Saturday, January 15, 2011

Day 14

We spent $9 today. $3 has made it's way to the future purchases envelope. The $12 a day budget for this week is balanced. Two weeks of success!

I leave you with my thoughts... posted over a year ago:

I wonder, is a utilitarian economy achievable? At present it seems that our weak and crumbling economy is designed and functioning to serve no one and nothing but itself. Those at the top aren’t happy. They’ve every imaginable pleasure in the palm of their hands, but honestly does anyone believe they’re actually happy. The middle men, the middle class, strive and toil and dream the American dream of embracing and climbing the economic ladder and maybe one day finding themselves at the top.

If you work hard enough and preserver long enough you too can obtain the pleasures of the world and not be happy. And then we reach the bottom to discover the peasants who live in impoverished countries all over this planet and work ceaselessly crafting the economic goods fueling our system, cheap enough for the rich to prosper off of them, and affordable enough for us, that we might believe we’re living luxuriously. This system seems to be benefiting no one. Who’s actually happy? We’ve all the goods we can imagine filling our stores (mostly all enormous now as the little ones are on the brink of extinction, a necessity for economic growth), filling our homes, and overtaking our landfills.

Our lives seem to possess a greater void than ever before and yet at present saving our precious economy seems to be the issue at the very top of the Bill. And so I wonder is a utilitarian economy achievable or are we all doomed to live pointless materialistic lives never really realizing fulfillment or freedom. Forever stepping on the little guy, while increasingly destroying the world we call home? What are we fighting to save but destruction itself?
We are a society of notoriously unhappy people- lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent- people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying to save. 
-Erich Fromm

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