Money destroys everything.

The best predictor of the durability of a marriage is the credit rating of both partners. If they have sort of the same financial background, it can last longer.

In my personal life money screws me in many different ways. The most recent way is this:

A friend and I have sort of the same business, the same source of income. Of course, there is such a thing as supply and demand. If he gets a job I don’t get it and if I get it he doesn’t get.

He only tells me about job offers when he’s already declined or accepted them. He’s ok with it that I get the scraps of his table, but he’s of course not going to give me one of his better opportunities, so he never discusses these things beforehand. I also see the fear in his eyes when I tell him am running all over Bratislava to work at many different companies that he would have wanted for himself. He’s also worried that am destroying the market, because I am so cheap to hire. Is that his fault? Probably not. It’s just the system we live in, it’s a cut throat world, whether you like to believe differently or not.

And you stand a much bigger chance that a friend will plant a dagger in your back than an enemy. I mean, how many open enemies do you have? It’s your friends that are dangerous, it’s they that come close enough to drive the dagger home. Your enemies don’t know you that well. I don’t like playing these games in real life, I would hope we could reserve nasty competition for board games, but the need for money makes us into bloodlusting poker players, all of us, unless you want to settle for extremely little in life (which may be better if it saves your peace of mind).

We would be fine if we didn’t operate in the same competitive business sector, but that’s not the case, and we both need to eat. We could work together, but not really, because why on earth would he give me some of the better opportunities, as long as he can have them?

So, because we are both not active total assholes and at least try to be mature and non-violent, we just ignore the matter, but it gives a dark background to all our interactions.

That’s what money does, it spoils everything.

That’s also why I can’t have a two minute friendly conversation with one of my students during a lesson, because every minute counts, and each student wants to have his or her full value out of the lesson.

Please tell me I’m wrong, but I see a society that serves the money God above all things, and personally, I feel it’s turning us into paranoid, stressed out, hoarding, manipulative, worrying, ice cold people.

It’s the system we live in, and it seems to me we have accepted that it’s like that. Apparently we like things the way they are. Cold, calculated, distant, number oriented, with so many opportunities to spend that hard earned money on material things to compensate for the lack of trust, intimacy, cooperation, genuine caring for each other.

The great big benefit is that our toxic culture ensures that I do not cling to life. I know many people who are afraid to die. Why they have this fear I do not know. I see death as a release from a prison with a toxic culture that kills most of us long before our physical bodies die.