Day 138: I Worked HARD For MY Money

We are taught the reward system from infancy. If you do this, you will get that! Finish all your vegetables and you can have dessert. Clean your room and you can have ice cream. Pull out your tooth and you'll get money. Be good and Santa will give you nice presents (be naughty and he'll give you coal!). Brush your teeth and get a sweet in your lunchbox. Be nice to your sibling and we'll go out for pizza.

As we get older, the system changes a little. We start to have to work a little bit harder for our rewards - our rewards also get a little bigger and better. Do well in school and you'll get a pet. Do your chores and you'll get a new phone/tablet/ipod. Help your mother in the kitchen and I'll get you a new pair of shoes. Get into college and I'll get you a car

The next phase is getting a job, which is basically: work and you get paid. Work really hard and you may get paid more. But this is also where things get a little murkier - it's not so much about being "good" anymore, it's more about getting things done, no matter what - but that is also not always necessarily the case. Sometimes even though we work real hard and do everything "right", we still don't get the reward. Generally it helps to know other people who are in a position wherein they receive many rewards, as they can arrange for you to join the Circle of Rewarding to share in the joys of rewards.

Even when we get screwed out of our rewards, we will still blindly accept the system as it is, as we have been taught for so long that in order to "get something" out of life one must first put something in. This also doesn't work based on the common sense principle of action and consequence (like, stick your hand in hot water and you'll burn), but more along the lines of the whole world functions according to fulfilling favours and "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".

The problem with this rewards-based system is that we are so busy trying to get our own reward that we don't consider the principle of sharing that which the Earth unconditionally provides. We are all stuck in the idea of a reciprocal system in which one can only get when you give - and not in the "give as you would like to receive" kind of way. We are trapped within our ideas of ownership and rewards to such a degree that we are unwilling to share based on the belief that what we have was hard earned and if someone else wants it then they better frikkin' work for it like we did, or else that would be just plain unfair.

We are in a vicious cycle wherein we keep each other locked in 'cos we don't want other people to be treated "unfairly"  for stuff they didn't even work for.

We get so attached to our rewards that we are not willing to share them with those who "do not deserve it" that we have actually become a society which accepts and allows half of the human population to live in poverty, simply because mommy and daddy taught us to be good little worker bees with a strong sense of "fairness" and no sense of consideration.

Imagine if every child born from this moment forth was taught to share unconditionally, with no concept of "fair", "reward" or "ownership" - would they not build a better world with a focus on the value of LIFE instead of the value of money and profit?

Investigate Equal Money