What I grok

Money.

I discussed money a good deal yesterday. I did so first in my video, in which I talked about lacking the deep understanding for money that some people seem to have. Then, in yesterday’s blog, I discussed why I want to be rich, and why it would never work out.

In the course of finishing that blog, I started thinking even deeper about the subject, and a thought occurred to me.

If you missed yesterday’s video, I used the word “grok” – from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein – to describe  having a deep understanding of something. To grok something is to understand it as part of yourself. Anything you do not grok is something foreign, something that you understand on an intellectual level but never really get, deep down. I talked about how I don’t grok money, certainly not the way some people seem to be able to grok it.

Most of the comments on that video involved some form of agreement – none of my viewers seem to grok money, either.

Thinking about it more, it frightens me to realize that I probably grok money more than the people who have it.

Right now, the world is in what the media is calling an economic crisis. Please forgive my use of this overused term – I am aware that it gets annoying to hear those two words repeated over and over. However, I can’t think of a better word to describe the situation we’re in.

Well, I can, I think that “shitfucked by shortsighted douchebag fuckasses” is a little lengthy. Especially when I tend to add another colorful description onto it with each subsequent use.

So, we’re in an economic crisis. We got into this situation because, as a society, we’ve become very centered on wanting more, and not thinking very far into the future. Everything is about making more in this fiscal quarter than we made in the last quarter.  Always more – it’s never enough to say “Well, we can make about the same and we’re sitting pretty damn well.” No, it has to be more.

Nevermind that it’s not feasible, nevermind what decisions will be more or less beneficial in the long run. It’s all about more, more, more right now, now, now.

To pile problem on top of problem, the same people that are good at getting that more tend to want to hold onto it. The rich get richer by not spending. The poor stay poor because we tend to spend a larger percentage of our money.

So we’ve got the poor people giving their money – or, more to the point, becoming deeply in debt to – the rich (be they people or corporations). The rich then keep it, hoard it, or at best spend it amongst other rich people. This doesn’t help anyone. Trickle-down economics is bullshit. Money moves up, not down.

These people do everything they can to hold onto their money. They save past the point of common sense. They take it way past just having a healthy cushion of savings. They have to have more than they have now. They can never have less than they have now. It’s an unending beast of a compulsion that our entire culture keeps feeding.

So here’s were I come to the frightening realization that, if you look at it this way…I do grok money. I grok that money has to keep moving to be of any use to anyone – the individual or the society as a whole. I grok that we need taxes. I grok that people need to spend money for anyone to get money.

I grok that you really can’t have your cake and eat it, too. An old saying, but it applies well to money. You can have the cake, sitting there on the counter, looking very pretty, or you can eat it before it goes stale. You can have your money, sitting there in the bank, looking like a very large number…or you can spend it before you realize that there’s no money left to earn, because you already have it all.

So maybe I do grok money. At the least, I grok it better than the people who are still trying to get water from a dry well to fill a pool that’s already overflowing.

You know what I don’t grok, though?

Why don’t they grok all this?