I told you I had nothing to do.
Anyway, I listened to an amazing, eye-opening This American Life (more so than normal, which is saying something). Here's the link. Seriously, listen to it. It's called "The Invention of Money," and it blew my mind. It's about the concept of money--how money is essentially just an illusion. I mean, everyone to some degree knows this, we just don't like to admit it to ourselves or think too hard about it. We know that a dollar bill is just an elaborate piece of paper and has no intrinsic value, we just also all agree to believe it means what it does. But there's no TRUE meaning. It is only as valuable as what we, as a society, say it is.
Think about that a second. A dollar is only as valuable as the value our society places on it. It's kind of scary, if you think about it--it makes the dollar seem so much more volatile than we've become accustom to thinking it is. What if everyone woke up one day and said, "you know what, I don't think a dollar is actually worth a dollar"? Depending on which way everyone went (the value is actually worth more or less), we would see macro-economic deflation or inflation.
Well watch out world, I'm going there. I'm going to take that one frighteningly small step further and say that the value of a dollar only has the value I place on it. (Thankfully, it's just me, and I don't control the masses, so no deflation...yet.)
Realistically, I can only do that to a point, I realize. I can't go to my landlord and say, "You know what, a dollar means so much more to me than it does to you right now, so I'm going to start paying you in MY dollars, not yours." That would spell eviction and a punch to the face. But, I can choose to abstain from buying overpriced or superfluous things because they don't add up in my dollars. After all, my dollars are worth more than the people who are pricing them think they are. I would even go as far to say that a Caroline Dollar is worth about 1.5 to 2 American Dollars. So that means that when something is $10 to the average person, to me, it's really $15-20. (Hmm....maybe a good money-saving strategy would be to just start calculating that every time I go to buy something.)
That is what it means to "know the value of a dollar." That is why you see people who make ten times what a normal middle-class citizen does, and they still manage to be overwhelmingly in debt--it's because they don't have the correct calculation of what their personal dollar is. Or when you watch something about how the wealthy live, and they have gold-plated everything, and you want to scream "You could do SO much with that money and you bought a gold toilet! Just give the money to me instead because you are officially too insane to have it." (Well, that's my reaction at least.) And, that is why that report came out last year about how, once you reach a certain annual income in America (I think it was around $65,000 or $70,000 for the average household), anything after that does not equate to added happiness. The value of the real dollar only goes so far.
As I'm trying to figure out my career and what kind of job I want and what direction to go in, I have to admit that it is, by its very nature, related to money. I originally chose to go into theatre (umm...not the best paying career tract, and admittedly how I got the more valuable Caroline Dollar), now I'm looking around to see if I want to go with another option. And, being the practical person I am, I've decided that I need to know that base amount of money (in Caroline Dollars) that John and I need in order to live a comfortable lifestyle. That way, I can make sure that whatever I decide to do, it has to make (or eventually make, if there is initial training to take into consideration) at least that amount of money.
Hmm....much to think about.
I think I'm going to listen to "The Invention of Money" again.
Think about that a second. A dollar is only as valuable as the value our society places on it. It's kind of scary, if you think about it--it makes the dollar seem so much more volatile than we've become accustom to thinking it is. What if everyone woke up one day and said, "you know what, I don't think a dollar is actually worth a dollar"? Depending on which way everyone went (the value is actually worth more or less), we would see macro-economic deflation or inflation.
Well watch out world, I'm going there. I'm going to take that one frighteningly small step further and say that the value of a dollar only has the value I place on it. (Thankfully, it's just me, and I don't control the masses, so no deflation...yet.)
Realistically, I can only do that to a point, I realize. I can't go to my landlord and say, "You know what, a dollar means so much more to me than it does to you right now, so I'm going to start paying you in MY dollars, not yours." That would spell eviction and a punch to the face. But, I can choose to abstain from buying overpriced or superfluous things because they don't add up in my dollars. After all, my dollars are worth more than the people who are pricing them think they are. I would even go as far to say that a Caroline Dollar is worth about 1.5 to 2 American Dollars. So that means that when something is $10 to the average person, to me, it's really $15-20. (Hmm....maybe a good money-saving strategy would be to just start calculating that every time I go to buy something.)
That is what it means to "know the value of a dollar." That is why you see people who make ten times what a normal middle-class citizen does, and they still manage to be overwhelmingly in debt--it's because they don't have the correct calculation of what their personal dollar is. Or when you watch something about how the wealthy live, and they have gold-plated everything, and you want to scream "You could do SO much with that money and you bought a gold toilet! Just give the money to me instead because you are officially too insane to have it." (Well, that's my reaction at least.) And, that is why that report came out last year about how, once you reach a certain annual income in America (I think it was around $65,000 or $70,000 for the average household), anything after that does not equate to added happiness. The value of the real dollar only goes so far.
As I'm trying to figure out my career and what kind of job I want and what direction to go in, I have to admit that it is, by its very nature, related to money. I originally chose to go into theatre (umm...not the best paying career tract, and admittedly how I got the more valuable Caroline Dollar), now I'm looking around to see if I want to go with another option. And, being the practical person I am, I've decided that I need to know that base amount of money (in Caroline Dollars) that John and I need in order to live a comfortable lifestyle. That way, I can make sure that whatever I decide to do, it has to make (or eventually make, if there is initial training to take into consideration) at least that amount of money.
Hmm....much to think about.
I think I'm going to listen to "The Invention of Money" again.
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