Cooked Goose

Money

While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.   Groucho Marx

Let’s come clean: We, as in we people are a fearful lot. Good many of us spend our lives not in living but in managing our fears. That is to say we’re so busy concerning ourselves with the thing that we fear that we have no time or energy to give attention to that which we believe is good. The Great Wall of China is a monument to the human priority: Safety first! And how great is our fear? You can see the damn thing from space!

That’s where money comes in. Money mimics security like nothing else. Think about it. If ten million dollars were to miraculously appear in your bank account, would you not feel as though all your troubles were taken away? It would be difficult to believe otherwise.

I’ve heard that money consistently makes it on the list of the top causes of marital strife. It’s no wonder why. If money is so inextricably tied to security then messing with it means messing with one’s safety. Or to be more direct, messing with one’s fears. And how do people respond when that which we fear is wagged in our face? Yup, we freak out.

The trouble with all this is that it’s based more on our imaginings than on fact. Yeah, we all know money can’t buy happiness. Lesser known but equally true is that money can’t do much in the way of alleviating our fears either. Like Groucho says, it may be a different kind of fear…but make no mistake, it’ll be fear nonetheless.

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