I hate money

I try to live outside this Matrix world and tell myself that money is of no importance.

I'm perfectly fine with my piece of s**t car, as long as it runs. However, because it's a piece of s**t, I can't trust it outside a relatively small area where I know I can call someone up and beg them to save me if it breaks down.

I lie to myself, saying that I have never worried about money in my entire life. It's true that, in the past, I knew I could find a job that would pay enough to support myself and my family. But the damage wrought on my psyche by those jobs is still beyond my reach to repair. If I think about it long enough, I know it is impossible to recall a single job that didn't involve doing things that were illegal or immoral or both. They also required the acceptance of harassment, both verbal and sexual, from my employers and co-workers, knowing that if I did anything about it, I would lose my job and not be able to support my family. Those were the “good” jobs.

I tell myself that I live a simple life that doesn't require a lot of money. However, it requires enough money that I am always and forever beholden to someone and can never be free. I can work, but then I'm beholden to my employer. In the case of my past two employers, I assisted in people's deaths so that my employers could become rich. After 10 years, the first of those employers fired me because my conscience would not let me go on. I tried my hand at self-employment, working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, until my clients sent my work to India, leaving me without even the safeguard of unemployment. I went to work for my second death-dealing employer, who was worse, by far, than the first one. It was the only job I could get, because the world had changed, my location had changed, and I had grown old. My decades of job experience were a detriment rather than a help.

Some jobs are merely boring, or involve hard physical labor or tremendous amounts of brain power. You may know your employer is cheating on their taxes, or shortchanging people's hours, but you tell yourself it's OK �" no one is getting hurt. That was also a lie, at least for me. I was getting hurt because I was adding up the hours for people on the edge of poverty, then watching my employer change them. I was the one delivering the fraudulent spreadsheets to an accountant, who told me he could not vouch for my employer, while my employer told me that I had BETTER make sure there were no problems with the accountant.

Then I got sick. Without insurance. Deathly sick. A day away from dying. My family, who I had supported through my paycheck for decades, no longer existed. Of the two still present, one didn't believe me, since my employer didn't believe me, and the other was in no position to offer help, i.e. had no money. It was then that I realized that having money or not having money could mean life or death. Kind of took the sails out of my “I don't care too much for money” facade.

About the Beatles - “I don't care too much for money, cos money can't buy me love.” I found that to be a lie, too. If I didn't have the money to support myself, I wasn't worth anyone's love. Money may not matter much to me, but it matters to others. Pink Floyd said it more accurately - “don't take a slice of my pie.” Love has to be earned, because it's the 21^st century and women must earn their keep in ways far beyond the raising of children, cooking, cleaning house, doing laundry and finishing off drywall. Love has to be earned with money. Otherwise, resentments build up when one person supports another, as if they're getting “money for nothing,” and love just doesn't happen in that environment. What happens instead is a mental illness called “co-dependency.”

I lie about living a simple life. I like to drink beer. I like to eat. I like to live indoors. I like to feel secure. All those things cost money. But the things I can do to earn that money �" an equitable amount of money that will allow me to be in someone else's presence �" means destroying my soul. I'm well past the age of being hired to do anything legal. Or even something boring, or that requires hard physical labor or extensive brain power. I don't have an education, either. Just the education I've sought out for myself, which doesn't come with any pieces of paper.

Another thing I hate about money �" if I have it, the people around me turn into thieves. They use their knowledge of my damaged psyche so that I will give them my money, even though I know they have 10 times as much. I give it to them in order to buy their love, even though I know it doesn't really. It just buys me enough to stay in their game.

I hate money because it puts a price on my worth. As time goes by, I see that I'm not worth much, but more than anyone is willing to pay. Oh, and the cats! Who will provide for a person who drags along six cats? It's kind of like kids. No one has the money for that, without heaping on a steaming pile of abuse, for which one must say please and thank you. Net worth less than zero!

I take my damaged psyche and debate the major decisions of my life - back and forth, upside and down. Yet I'm not quite so damaged to not know that I'm only a pawn in making those decisions. In the end, money makes them for me. To think otherwise is truly delusional.

Reviews

[Untalented Creation]

An amazing story! I enjoyed reading it and was stunned that you explained that money is actually necessary and defining our lives. But I totally disagree with your last two sentences (Well, I disagree with the lyrical I - I don't know if that's also your opinion) I think it's very dangerous to blame circumstances and situations (The constant need of money) for something you've done.
Nevertheless this story was such a great inspiration. (: