My Million Dollar Blog

It’s another one of those late nights. This is going to be long. I have a point, so bear with me.

Been stewing a lot on the actual reality of money, because this is a huge grey area that gets really muddy, really fast. I’m always amazed by how detatched we are from money, how many mechanisms are in place to stop you from actually SEEING money, just moving it around electronically.

Internet banking, PayPal, credit cards, direct payment, direct deposit, debit, metro passes, telephone banking all detatch us from the actual THING of money. It’s astonishingly easy to get, distribute, and spend your paycheque without ever really touching any money at all. I remember my mother telling me how, when she started teaching, they got actual cheques and you had to show up at the bank before it closed on Fridays with every other working human being in a five mile radius and hope to whatever was listening that they didn’t snap the door shut before you got to the front of the line, because then how would you buy food before Monday?

That wasn’t so long ago, and yet I can’t even imagine it. I never step foot in a bank these days, except for special occasions and disasters of customer services that warrant actually getting up and going there. Other than that? Electronic everything.

Here in Canada we have an extensive direct payment system, called Interac. (Pardon me if I’m simplifying, but I take it for granted; it wasn’t until I moved to London that I realized that not everywhere has this.) Canada and Japan have the biggest direct payment systems in the world last time I checked, and we’ve had this system for about fifteen years. Pretty much every store takes it (and now even street vendors carry it) - you walk up, they swipe your card, you punch in your PIN number, the money comes out of your account. Simple. No minimums, no credit, no filling cards, just a direct hole into your bank account. If it’s there, you can spend it.

This system means that you pretty much never have to carry cash if you don’t feel like it, ever. They’ve refined it so much in recent years that the amount of time that it takes for a “yes” signal to come from the bank has been reduced so much that it’s hardly even there (when it first started it took about a minute). There’s also systems being developed that are EVEN SIMPLER, like wave a tag at a machine and it takes care of the whole PIN business for you. The number of times I have been counting dimes for streetcar fare I have wished they had this system on public transit are innumerable.

Interac has fascinated me from day one. You’re always close to your money, but you’re never with it either. I’ve done lots of experiments with it on my own reactions; paid for groceries in cash, for instance, instead of with my bank card. Handing over $25 for ten days of sustinence becomes a lot more painful when it’s a THING. When it’s on your card, pfft, it’s nothing. Twenty-five bucks, what’s that. I still maintain that the best way to not spend money is to force yourself to pay for everything in cash, because you start to realize what the hell you’re spending. It’s hard to keep this up though I find because it just takes so much damn time.

All these systems are loosening our relationship with money. Raise your hand if you’ve ever ACTUALLY HELD IN YOUR HAND any money from a PayPal transaction. Probably not, numbers just show up in your account and you transfer them elsewhere, maybe to your bank, where you transfer those numbers to the credit card company or your retirement plan or whoever else needs numbers shifted today.

PayPal isn’t actually transferring money, per se - as far as I know there’s no vault with bags of cash in it. They’re just dealing in numbers. When you consider the size and influence of that company and how much eBay paid for it ($1.5 *billion* US in 2002) … well, those numbers certainly mean something. What fascinates me even more is that you can pay in any currency, the conversion is just an algorhythm, the difference between a pound and a yen and a dollar is thin, at best.

So here we are, constantly separated from money, the economy dependent on how fast we can spend it, how effortless the mechanism can be - and this separation, I believe, isn’t malicious; quite the opposite, I don’t know what I would do without internet banking and an Interac card. Stand in line? Perish the thought!

Just because it’s all mere numbers on any given screen, however, haven’t diminish these numbers’ importance. Instead, this nearly seamless accessibility to our own set of numbers has given us the opportunity to fret about money like never before - want to see what your mutual funds are at? How’s the stock doing? How much is left on the mortgage anyway? It’s all there for you to view from the comfort of your living room.

Enter Baudrillard.

Briefly: he’s a French philosopher who’s known for his theories of hyperreality. From Wikipedia:

“… authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute), and nothing is “real,” though those engaged in the illusion are incapable of seeing it. Instead of having experiences, people observe spectacles, via real or metaphorical control screens.” (Read the rest here.)

Sounds about right to me.

We’re not experiencing having money. We’re not experiencing getting anything in exchange for work - not tangiable to any real extent anyway - we’re just experiencing numbers changing on a screen, which we can spend like lightning in an economic system that depends on insatiable consumer desire, and a system of consumerism that depends on instant gratification.

We’re getting tied up in knots about money that’s not really there. I mean, why the hell have I lost thousands of hours of sleep about debt? It’s just a bunch of numbers that show up on a piece of paper every month, it’s not like I actually have to hand any of these people a wad of twenties (actually, I tried to once but the envelope screamed DO NOT MAIL CASH). I just have to keep the numbers clicking.

So this thing that is existing in a tangiable form less and less and more and more as abstract numbers that don’t have any basis in the real world, but translates to tangiable things and definite visceral and emotional reactions and therefore we know it has to be there in some way, is making everyone I have met this year crazy to some degree. I have yet to meet one person who said “Money? Pfft, don’t think about it really.”

I’m not saying we’ve been duped or lied to or that there’s any conspiracy going on here - really, I’d rather not spend Friday afternoon in a bank line sweating it out that I might be SOL for a loaf of bread thanks - but this physical disconnect but absolute emotional frenzy that I keep seeing about money over and over again, in everywhere I go and everyone I talk to, definitely indicates that there’s something going on here.

Maybe the Romans were as money-crazy as we are - surely status and material expressions of your buying power (or the buying power you want to be seen as having) are nothing new. This is starting to sound a lot like the argument that we mechanize the food industry and kill millions of animals a minute because no one can really understand what it is to eat food that doesn’t magically show up in a store.

Maybe all this dissonance, delusion and weirdness I’ve been digging up about money is just a symptom of something infinitely bigger, but that’s not for me to say. If you want to add to this or talk about it or argue it or lend your own experiences, I’m interested in hearing what you have to say. You know where I am.

Sleep. Wait, talk at camera first. Then sleep. It’s daylight, I think I’ll go outside and do it.

Had a most enlightening conversation tonight with my friend Mark. He started out years ago studying economics and, as he put it, “When the numbers walked around the page and I realized I could be rich beyond my wildest dreams by investing my student loans, those numbers turned into Cuthulu and I said, right, I’m walking away now.” It was one of those rare conversations that is so unbelievably apt, so there at the right time that I am floored with my luck to be there to hear what I needed exactly when I needed. A conversation so enlightening that I took notes:

“Unless you are a drug-addled arrogant fuckhead then you must understand that you may be fucking up gloriously and proving all the people you wanted to prove wrong right, and that fear will always be with you. Unless you embrace it and enjoy it, you’re screwed. Success is backwards thinking. Failure is always forward thinking.”

I came away with a reading list and a lightened heart. I came away with about four fewer hours of sleep that I’m really going to need tomorrow, but frankly for beautiful moments like these that are delivered with crystal clarity, clarity under so much pressure that the world itself is viewable in its entirety through them, it’s a small price to pay.

Apparently the cold I’ve been dodging for the past, oh, three months has finally caught up with me. It’s not too bad, considering the less than pleasant let’s-charge-off-the-streetcar-because-I’m-gonna-puke episode I had this morning. Despite all odds, things did look up from there.

I have mastered the art of killing whatever virus is threatening to take down my health (and therefore productivity) over the past nine months; the only time other than this one where I’ve been legitimately sick was that playful (and by playful I mean Exorcist-inspired horrifying) episode of food poisoning/stomach flu/alien medical experiment that happened back in January. You might remember the one, if you’ve been reading that long - the Toronto Star was sending a photographer for a feature photo, and I was fairly convinced I was dying but trying to clean myself up enough to put on a good face and failing utterly.

I will forever bless that photo editor for sending someone the next day.

It seems to be a common theme really; just when I think it can’t possibly get worse it gets worse to the point of hilarious. I’m fairly sure that if there is some higher power controlling the fates of each of us, Laurel and Hardy, or possibly all three Stooges, are at the helm of mine.

Getting some response to the ads for odd jobs on Craigslist - if you need a dog walked, something painted, leaves raked or a lasagna in a hurry, email me.

Response to ads has been low, so will be procuring new ad space tomorrow. Too bad skywriting is so expensive.

It’s amazing to have people say things like “Remember that thing you wrote? It really affected my whole life.” Mostly because even I don’t take cues from me, so it beats me why anyone else would.

At the same time though, I know I’m on to something.

Today I spent most of the day focussing my energy on not getting sick, as it would seem that every person I know is sick these days.

Funny what takes precidence sometimes.

Brought to you by a conversation not instigated or about me or this project:

“This is about confronting your biggest fears, kicking them in the face, and telling them to fuck off back where they came from.”