'm struck by this scene for a number of reasons. The couches they sit on are worth more than my life assets. They are in a mansion. Someone, somewhere, is eating duck, and that person is just the MAID. The amount of net worth and conceivable power in the scene is in the multiple billions.
And they sit there, on their Apple iPhones, swiping away with faces carved of bored stone, sending out tweets for brands or whatever.
And then they binge watch some Netflix show they hate and notice the frown lines are deeper.
Third, when the apocalypse hits, you won't care. The great thing about owning little of value is when it's time to exit left off the stage of modern capitalist society and into Planet of the Apes sans apes or Mad Max sans Max, you were born ready. You have no assets to worry about. You're certainly not somebody who's a shoo-in for the guillotine. No, your faceless anonymity is of value in these hardscrabble, dystopian times.
Fourth, you're probably cool. Rich people aren't cool. Elon Musk isn't cool and Taylor Swift isn't cool and Jay-Z isn't cool and those tik tok influencers are, in the deepest and truest way possible, the absolute opposite of cool. You know who is actually cool. You've seen it. Homeschooled kids with Swiss army knives and buttoned up shirts tucked into jeans, old men rocking bunny boots walking the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere without a thumb out or any need for a ride, commercial fishermen buying way too many boxes of hashbrowns for their boat in early summer, young men who love chicken wings and make sure to always buy a postcard at every museum they visit, librarians who make sure the next book in the series you love is on the shelf pronto, retired hockey players who love telling you about the time they scrimmaged with Wayne Gretsky, some kid plucking a guitar singing about train schedules, and a woman selling flowers on a street corner.
Finally, you probably have better taste. Rich people, generally, have terrible taste. Look at Jeff Bezos. He dresses like a bouncer at a Pitbull concert, or your cop uncle at Thanksgiving. Elon Musk dresses like your cousin at Thanksgiving. Bill Gates dresses like your aunt at Thanksgiving. The only person who had any taste and boatloads of money was Steve Jobs, and that was so long ago he'd be canceled now by people using the very devices he sold. Every phone company- Google and Samsung included- still are making variations of Apple ads from 13 years ago. That includes Apple now.
A Tik Tok couple recently had a 59 million dollar wedding and who was their music of the enchanted and lovely evening? Maroon 5. They paid millions to hear the exact song you hear at your local Subway WILLINGLY. Imagine being THAT kind of person. You don't even know how much you have to be thankful for.
I'm not saying being short on funds ("fun(d)s," as John Lennon wrote back when he short on them and still cool) is ideal, but if you keep these five wisdom nuggets in your brain's back pocket, you may feel slightly better when making sure you have money in your account when ordering chicken nuggets off the McDonalds dollar menu. Possibly.
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