So there I was this morning at about 11, barely managing to keep my eyes open while i clicked buttons to try and isolate the fish. I had just been up all night playing, I was about to go to bed at about 3 when I saw a bad player sitting at 25/50, i just kept playing. I didn't really want to mind, but felt compelled. I made excuses like "this is my job, it's what i do", or "i can't pass up this soft high stakes game!" but that was all bullshit. It was all about the money!
I have a belief that we were brought up to have the mindset that success = money and money = success. We got told that we go to school so we can get to college, we go to college so we can get to university, we got to university so we can get a good job, we get a good job and make loadsamoney! And we've made it! We're a success!
I don't think money is all that valuable really. I was watching Bear Grylls a while ago (a survivalist expert). He was making his way out of some remote part of Africa and came accross a hunter-gatherer tribe. Bear Grylls helped them hunt for food. They spent 8 hours digging a hole to capture a porcupine. Before watching I never realized how big these things were, and how viscious they were! An animal is most deadly when it's cornered and it's life is threatened. After digging the hole and cornering it it dashed out, eveyrone just managed to get out of the way, jump up a few feet in the air and grip to the side of the whole. But man, that thing could have done a lot of damage! So here are people who just spent 8 hours digging a hole, then risking their life to give a small amount of food to themselves and the tribe, you try telling them about your money problems! Or try impresing them with how much paper you have managed to accumulate. Puts things in perspective, eh?
Money just gets you stuff, most of it really unecessary. So why am I doing something that I really don't enjoy (not poker, but playing all night) just to get a few more ££s? I have more than enough money as it is. I think it comes down to an addiciton to money. There was a program about prostitutes, 6 or 7 of them were being asked some questions. Each one was very unhappy and felt very unsatisfied with their life (as I'm sure you can imagine). They got asked why they did it if it made them so unhappy/unfulfilled. Each of them had the same response: "I have an addiction to money" They were taking in like 5/6k a week tax free and they got addicted to it. They certainly didn't need that amount of money, they spent most of it straight away on clothes/drugs/jewlrey etc anyway (none of which was very fulfilling to them). But they did something that they hated just to get it! Well last night/this morning I think I had the experience of being a whore. It wasn't fun. Never again, never again.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
Underlined is important/what you're saying... Absolutely spot-on.
I have a belief that we were brought up to have the mindset that success = money and money = success. We got told that we go to school so we can get to college, we go to college so we can get to university, we got to university so we can get a good job, we get a good job and make loadsamoney! And we've made it! We're a success!
That pretty much nails it on the head and is one of the main reasons why we are stuck in an unsustainable society that is rather quickly ruining the world
