You Think Money is Hard To Come by

"...we think we have to go to work every day for a certain number of hours for a certain number of years and then we won’t really have enough to do fuck all with anyway except eat Value food products and play scrabble by the dim glow of the one bar electric fire".

"Do we really?"

"Well that is how we act".

"Shit!"

"Yeah shit! So try this on for size. Other people think money is easy to come by".

"No they don’t!"

"Yeah they do. There is another whole parallel universe with people making more money in an hour than we will make in a whole year. Now I am not suggesting that money is the be all and end all of success, sometimes it's just a byproduct and sometimes it's not even that and I'm not suggesting we can enter that parallel universe overnight, in fact I don’t think we can do it at all, unless we do everything they have done and maybe it’s a little bit late in life for that, maybe not. Maybe that too, is up to us, but how the hell can money be hard to get if they can do that? How can it be that the only way to have two beans to rub together is to go to work for nine tenths of your life and end up with piss all, when they are living proof that the world works the other way?"

"I don’t know".

"Neither do I but all I can see is that it must work both ways. We're right, money works the way we have always thought but it also works the other way too".

"Okay so we’re right about it but we don’t want to be. So what we’re saying here is that we have got this whole bunch of ideas which pretty well cover most things in life, what’s okay and what isn’t, what’s good to eat and what isn’t, what to wear where, who’s great and who isn’t, how to behave and any more would be seriously laboring the point because I don’t think there is a single thing we don’t have an opinion on".

"Exactly, there isn’t anything left unfettered by some outrageously firm idea that we have stuck on it, based on crap, erroneous notions and scanty radar information from the aforementioned swindlers and clowns".

"Are our opinions really that crap?"

"Not crap, just unfounded on the whole and not really ours. And then there are the ones that actually seem to have a foundation like earning money - we’ve proved all our lives that we were right about it haven’t we? It’s hard to come by and we have to go to work every day for a certain number of hours for a certain number of years blah blah blah, but we have just realized that strong as this foundation is, it’s not exclusively correct. There is another way!"

Fuck, that means..."

"Has it dawned...?"

"Yes it has, that means that other stuff we think, we've been shown, might work another way too. Not just money and friendship and success and who we are and how we get where we want to go and what we need to do in life, relationships and so on - it might all work both ways. It might just be the world's biggest swindle - there might be another way to do everything."

" Agreed! Everything is up for grabs!".

"Oh yes! So what opinions or beliefs even are we going to keep, which little beauties shall we hang on to and which shall we ditch?"

"I don’t think we can keep any. I think we need to re-examine everything ".

"What! How the hell does that work?"

"Do you remember that day when things got really bad at work, when we weren’t exactly coping, when the unanswered phone messages and emails piled up higher than the unfinished work on our desk and it all caught up with us on one monumental shit day?"

"Unfortunately yes".

"Well what did we do?"

"Sweated a lot, didn't sleep and agonized for another whole day over which bits to tackle and which bits to ignore.

"And what happened?"

"We thought we’d die from the stress".

"And did we?"

"Almost!"

"And just before we almost died, what did we do?"

"Hit 'delete all' and picked up the rest and put it through the shredder - man the relief".

"Yep, it felt monumentally great because wading around in crap that wasn’t going to get us where we wanted to go and was stressing us out was leading to nowhere except coronary central. And wading around through all the shit in our heads with fine toothcombs and tweezers and other sundry implements that people talk about, isn’t going to help us work out what to get rid of and what to keep. And therefore, it isn't going to get us where we want to go either, today or any other bloody day".

"So we could start again?"

"Yeah, really start again this time, not just move house, or swap cars, or change jobs or or even hairstyles, although the last one was a real doozy and took years off us; none of that - a proper new start”

"Blimey!"

*

Life Rule For The Common Man no.3

Stop making the same dumb mistakes

Make some new ones for a change

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