A while ago a friend of mine posted something on FaceBook about how money cannot buy you integrity. I responded in my typical snarky fashion that while money can’t buy you integrity, it can certainly buy you the appearance of it. This is, after all how advertising works. Don’t believe me? Look at any political add, ever. They’re either selling you a “bright shiny future” and then sticking a politicians name and face on the end to create a positive association, or their selling your a “dark sad dystopia” and then sticking their opponents name and face on the end for a negative association. This is in a nut-shell how political advertising works.

All snark aside, my friend was correct. You cannot buy integrity. You have to earn it, usually the hard way. The same is true, as the popular sayings go, for happiness and even love (although I’d argue in the case of the latter what they really mean by “money can’t buy you love” is that money can’t buy you trust).

These are not new ideas. Besides Jesus’ memorable quote about the odds for rich people entering into heaven, he provided a smashing good illustration of his opinion about money in the church proper when he went after the money changers in the old temple with a whip. Even now, years after I stopped being a believer I still get chills at this action, giving the proper Californian response to anything awesome, “Dude!”

So this got me thinking. If money is so pernicious then what can you buy with it? As it happens I think there are a whole lot of things perfectly suited for my money. Books, probably tops the list, followed by anything my wife or son wants or needs. (Although, to be fair, “wants” and “needs” in this context is strictly limited to the realm of realistic.) Chocolate also comes to mind, although I’d qualify it with “good” chocolate. But even this leads to problems. Books I have discovered can lead one to be overweight (don’t look at me like that, you know its true) The same can be said for chocolate. Giving too much to a child, I am told, can lead them to be lazy and spoiled. Apparently the same is true if they are an adult and poor. Although curiously this phenomena is limited to only government hand-outs. When individuals give to the poor, or when churches give to them, then they somehow don’t become lazy and spoiled. I suspect my many conservative friends will tell me its not that government money makes people more lazy than money from the church, its that the government is giving away this money without their consent. I find this argument (if in fact this is what they would say) more compelling, but then it just makes me think the issue is not about the money itself but about who is in control of it, which is a whole nother weird thing. (one weird thing at a time, please)

So if books and money make one fat, and giving money away is problematic, then what can one buy that doesn’t taint their everlasting soul? I don’t have an answer to this. I’m not the teacher here. Hell I’m still stuck in the back of the class with my hand up. But what I’ve found is there are some things you can buy that do make life better.

Money can buy you time. This is pretty straight forward concept, but a surprisingly large number of people miss it. We sell our own personal time to our bosses in exchange for money. This is, after all, how employment works. But the equation of time=money also works just as well in the reverse. One can trade money for time. Need a dress hemmed for a date on Saturday, but don’t have the time? A dry-cleaner or a tailor will be happy to do the work for you, at a cost. Need a computer part sent to your home by tomorrow? Amazon will be happy to ship it next-day, at a cost.

Of course, there are problems with this. You need to have enough “extra” money laying around to afford the expense, and the need has to be greater than the cost, but there are plenty of times when both of these are true. The classic example of this being the vacation, where you trade your regular income for time to not come work. Of course, many employees have some form of vacation pay in their contracts so their bosses in effect pay them to not come to work, but the self-employed and the unemployed don’t have this advantage. And don’t even get me started on those poor souls who work at home raising their children. For them there is no true vacation. Every where they go, they are still on the job.

All of this leads me to conclude that there is one other thing money can buy, and that is peace. You may not have enough money to buy that beautiful house in a remote part of Hawaii, but almost all of us can afford to rent the experience of living there, for a week at least. And oh the peace that comes to your soul when you do. You may not have the spare $25,000,000 laying around to help stop Ebola like Mark Zuckerberg did, but you can still contribute to Medecins Sans Frontieres. And yes, I’ll bet you’ll feel better afterwards. You may not have enough money to stop the grinding poverty in Africa and Asia, but you can give to companies who will oversee the work for you like Heifer International. And yeah, that feels pretty good to.

Of course all of this requires that you have “extra” money, and extra money is a rare thing for most people, especially the poor who are ironically the ones who need it the most. I suspect they could use a vacation from their poverty about as much as you and I can use one from your jobs. Maybe vacations should be a part of welfare. Or maybe people on welfare should be able to select a charity so portion of their un-earned income is sent to those with even more needs. Is that just too weird, or should I go looking for a whip?

I got a little bit of research time in today, and came across some interesting finds on teh interwebs.

#1 an interactive map of the ocean floor. Think Google Earth, but underwater. Its pretty darn cool to look around at stuff. There are mountain ranges, canyons, etc. all existing underwater. You could float right over them and never know they were there.
Note: If you’re seeing a whole bunch of brightly colored lines you might want to uncheck all the boxes on the left.

#2 A completely crazy secret Christian sect in Tsarist Russia. They were called the Skoptsy, and they took the idea of living a pure life to the extreme. Apparently they read Matthew 18:8: If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire, and took it quite literally. So if you found yourself sexually attracted to the wrong person, these guys thought the best solution was to sharpened their knives.

“Very soon this website will be famous among all blogging viewers,
due to it’s good content.”

This was from cheaphardwaresoon.com. I’d say I admired their sincerity if I thought there was any.

I woke up today and saw this in my spam filter, along with 4 other spam comments on my blog.

chromebook 2012 If you are putting keywords throughout your article, then be certain that it has the proper sentence structure and grammar. If they may be working on your own manuscript, is he also gonna help you write your marketing copy, query letters, book proposal, etc. Radio shack acer aspire one meanwhile

Jason: Blake says horrible stuff that make me feel so angry and hurt. 4) Accept the possibility that you simply might be writing or have written the wrong book.

I like that last line especially.

It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d certainly donate to this excellent blog!
I suppose for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding
your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to new updates and will talk about this blog with my Facebook group.

This was from someone with the unusual name Heavy Duty Cleaner Degreaser. Can you imagine the teasing they got at school? They must have had a horrible childhood. And even worse, as an adult their comments aren’t taken seriously.

Oh the humanity.

A good friend of mine posted a great article on the effects of consumerism on our culture. I found it on FB, but thought it might be better brought over to my blog. You might read the post for yourself before digging into my response below.

I think this is a wonderful article, although I had a few quibbles. The author has the history a bit mixed up, but the end result is the same.

Consumer spending as a force in our economy (over 70% of the GDP, last time I looked) was not designed as much as it was an accident. Call it a feature instead of a bug, if you will. Like many things in our semi-capitalistic economy, it came about both by consumer forces, and a need to see a greater return on investment. Its the superhero of this story that is surprising.

Today the concept of advertising is deeply rooted in our culture, but it wasn’t always so. If you look at media (like newspapers or magazines) prior to WWII and indeed prior to WWI, you see very little of what we call advertising. Oh there are ads back then, but they are amazingly transparent to our modern eyes, and they are not nearly as frequent. Its also important to note that during the war years consumer spending was deeply curtailed. Many of the basic needs were rationed, like petrol and food stuffs.

The big shift came as  a result of the post WWII depression. We had all these factories used to making all this stuff, only it wasn’t being consumed by the war department any more (war being the best consumer ever made). If you were invested in lots of factories (which a large percentage of the wealthy had done back then, after all it was patriotic and profit making) what were you to do? You wanted to get a good return on your investment, but how was that going to happen?

At the same time you had many people who had worked hard and saved during the war (or had worked hard in the war), and were looking for a way to reward themselves for their efforts.

Enter the savior to our economy. Of all things it ended up being Madison Ave. in NY, and by extension all of its ad men. Advertising became the hook to pull consumers into the market. First by radio, and then by glorious TV, we extend the idea of buying our way into a better economy one ad at a time. And as advertising became increasingly profitable more investment was put into the process of designing and creating ads. It was this investment, it was this interest in spurring our economy, that allowed advertising to finally grow, and become more sophisticated. Trying new tricks, new techniques, new mediums (like TV), and new relationships (like advertising and sports), averting grew until it started to become one of the most dominate cultural forces in our country.

As advertising grew in influence it also became more sophisticated.  Ads used to be garish, and overly broad, using pitifully simple themes to get us to buy. But now ads have evolved to become more and more sophisticated as we’ve learned to tune out the simple ones. Today ads on the internet are often deeply targeted. If last week you did a search for a new rototiller, don’t be surprised if this week your favorite blog features ads for new rototillers. Advertisers have mixed the power of search engine queries with the power of flexible web-pages, a process that is intrinsically complex.

But here’s the tricky part. Just like you don’t have to buy anything sold in an ad, you don’t have to buy our ever present advertising culture either (or any other culture for that matter). Alas, the price for this is not fitting in, which is a difficult feeling to overcome. We’re wired to go along with the herd (which is one of the ways advertising works), so standing out goes against our biology. And don’t try pretending that advertising doesn’t work on you. Studies show that the people most likely to be effected by advertising are the ones who claim they are the lest likely.

If you’re looking for ways to shed the effect of adverting culture from your life, I’d recommend you look to the people who have been shunning popular culture for millennia: Artists. Check out your local painters, song-writers, poets, authors, actors, etc. All of these creative types have been thumbing their noses at the world for years. Practicing their own versions of anti-culture. Check them out. Get involved. Create. And learn to ditch the cultural norms which are holding you back.