RPF-0027_What_if_Money_Were_No_Object_and_The_Game_of_Life_sick_today
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00:00:32.400 | Good morning friends. This is Joshua Sheets and today is episode 27 of the Radical Personal Finance podcast.
00:00:38.200 | For today, Thursday, July 24, 2014.
00:00:42.700 | As you may be able to tell by the sound of my voice, I'm a little bit under the weather.
00:00:46.200 | And I've been fighting this off for the last couple days. Nothing seriously wrong.
00:00:49.400 | I've just been burning the candle at both ends and didn't take enough time to build in enough time for sleep.
00:00:54.700 | So that's a mistake I won't repeat again in the future.
00:00:57.200 | But I didn't build enough time for sleep.
00:00:59.000 | I fought through it yesterday to record episode 26.
00:01:02.000 | But, you know, I was thinking back about that episode and I feel like I struggled a little bit.
00:01:05.800 | So forgive me if it wasn't quite up to par.
00:01:08.600 | But I didn't want to leave you without a show.
00:01:10.000 | So today I'm going to play two very short pieces of audio.
00:01:12.500 | I think this show will be no more than 10 to 15 minutes in total length.
00:01:15.800 | But I didn't, again, I didn't want to leave you without a show.
00:01:18.200 | So I'm going to play two short pieces of audio today instead of trying to record any commentary.
00:01:22.600 | Two short audios by Alan Watts.
00:01:25.600 | In case you're unfamiliar with Alan Watts, he was a philosopher.
00:01:28.600 | He died back in the 1970s, but I think about 1973.
00:01:32.400 | He was a Brit, but he specialized in Eastern philosophy and especially in translating Eastern philosophy into and interpreting it for the Western tradition.
00:01:43.000 | So he has various pieces of audio and video recordings that are quite thought-provoking.
00:01:47.700 | And I enjoy studying philosophy.
00:01:49.100 | And I just felt like these two pieces of audio were very thought-provoking.
00:01:52.900 | So I will not make any commentary on them.
00:01:55.000 | I will let you interpret your own conclusions.
00:01:57.500 | But I do hope you'll take about 10 minutes and listen to these two pieces of audio and enjoy them and consider what they might mean to you.
00:02:03.700 | I know that for me, I find them very thought-provoking.
00:02:06.600 | We'll be back with more shows just as soon as possible.
00:02:09.100 | If I'm able to, I'll bring your show tomorrow if I'm feeling up to it.
00:02:11.900 | If not, we'll be back on Monday with content that hopefully will be up to a higher standard.
00:02:16.300 | Just didn't feel like I could deliver for you today.
00:02:18.700 | So with that, have a great Thursday.
00:02:22.700 | What do you desire?
00:02:25.000 | What makes you itch?
00:02:27.900 | What sort of a situation would you like?
00:02:33.700 | Let's suppose I do this often in vocational guidance of students.
00:02:38.500 | They come to me and say, well, we're getting out of college and we haven't the faintest idea what we want to do.
00:02:46.700 | So I always ask the question, what would you like to do if money were no object?
00:02:53.200 | What would how would you really enjoy spending your life?
00:02:58.300 | Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system.
00:03:01.600 | Crowds of students say, well, we'd like to be painters.
00:03:04.700 | We'd like to be poets. We'd like to be writers.
00:03:06.900 | But as everybody knows, you can't earn any money that way.
00:03:10.100 | Or another person says, well, I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses.
00:03:14.500 | I said, you want to teach in a riding school?
00:03:19.300 | Let's go through with it. What do you want to do?
00:03:22.100 | When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do,
00:03:26.200 | I will say to him, you do that and forget the money.
00:03:33.000 | Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing,
00:03:39.400 | you will spend your life completely wasting your time.
00:03:43.900 | You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living.
00:03:47.100 | That is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid.
00:03:52.800 | Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
00:04:02.000 | And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is.
00:04:07.000 | You can eventually turn it. You could eventually become a master of it.
00:04:11.000 | The only way to become a master of something to be really with it.
00:04:14.800 | And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.
00:04:18.700 | So don't worry too much. That's everybody's.
00:04:22.000 | Somebody's interested in everything and anything you can be interested in.
00:04:26.200 | You'll find others. But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on spending things.
00:04:33.800 | You don't like doing things you don't like and to teach your children to follow in the same track.
00:04:39.700 | See what we're doing is we're bringing up children,
00:04:43.300 | educating them to live the same sort of lives we're living in order that they may justify themselves
00:04:50.100 | and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing.
00:04:55.700 | So it's all wretched. No vomit. It never gets there.
00:05:01.900 | And so therefore, it's so important to consider this question. What do I desire?
00:05:29.900 | We have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture and in various other cultures,
00:05:36.000 | high civilizations to the new member of human society.
00:05:44.000 | Instead of saying frankly to children, how do you do welcome to the human race?
00:05:49.900 | We are playing a game and we are playing by the following rules.
00:05:55.000 | We want to tell you what the rules are so that you know your way around.
00:05:59.900 | And when you've understood what rules we are playing by, when you get older, you may be able to invent better ones.
00:06:06.800 | But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation.
00:06:14.600 | He's not really a human being. He's a candidate for humanity.
00:06:19.300 | And in just this way, we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life,
00:06:25.300 | which always is preparation and never actually gets there.
00:06:29.700 | In other words, we have a system of schooling which starts with grades
00:06:34.200 | and we get it always preparing for something that's going to happen.
00:06:38.700 | So you go into nursery school as preparation for kindergarten.
00:06:43.000 | You go to kindergarten as preparation for first grade.
00:06:45.900 | And then you see you go up the grades till you get to high school.
00:06:49.200 | And then comes a time when maybe if we can get you fascinated enough with the system, you go to college.
00:06:55.900 | And then when you go to college, if you're smart, you get into graduate school and stay a perpetual student
00:07:01.200 | and go back to be a professor and just go round and round in the system.
00:07:04.700 | But in the ordinary way, they don't encourage quite that.
00:07:07.000 | They want you after graduate school or after graduation, commencement as it's called,
00:07:11.600 | beginning to get out into the world with a capital W.
00:07:16.200 | And so you've been trained for this and now you've arrived.
00:07:20.200 | But when you get out into the world at your first sales meeting,
00:07:23.300 | they've got the same thing going again because they want you to make that quota.
00:07:27.500 | And if you do make it, they give you a higher quota.
00:07:30.600 | And come along about 45 years of age, maybe you're vice president.
00:07:35.600 | And suddenly it dawns on you that you've arrived with a certain sense of having been cheated
00:07:43.500 | because it is just the same as things, life feels the same as it always felt.
00:07:49.500 | And you are conditioned to be in desperate need of a future.
00:07:55.800 | So the final goal that this culture prepares for us is called retirement.
00:08:01.100 | When you will be a senior citizen and you will have the wealth and the leisure to do what you've always wanted,
00:08:09.000 | but you will at the same time have impotence, a rotten prostate and false teeth and no energy.
00:08:19.200 | So all the whole thing from beginning to end is a hoax.
00:08:24.500 | You are involved by and large in a very strange business system,
00:08:31.900 | which divides your day into work and play.
00:08:37.700 | Work is something that everybody does and you get paid to do it because nobody could care less about doing it.
00:08:44.700 | In other words, it is so abominable and boring that you can get paid for doing it.
00:08:50.700 | And the object of doing this is to make money.
00:08:53.700 | And the object of making money is to go home and enjoy the money that you've made.
00:09:00.300 | When you've got it, you see you can buy pleasure.
00:09:04.900 | And in myriads of ways, you see, you go home, you with the wealthiest people in the world,
00:09:11.900 | and you would think that having earned your money and go home, you would have an orgy and a great banquet and so on.
00:09:19.500 | But nobody does. They eat a TV dinner, which is just a warmed over airline food.
00:09:24.300 | And then they spend the evening looking at an electronic reproduction of life, which is divided from you by a glass screen.
00:09:33.300 | You can't touch it. You can't smell it. It has no color, except maybe if you're very wealthy, it has color.
00:09:38.900 | But by and large, it doesn't. And you look at this thing and you don't.
00:09:44.500 | You have a strange feeling, you see, that the whole procession of grades that was leading to something in the future,
00:09:51.600 | to that goody, that gorgeous, galluptious goody that was lying at the end of the line, it never quite turns up.
00:09:58.900 | And this is because from the beginning, we condition our children to a defective sense of identity.
00:10:12.300 | We condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble,
00:10:21.700 | and therefore attended by constant frustration. And as a result of this problem being insoluble,
00:10:28.300 | it is perpetually postponed to the future. So that one lives, one is educated to live in the future,
00:10:36.200 | and one is not ever educated to live today. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, the philosophy of carpe diem,
00:10:46.800 | let us drink today for tomorrow we die, and not make any plans.
00:10:52.500 | What I am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.
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