Have you watched television lately? Or really ever. In an hour's worth of programming there is only really forty two minutes dedicated to the actual show. The other eighteen minutes is filled with advertising, both national and local. Back in the 1960s there were nearly ten more minutes of programming for an hour long show. In today's half hour block of time over 25% of it is devoted to commercials. Somewhere along the way it became acceptable to increase the advertising block of time in hopes of generating more money. Add to that there is something called product placement where even during the show there are not too subtle inclusions of items that a company wants you to buy. So the clever doctor just happens to crack open a Coke just before revealing the diagnoses that's been plaguing the patient the entire episode or the cops chase down the killers using all Ford vehicles. The idea is that we'll associate the soda or the car with our favorite show and maybe, just maybe, we'll take that association with us when we're faced with the decision of what to drink or what to drive.
With commercials someone is constantly trying to convince you to hand over your money for a service or product that they want you to believe you can't live without. Who knows, maybe you can't live without it, but I'm usually of the belief that if I managed to get by this long without it, then it's not so much a needs as it is a desire. I've talked before about how I've stayed pretty traditional when it comes to the work I've done in order to make my money. It's hard for me to imagine having to go to work every day and spend my time trying to convince people to give me their money. Some people are born salesmen. They have a gift at identifying a person's need and knowing how to fulfill it. Or at least spotting the person's perceived need and what they can do to maximize profit from it. Regardless of how you feel about it, it must be hard work filled with uncertainty.
The more I think about it, the stranger it is this cycle we go through to make money, only to spend it on things we don't always need. If you think about it this way, whatever we spend our money on it's just the culmination of all the effort we put into making that money in the first place. In that sense it really comes down to quantifying the value of our time. Everything has worth, which means everything has a cost associated with it. As of right now we dictate the price of things, even if it often feels like we have no power over the system as a whole. Sometimes it's easy to forget that we as a whole determine the value of things based on our demand for it. Our power to sway the system may feel inconsequential because we're just one voice out of many. I recently read about how due to the current economic situation it's getting to be too expensive for Americans to eat fast food. Fast food was designed to be a relatively cheap and easy alternative to cooking. It's to the point now where it's actually more cost effective to buy the ingredients and make it yourself. Actually it's been that way for a long time, but it comes back to how much your time is worth to you. The added monetary cost was designed to offset the saving in time. The thing is that the price of fast food will not go down until people start to weigh the financial cost versus the time spent and decide the cost does not justify the benefit. For some people time will always be more important than money. For others the saving of money outweighs any extra time spent preparing a meal by hand.
Will we ever get to a point where money isn't the basis of our society? Really money is just a mutually agreed upon standard for what something is worth and yet who decides what the standard is? Someone out there is making a determination on the value of everything. Is it us that influences that decision or does the system take on a life of its own? If we really are in control then theoretically we could all mutually decide to abandon the system in favor of something else. It's highly unlikely that it would ever happen though. They say money is the root of all evil and maybe that's a little dark, but not exactly far off the mark. We associate money with power because right now if you have money then you have more opportunities than someone without it. Look at big business who are caught doing something wrong. They can use their large amounts of money to buy their way through the legal process. The same thing happens with celebrities who misbehave. Do those with money not have to follow the same set of rules as those with less? If we were to abolish currency as we know it today then how would those people with large amounts of money be able to maintain their status or level of power? We use money as a way to rank ourselves within society, even if we may do it unconsciously. It may not be the sole basis of how we group ourselves, but it's certainly an important factor.
Parents try to teach children the value of money so that they can understand how the world works. Before I went out and got a real job my dad would pay me for doing simple chores around the house. Before then it was just things I was expected to do anyway. I had reached an age where I needed to learn the cost of things. When we're young we almost come to expect certain things to be provided. Clothes and food would just sort of appear for us when we needed them. Toys and other things may happen on special occasions, but for a lot of us there was no real association with the price behind them. Go to a store with a toy section and watch the children there. They may be old enough to see the prices on things. They may even know the difference between $19.99 and $99.99. Still for them it's an abstract idea. When asked to pick which toy they want a child will just pick whatever appeals to them at the time. Until stipulations are put on the choice there is no limit to what they could have. Actually there is a limit, they just don't know it. So as I got older and started do chores for money there was a change. When going to the toy aisle and spotting something I wanted I couldn't just ask for it to be bought for me. Instead I had to calculate the cost and see if I had enough money to buy it myself. The responsibility was given to me to decide how I wanted to spend my own money. It was then that I started to grasp the concept of working for something I wanted, rather than simply having it given to me. It was also at that point that I I could see what my parents had to go through in order to provide me with the life I had. As I mentioned before, prior to then there was an expectation of maintaining the status quo.
With the way things are it's sometimes hard to know if money is how we quantify the value of everything or if money is where the real value is stored. Is money just a means to an end or is it just the end?
