tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post2352269756298689693..comments2011-07-11T10:28:28.750-07:00Comments on The Adventures of the Henwife: Some thoughts on moneyCulturemouse1http://www.blogger.com/profile/06990264835001360595noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-45127643112800460282011-02-19T13:02:40.556-08:002011-02-19T13:02:40.556-08:00and electric lights.and electric lights.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04694116896070240429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-73984413920878101872011-02-19T13:02:10.916-08:002011-02-19T13:02:10.916-08:00I think we are still in the Dark Ages. We just hav...I think we are still in the Dark Ages. We just have more stuff. :-)Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04694116896070240429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-23379102326440447382011-02-15T12:24:29.482-08:002011-02-15T12:24:29.482-08:00(And the wrong 'they're/their' on Mum&...(And the wrong 'they're/their' on Mum's answer. Goodness me, sorry, people!)Culturemouse1https://www.blogger.com/profile/06990264835001360595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-86698092250902860402011-02-15T11:08:14.933-08:002011-02-15T11:08:14.933-08:00(Apologies for using the wrong 'its/it's&#...(Apologies for using the wrong 'its/it's' in Sarah's reply, and also a semi-colon instead of an apostrophe, and any other mistakes and typos in any of the posts.)Culturemouse1https://www.blogger.com/profile/06990264835001360595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-47592188185813375792011-02-15T11:05:27.109-08:002011-02-15T11:05:27.109-08:00Annikki: You do bring in another rung by talking o...Annikki: You do bring in another rung by talking of the sacrifices made by others, which isn't something I covered in my original post. I have found 'Smile' on the bookshelf so remind it to lend it to you so you can read 'Empire Building'. As I mentioned when I told you about it before, the story concerns a man who places achievement in society above all else, supposedly for the benefit of his wife and son, but to their emotional and physical detriment. I'm not interested in money or being rich at the expense of my time with Simon or his time with Milly. A balance has to be struck, as in all things. When I say I want to be rich I'm expressing a fantasy, similar to wanting to be able to sing incredibly well, or write a nobel-prize winning novel, or have magic powers (or at least some kind of cool X-Men mutation, but not one that messes with how I look). The reason I wrote this blog in the first place was that if I express any of those other desires then no-one bats an eyelid, but if you say you'd like to be stupidly rich then people act like there must be something lacking in your soul to want something so vulgar and so steeped in corruption and misery, and that you must clearly be someone who therefore DOESN'T CARE about other people and how they suffer, and I wanted to put forward a defence both of being rich, and of wanting to be rich. I CARE. I just want to do it wearing diamonds.Culturemouse1https://www.blogger.com/profile/06990264835001360595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-60127509974643439392011-02-15T11:05:06.437-08:002011-02-15T11:05:06.437-08:00Which leads me to Sarah: As you say, odd to becom...Which leads me to Sarah: As you say, odd to become to obsessed with something that has no value in itself, but huge value in terms of what it represents. There are people who have expensive art who care about it only because it's expensive, rather than because it's beautiful art. But it's equally odd to blame money for the way people behave rather than the people themselves. I suspect that if there were no money in the world then the people who behave badly because of it would behave badly anyway. Whenever I hear a story told about how ancient civilisations become corrupted by Western influences such as money and drink and sex, I always wonder if they were really so idyllic in the first place, and if the people who succumb to bad habits were really so wonderful before. I think it's quite possibly power, rather than money, that is the corrupting influence. Money, of course, is a path to power, but without it other paths would be found and used. <br /><br />As for our opinions on this being irrelevant? I disagree. We're intelligent, educated individuals, and even if we weren't we'd still be entitled to an opinion. Just because we don't know what its like to be extremely rich or extremely poor doesn't mean we should fold our arms and say 'Well, it's none of my business." I don't know about you, but the world is my business. If we restrict ourselves to only thinking about or debating subjects in which we have personal experience we would all think in very narrow lines.<br /><br />As for being grateful, I don;t believe that wanting more mutually excludes being grateful for what we already have. Cathy Hudson was saying to me on Facebook that she's jealous of my baby and that she'd like one of her own. She then felt the need to follow this with a whole thing about how she's obviously extremely grateful for Sam and she appreciates she's lucky to have him and some women don't have even one etc. The thing is, I didn't for a second assume she wasn't grateful for Sam or that she wasn't aware of the plight of poor women struggling to get pregnant even once. I didn't judge her, but she clearly judged herself, just for expressing a desire to have more than what she has. And we do that, we judge people for wanting more, as though it's somehow a blasphemy, as though wanting clear eyesight is wrong when there are people who have no eyesight at all, as though wanting clear eyesight is an insult to those with no eyes. We use the concept of wanting more as a stick to beat people with, to imply they're shallow or heartless, to push them back down into their place, but wanting more than what this life just naturally offers can be an amazing thing. Wanting more is how we have cars, the internet, heart surgery, space exploration, land exploration, electricity. Wanting more is how we know America's there, and China, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Greenland. Wanting more is how we have paintings that fill entire ceilings, and books that aren't The Bible. Wanting more is how civilisation becomes civilised, and how it evolves. Otherwise we're just stuck in the Dark Ages.Culturemouse1https://www.blogger.com/profile/06990264835001360595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-53251120254543451642011-02-15T11:04:32.567-08:002011-02-15T11:04:32.567-08:00Mum: Dad said to me once was that it was better to...Mum: Dad said to me once was that it was better to be poor and miserable than rich and miserable because if you were poor and miserable then you could always hope that one day money would come along and solve your problems, but that if you were rich and miserable there was nowhere else to go, as it were. An interesting adjunct to that idea is that it suggests that we don't necessarily address the root of our problems. It's easy to look at someone, say the bored alcoholic housewives in the Sunday Times magazine a couple of weeks ago, who 'have it all', and say that money hasn't made them happy. That's true, but it isn't making them unhappy either. They clearly have issues that neither they or we are willing to address because we'd rather shake our heads primly and say "well, see where they're 'having it all' has got them", and they'd rather blame the emptiness of their perfect lives than look at why they allowed their lives to become so empty in the first place. I agree with you that the love of money is what makes people behave badly, rather than money itself. Money just exists.Culturemouse1https://www.blogger.com/profile/06990264835001360595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-77412662467651210152011-02-11T07:14:46.978-08:002011-02-11T07:14:46.978-08:00To quote yourself (although, you said this to Bea ...To quote yourself (although, you said this to Bea after she had successfully warbled her Japanenglish at Milly more loudly than either of us could have imagined a baby would be able to speak) I shall say "some very salient points made"... and to add another rung to the ongoing ladder of debate about the money issue, it is the sacrifices that are made in order to acquire money that twist a knife in my Champagne-Socialist's heart. The sacrifices all too often being made by the people of the third world, whose natural resources are being robbed by those morally maligned but socially celebrated power player business men that fund all the political parties in the west. How many wealthy people can put their hands on their hearts and say that every one of their many pennies has been made without just a little bit of cheating, tax evading or sheer cold, hard, ruthlessness? Then there are the sacrifices made by the children of the people who work ludicrously long hours in order to be sent to public schools, and given the best of everything...when in fact all a child really wants or needs is their parents' time, because, as a parent and a teacher, I can promise you, that children equate the time you give them with how much you love them. <br />And I could go on but Bea is tugging at my hair which is the international bsby sign for "play with me mummy I'm bored". So I shall, because time, is love.annikkihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07155416736873093855noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-73263905080020796752011-02-10T13:57:24.819-08:002011-02-10T13:57:24.819-08:00for me, the optimum amount of money would be the p...for me, the optimum amount of money would be the point where i didn't have to worry about it. however, i suspect that when you (collectively) have it, you worry it will disappear. <br /><br />what would be truly lovely would be a society in which money is not what gets traded. i appreciate it started out as a shorthand/gesture for real trading, and in some cases that's still true, but i think in banking terms it's got slightly out of hand. people actually think it's real, where it's little more than a concept and is in fact entirely based on confidence in its abundance. how weird is that? <br /><br />so, do i want more money? dunno. i'm doing ok, and i don't really want 'stuff', so my money is spent on the basics of living. do i wish i didn't have to have money to live comfortably? yes. do i think the general obsession with money and 'stuff' is collectively unhealthy? yes. do i think that me even having an opinion on it when i live in such a privileged part of the world, with all my education and wits behind me, is completely irrevelant? yes. you and i don't know what it is like to have extreme wealth or extreme poverty, and all of us would be much better served by being grateful for what we do have.<br /><br />end of sermon. ;-)Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04694116896070240429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-637497141150145495.post-50076329945828493772011-02-10T08:11:56.484-08:002011-02-10T08:11:56.484-08:00If you are determined to be miserable, it is surel...If you are determined to be miserable, it is surely better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable, and if you are happy, there are many things you can do to spread that happiness around if you have lots of money. Anyway, it is the LOVE of money that is the root of all evil, not money itself. If I had more money I would buy lovely Debbie Bliss and Nori yarns for my knitting instead of trawling the internet for discontinued bargains. Dream on!Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10858094916548207943noreply@blogger.com