It's been said that there is a cost to everything. That freedom isn't free. Everything we do in life has some kind of price fixed to it, even if we can't see it right away. Our society has this drive to want more, no matter the cost. Sometimes that's a good thing. It forces us to reach for what's next rather than simply accept what is. On the other hand it's almost like we're constantly making deals with the devil, not realizing how much it will cost us in the end.
I grew up with the idea that if you wanted to get anywhere in this world you needed an education. Not just a regular education, but a high tech education. The kind of knowledge I thought was necessary couldn't just be found in a book at the library. You had to go to that far off and almost magical place called College. Once you get there though you realize that while it's somewhat better than say high school or the last job you had, it's not all that different from the world you just left. It just costs a lot more. I'm not just talking about the money, although I'll get to that. The first thing you pay for is your freedom. Sure you may get away from mom and dad for the first time in your life, but more often than not the price of that freedom is something intangible. Right away you'll probably notice all the things that you took for granted while living at home. Your new freedom means just that, you're free to flounder on your own while you look for a way to pay for both food and possibly rent. The other thing you might find yourself paying for is your own identity. For many of us we spend years living in a very specific role because that's just how the world has always been up until that point. Leaving all that behind means that you don't have to be the jock, the nerd, or clown. You don't even have to be brother or daughter anymore. You get to choose what you want to be. Though in doing so you could potentially lose what you once were.
Let's not forget the cost in money either. Society has forced it into our heads that you need a college education. Sure you could skip college and just go find a job or a trade. There's nothing wrong with that except that we're made to believe that in ten or twenty years all our experience won't mean anything because we don't have a piece of paper that says we graduated from college. I believe that education is the silver bullet for many of our problems. Better educated people theoretically can create a better society. The problem with the system today is that in getting that education we're immediately digging ourselves into a pit of debt. Student loans are both a great and terrible thing. Without them I wouldn't have been able to go to school. Without school I wouldn't have the job I have now. On the flip side without student loans I wouldn't have been thousands of dollars in debt before I was thirty. Maybe I wouldn't be making as much money as I am now, but without having to hand over a large portion of my paycheck each month would it just be a wash?
I'm not entirely sure what the American Dream is. I do know that it's not something you can just buy on the weekend. It takes years of payments. At any time everything you worked for could be thrown out the window. At least that's the fear many people have these days. Years of work edging closer towards the end of that balance could be for nothing if the wind shifts the wrong way. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if perhaps that's how they want it. If people didn't owe lots of money that they had to pay back then how could they be controlled? Don't pay your student loans, they'll just take them out of your paycheck. Don't pay your mortgage, they'll kick you out of your house. One way or another the majority of your money isn't really yours. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're wage slaves, but one has to wonder what an outsider would think of our society. In order to get that high paying job we have to borrow a lot of money to be allowed to work hard so we can pay back the money we borrowed for the high paying job. It seems almost like insanity when you think about it.
As I mentioned before, we pay not just in money for things. Take a look at our national security and what we have to pay in order to maintain even the illusion of safety. In order for us to be safe from harm then someone else has to be in harm's way. Somewhere someone is going to get hurt so the most we can hope for is that we decide when and where that's going to happen. If we want inexpensive food then we often have to compromise quality for quantity. Something that's good and good for you has a higher cost than the prepackaged slop that could be bought for half the price. It takes time for quality and time is becoming more and more valuable for people who make a living in shorter and shorter increments of it. So that extra cost has to go somewhere.
Now it can be argued that it's just the cost of doing business. If you want to be something more then you have to play the game. You have to pay the price. They say that energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. I wonder if the cost of something is the same way. No matter what happens, someone is going to deal with that cost eventually.
