Money, Never enough of it
Last year, when we were driving through Namibia in a Hyundai i10, taking the back roads against all advice, cranking Biggie Smalls and staring at the endless tundra of nothing, I thought heaps and heaps and heaps about money. How it seemed to be leaking out of my bank account. Slowly my good times were vanishing as the funds sank lower and lower.
We took a wrong turn and ended up in the township. Driving around, people standing in front of their tiny houses, wondering what in the world these two white girls in their tiny light blue hot cross bun on wheels, packed full of surfboards were doing here.
It was so hard to comprehend, that we were doing things we wanted to do on our part time waitress wages whilst everyone here was working harder than we could ever imagine and barely earning enough to eat. Let alone fly to another continent and road trip around for half the year.
Yet we were all members of the same planet. How the fuck does that happen?
I thought for hours, with no knowledge what so ever of how economy works, praying that somehow my logic could figure it out, and basically realised that I have no idea and what the fuck is it that makes the Australia dollar worth what it is and the same for all the other currencies.
Like really, what is it?
We have created a system where some people are born into absolute liberty to do whatever they want and others are not, and the people that are not a deemed incapable by the people that are but really it’s all just a bunch of numbers on a screen telling us what we can and can’t do.
We talk about the possibility of machines being conscious in the future, whether if they started controlling us could we turn them off?
That apocalyptic scenario of robots taking over and our own genius ends up destroying us. Well fuck.
We created economy, yet we’re all slaves to it. We’re slaves to our own genius and we cannot turn it off.
Isn’t that a scary thought.
“Screw people and the environment, lets deal with the economy” – Tony Abbott, former Australian Prime Minister