Oh No, Not Utopia Again

There hasn't been a cost of living post this week.  With other things that have been happening, I've not had the time to put it together or compose anything interesting to say about my own expenses.  I have still been keeping track of my outgoings and income, so for the record, my total expenses for 29th July - 4th August were £114.04, and my income was £288.85, or a balance of +£174.81 (an overall balance of +£37.55 for the month of July) but a few days have gone by now so it seems superfluous to break it down any more than that.  An opportunity, perhaps, for reflection instead.

 I speculated in at the start of July that if I budgeted less that month than I had the month before to "non-essential" spending, I could consider that a kind of progress.  At the same time, I wondered what "essential" really meant, and with that comes the question - progress towards what?  My original intention when I began this blog was to record my journey towards a life where I could live without the need for money at all: a vague dream, perhaps impossible, but one that inspired me all the same.

To live without the need for money is how I understand true "self sufficiency".  There are other understandings.  The notion of "financial independence" seems to be more popular and relatable and to be sure, more easily defined.  "Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life" goes the saying - for those lucky enough to have done so, the prospect of early retirement seems attainable: sacrifice some time now, working hard at something that doesn't feel like a job, in return for a longer, more comfortable future.  It wouldn't feel like a sacrifice either, if you really did love your job.  At worst, a necessary evil.  But a necessary evil is still an evil.  Those who do love their job might ask themselves whether they love it enough to do it for free?  Love is an act of giving, and the Christian part of my brain is still telling me that to receive reward in return for an act of love you would not otherwise take is not really an act of love at all.

Which is all very interesting, but just a means to the end point that concerns me here: financial independence is not really independence.  If you depend on money to maintain the life you wish to lead, is it right to say you are really free?  The difference here is between "freedom from" and "freedom to" (Isiah Berlin's positive and negative liberty, if you like).  Money is "freedom to" in the world we inhabit; and yes, with that freedom implies a certain "freedom from": freedom from the drudgery of repetitive, unsatisfying work that still haunts millions if not billions of everyday lives and robs those masses of so much energy and personality and creativity, joy and soul - more and more so, in fact, despite all the prosperity our economic and industrial ingenuity has brought us.  Keynes' 15-hour working week for all remains a fantasy for almost everyone, close to a century after he predicted it would soon become real.  Our standards of living have risen, and Keynes was right to anticipate that, but are we working less hard so as actually to be free to enjoy these lives?  No we are not.  The opposite in fact.  The reasons for that are obvious.  Homo economicus: the victim of his own success.

I want a world where everyone is "financially independent", not only me, and not only a privileged or a self-interested few, although I begrudge such people nothing either.  This is not a world we can create through the accumulation of money, or of things.  It is not something we can create through accumulation, full stop.

Here is the heart of the matter.  Human beings are not individual economic units.  They are not individuals at all, not really.  Which is why the freedom of "financial independence" is an illusory one.  It is about accumulating enough for yourself to continue living the kind of life of material abundance you would not choose given the chance to live that life again, knowing then what humanity is beginning to learn (again) now.  We are waking up, perhaps globally for the first time in the history of our species, to the perils of our pursuit of individual gain at the expense of our sense of being one small part in a much larger whole.  The environmental crisis we face is expression of this awakening, which is a spiritual crisis in every sense that it is also a material one.  Community is the key.  Self-less-ness.  The emptiness that is at the centre of what you (qua you) actually are.  The universe that is you-for-others.

Money as we now understand and use it doesn't quite fit, here.  Money is not something that lends itself (pardon the pun) to being held in common.  Money is always owned.  There is my money, and there is your money.  Money is a claim to something, an assertion of power and of right.  There is always someone behind the money.  Follow the money, they say.  In this instance, "they" are right.

So anyway, what about me?  Oh, the ironies.  Let's embrace them, though.  I am both pretentious and sincere.  I am both joking serious.  Is keeping track of every penny I spend and sharing it with the world how I might achieve the end of moving, somehow, beyond the need for money - "financial independence" in the true sense of that term - freedom from finance?  However much I lower my expenses, they will never drop to zero.  So in that sense I will never be free.  I am sharing what the money is doing, but I'm not sharing the money. Perhaps behaving as if I do not understand what money is.  When in fact I've known that from the beginning.  Which is as good a place as any to end.






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