Filed under: Money | Tags: capitalism, lottery, neurotic, rilke, status, transcend and include
The truth is that when it comes to my relationship to the material world I think I’m completely neurotic.
But then I think most people have a neurotic relationship to money whether it’s always wanting more or like me not wanting to think about it or being terrified about what to do when the money runs out. But the irony with me is that I’m very pragmatic and I probably know more about finance than most people. I even know what a hedge fund is and for over a decade I’ve known that derivatives would one day kick the s__t out of the world economy. People who know me can’t understand why I live such a financially destitute existence or that I sometimes live what to them seems such a reckless existence like the many years I lived off my credit cards until I had to declare bankruptcy. I don’t understand it myself.
me & Captain Howell
I have the education and skills to live a very different lifestyle if I wanted, you know, a house, a car, a pension plan and a vacation in the islands once a year where I have tea with the manager of the bank where my off-shore funds are being securely held. But instead I live on the bottom rung of financial status where an expenditure of a dollar is a big deal and where I never know from one day to the next if I will still have a roof over my head. And meanwhile all my friends who looked as if they hadn’t a clue of how to manage their financial affairs live in their own homes, have nice safe careers and know where they will be when they are old and crumbling.
When I look at how people survive in the physical world I swear I’m astonished. I really don’t know how they do it. I mean I know technically but I don’t know where they get the confidence and motivation to do what they do. Most of all I don’t know how they came to believe in it. That’s not a judgement. I am simply one of the non-elect looking at the elect and feeling astonished. It feels like everyone knows a secret that I don’t or that they belong to a religion from which I am excluded When you’re an existephobe the whole world looks upsidedown.
But like I said earlier, being existephobic doesn’t mean that I am afraid of money. Not at all. For example I know people who say they wouldn’t want to win millions of dollars because they think it would destroy them. Not me. If I won 10, 20 even 50 million dollars tomorrow I would be fine. I would still take my 30 year old 3-speed bike for a ride to the top of the mountain and sit on my bench reading a book and no one would know the difference. It would mean that I no longer need to worry about surviving in a physical world so my existephobia would be under wraps. And since I agree with Needleman that money can be used creatively than all I would need to do is get out of my own way. As Rilke said: “True art can issue only from a purely anonymous centre.”
money money money!
So I can’t see that winning a ton of money would drastically change the way I live. The simpler my life the better. My dream of the perfect life is one where there is unlimited time to do nothing. I have a particular gift for staring out of windows for hours on end. At most I might use the money to find a slightly less squalorish place to live and then I’d buy myself a new computer. A laptop so I can be more mobile. After that my first priority would be to help all those I know who are struggling to get by, like all the artists I know who can’t do what they really want to do because they need to work to pay the rent but who find it hard to look for work because they too suffer from existephobia. And then I would set up a foundation whose mission it would be to relieve as many fellow existephobics I can find together with all those who have dreams of what they would do if only they had the means. Imagine how much fun it would be to help others have the means to realize their own dreams. I think it would be one way I could help make this world a little better place to live in.
I would be the money girl.
Poverty is such a horrible degrading place to be and no one should have to live like that so I hope I win billions and then through grace and humility I would find a way to help others escape poverty. And perhaps one day we will transcend capitalism, or as Ken Wilber says, transcend and include capitalism, move beyond mere consumerism and create a healthier saner more spiritually sound way of surviving physically in the world where success would be defined by something other than your personal net worth and thereby eradicate the cause of existephobia. I am certain there is a better way even if I don’t win the lottery.
Filed under: Money | Tags: arachnophobia, divine intervention, hagiophobia, material world, seymour glass
The reason I’m not very good with positive intentions when it comes to money is that, other than very basic needs like shelter and food, I don’t really know what I want. The material world seems so unreal to me. That doesn’t mean I’m a Buddhist. I’m a existephobe.
My relationship to the material world simply makes no sense. I wish it did but it doesn’t. I’ve never been able to come up with a concrete plan of just how I’m going to survive materially nor any clear notion of where my next paycheck is coming from. Even when I owned a business and had twenty people working for me, every time we were able to make payroll or pay the rent I felt it was nothing short of a miracle, that it had far less to do with anything I did than it did with some kind of divine intervention. That’s why I always have a ticket in the lottery. Even if I don’t know precisely what it is I want, I believe that if you don’t have your hand out your hand will remain empty.
You might ask, how is it that a existephobe can own a business? Isn’t that like an arachnophobic having spiders for pets or an ouranophobic believing in the rapture? In a way you would be right. My owning a business was a kind of convoluted and somewhat shadowy way of dealing with my existephobia. From an early age I developed a very pragmatic relationship to the material world, kind of like negotiating a peace treaty with a colony of spiders. I learned to live on very little, to demand very little of the physical universe, and what I did have I managed with the tenacity of a miser. It was all about being safe.
You can never be too safe
The longer I could hold onto a $1 bill, the longer I could ward off another attack of existephobia. When it comes to money I can be quite anally retentive! I got myself into business inadvertently, in that I didn’t go into business because I wanted to go into business––like I said an arachnophobic doesn’t cuddle up to spiders––but being a designer I decided very naively to open a studio and then had employees and then it got bigger and then someone had to deal with the business and no one else wanted to do it so I had to do it––it was hell. (Hagiophobia, a fear of hell. I have that too big time!) In fact it always felt like the room was crawling with spiders! But like ancient Chinese wisdom recommends: keep your friends close but keep your enemies even closer! I managed the survival part of the business in such a way that I could keep my eyes off the bottom line as much as possible without jeopardizing the studio. Sort of like how Seymour Glass told Buddy to keep his eye off the marble if he wanted to win. My accountant who has lots of zillionaire clients once told me that I was able to squeeze more out of a $100 than anyone he knew which he thought was ironical because I was forever on the brink of going broke. The irony was that while I could manage the $100 I couldn’t get serious about making more. Being an existephobe, whenever I thought of how we were going survive or if maybe I should go out and get more clients I’d panic after which I’d spend several days picking myself up off the floor. It felt much better to think that somehow everything would magically work out and surprisingly it usually did. When you’re an existephobe you need to constantly devise clever strategies to think as little as possible about how you’re going to survive in the material world and the way that works best for me is a metaphysical trust in divine intervention kind of relationship––at least so far!
