Can We Transform Money?

Description

Money has been called "the root of all evil", and it clearly has been the cause of much violence in our world. But is money evil, or just the way we interact with it? If the latter, can we transform how we interact with money and turn it into a force for good?

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,money,moneyless

Video Transcription

money is something that I've wrestled with a lot in my life and it's also an extremely powerful force in our culture not only does it in a macroscopic scale guide a lot of the activities of our culture if not most of them most of us have internalized the way that money works so that it affects our daily lives in really profound ways and I think for many of us were not exactly where of how powerfully money shapes our lives so today I wanted to share some of the confusion that I've had some of the places that I have gone to is in my mind with changing my relationship with money and having it have less influence on my life

negative influence and of course in the end I'm gonna be asking you to share your thoughts or ideas about the role of money not only in our culture but in our personal lives so I want to start with you know a few years ago I did a presentation to the Sierra Club and I was talking about many things but the American Dream and money and how that works in our lives and I looked up the salaries of some of the top CEOs in the country because right off the bat there was there's always been something that disturbed me about mine and that's that the system seems to be broken in some way and that there's people who are on the streets you know hoping for a dollar from somebody and then there are people at the top levels who have enormous amounts of money that are almost inconceivable that's just here in the United States when we start to look out in the rest of the world there are people that live in even deeper poverty did a little math and I looked at I think it's for 2015 the top CEO salary which was a hundred and forty three million dollars for the year and we often hear well those amounts of money just don't make sense to us but they really they don't so so here's what I did is I did a little bit of math and they broke that down for what an average worker you know most of us that are working nine to five jobs who work about 261 days a year and about eight hours a day so the breakdown of this 143 million dollars is pretty interesting and it helps us to see a little bit more clearly the money involved that comes down to five hundred and forty seven thousand dollars a day that equals a pretty good hourly rate of sixty eight thousand dollars per hour which comes down to a very nice minute li rate of 1141 dollars a minute and 19 dollars a second okay that's that was eye-opening for me at least that was a top person there's there's a lot more on the top 100 list that make much more modest amount of about ten million dollars a year that that comes down to thirty eight thousand three hundred and fourteen dollars every day or four thousand seven hundred and eighty nine dollars now which is $79 a minute and about a dollar a second those numbers are amazing to me it might be amazing to you I don't share those numbers in order to invoke outrage instead I hope they can lead us to ask a question what is it in our relationship with money that would help a person feel justified in collecting 19 dollars a second when over a billion humans live on the equivalent of less than one dollar a day knowing that one minute of our income could double the income of 1,140 of these families could it be that our current relationship with money creates a sort of madness to a greater or lesser degree and almost all of us and could changing our relationship with money cure that madness I'm gonna do something here that is socially taboo I'm going to talk about my income so have a family of four and my family through the income I get from real while to you we live on a variable amount every year the changes based on how many students I have but on almost every year we come in below the federal poverty level which is I think $24,000 per family of four right now it's telling to notice that even though we don't make much by us standards we still have tons compared to many people if any of us are going to condemn the ultra-wealthy we might first see that we are subject to the same greed for instance my family lives in a relatively small four-room house and we all share a bedroom this might seem cramped yet if we arrange things differently we might house 10 or 20 people who would otherwise be homeless noticing we're almost all of us have more than we need can help us all come together to recognize that we're all suffering from a similar disease does this mean that we should all give everything away I don't think so but could we help each other to more fully recognize the part money plays in our lives

and could we transform our relationship with it and the odd thing is that even though we're making below the poverty level we feel like we're abundant in money and it's not always been so I have definitely gone the route of chasing after money or feeling like there's never enough and been in that place where every month is trying just to make enough to pay the bills and was getting behind my back and I had a period where we went heavily into debt and had a huge crash we lost her house the dis didn't work for us the money thing and so that's why there's been this continuous search of can money be transformed so I'm gonna share today what transformed for me before I share that though I would like to give you my thoughts about why money is operating the way it does in our system and why it can be such a destructive force in so many lives you probably know what I'm talking about there's people in the very bottom who are just again looking for a dollar would make a huge difference in their lives

there's there's people in the more middle-class who have you know a goodly amount of money and a goodly amount of things and yet they tend to still be striving and reaching and trying to to get more and they never feel satisfied with the money they have apologies for the somebody's running a tractor over there and even people on the top you know I've had a chance to my work and in the circles that I move in to know some people that are very very wealthy and a lot of

them are in the same place we have tons of money yet they're always craving more and they can never get enough and so they will sit and watch the stock market almost having in it heart attack as it goes down and feeling jubilation when it goes up and just being carried along on the tides money it clearly has a powerful influence in many many lives the reason I think it does is that the way that we look at money is as a system of indebtedness so anytime money is transferred it's really a transfer of debt if I give money to somebody at a store and they give me a good so I've given them money and then to transfer the known debt to me and when they give me the item then they relieve themselves of debt but there's still a debt relationship between us so that if they find out oh that you know I didn't give them quite enough money or if I find out that this product is shoddy or whatever we're gonna come back and we're gonna debate about that and I think in a subtle psychological way even if we don't end up coming back together there's always a carryover of that sense of debt so that it permeates our lives and no matter how much money we have for a lot of us it's very difficult to not feel that debt kind of just flying at us all the time as our debt based relationships add up it creates a mental heaviness where we never feel at peace with other people even in many intimate relationships such as marriages a sense of debt permeates I did this in this so you owe it to me to do that I think it's important to notice that our relationship with money seems to affect the basic way that we interact with other people

in a way money itself is neutral it's like it's like a knife it's not good or bad but it can be used to kill somebody or it can be used to whittle a piece of wood into a beautiful work of art and so for a while I thought oh my gosh you know what money it's just evil it destroys lives everywhere and there's no way to interact with it that is going to turn it into a positive thing it's you know it's not like a knife it's like a death virus that everything it touches it destroys and I'm guessing some of you share that that view that led me into starting to research there's there's people for instance that are living moneyless in this world and there's people that are operating by barter and trade the money moneyless thing is always fascinated me myself my family we have not had the courage to try moneyless experience experiment yet and instantly if you have we'd love to hear your experience with it in the comments below so we haven't had the courage to try that we've experimented more with trade and barter but in a weird way we found that trade and barter in an access same thing that same sense of indebtedness so instead of giving money I'm trading you know skills or goods or labor but there's still that indebtedness that gets set up and is there another way that money could be used one could argue that the debt structure is essential because if I give somebody to something give something to somebody and I just give it freely and I give somebody else something else freely and I give this really well then people are just going to take advantage of me right and maybe maybe there's something to that but I know that Brett my apprentice who's now living on the farm after his 11 month program he's been experimenting with just giving and he's been amazed that when he just gives out to people they're so delighted and warmed by that but they usually end up giving him back more than he would have charged her asked for in return via money or barter or trade and so not only does he get the pleasure I'm just giving really but others get the pleasure of giving back maybe the only reason that's happening is because we've all like internalized that debt structure this clot into us so much that we feel guilty if we don't give back but I tend to think from my own experience and from watching some people experiment with this that there's something else operating there's a joy like you probably know this you I'm sure you do you love to give right there's nothing better than giving to somebody and when we live in this debt structure it's just we can't give because there's always this feeling of debt and it's very very strong when money is involved because it's a little weird right I can I can give somebody a 15 dollar book and they can accept that as a gift but I'm going to give them money of even a lesser value a $10 bill I expect to be paid back that 10 dollars and most of us feel we might feel fine getting a you know a bunch of loaves of bread that somebody baked that are worth $30 but we feel a little weird if they just give us $30 and bills when should I pay you back for that so good money the question started to form inside of me good money be used in a gifting way maybe this is naive but I feel like the camp and I feel like that is what's made the shift for myself and my family have a different relationship with money and so what I try to do and I'm by no means perfect at this I'm starting to explore it more and more and trying to do it my life but when I give somebody money even if it's for a product that I'm going to be purchasing from them and they give that money to try to give it as a gift I remember the old zen story where the priest sells the rich person that gave him a bunch of money that the giver should be thankful and I try to have gratitude that I have money to give many of the people in this world don't and so I'm filled with gratitude that I have the money together I get a warm feeling from giving it and then when I receive my product that I'm purchasing I trying to see that as a gift from them and to thank them for it and if your gratitude for what they're giving to me and that creates a different feeling to me now

the practical part of this is that it would mean ideally that if I gave them that money and giving it to them freely without expectation if they didn't give me the product or they gave me a product that you know I could go home and it breaks but I'm not going to go back and try to return that and again I could see where this should feel naive because we need to have this system where there's accountability but you know not sure if the accountability thing is really working in our system do I notice that most of the products that I purchase you know they're built not to last they break way sooner than you know something made 30 years ago would have broken and so there's the more we get into this indebtedness and depend on this accountability thing more we remove our natural human ability to give freely and to want to give good things another side to it or another way to look at it if I am giving somebody something because they've given me money and you know this is my job and I just you know I I put out this product I'll make a good product but I may not put my whole heart into it but if I'm making a gift might be the same same product but I'm making this one as a gift to somebody and I want to give it to them from my heart and put my whole like heart and soul into this I'm gonna make the best one I can and so maybe that that accountability thing in that indebtedness thing is actually operating against our natural human tendency to want to create amazing things to want to give freely so that's the experiment that I'm doing in my life right now with money is trying when I give it to give it with gratitude and freedom and openness

and then more difficult than giving for me and maybe for a lot of us is receiving and when people give to me I try to receive with without taking on a sense of debt and I've been getting some good practice in that lately with some people that have been giving to me in some amazing ways one of the places I'm getting to practice that is the patreon page that I set up and so I haven't had a whole lot of people becoming patrons yet but but slowly and surely people are coming in becoming patrons and pledging a monthly amount and some are pledging you know two dollars and I skills so much gratitude towards them and some are pledging $50 and I feel so much gratitude towards them and it's really good practice for me to be able to receive from these people because they believe in what I'm doing and then I can give back joyously by making videos because really now these videos are starting to become supported by those patrons the supporting me so there looks like creating these with me and so to me even though money is involved because there's the different attitudes and and I've heard this when all like really everybody I communicate with who becomes patrons you know they're just they're happy to give what they can mate they just feel giving and so I think somehow there's a shift here and how money is used and I think that it can be used as long as we have it here and it's a reality in a beautiful way but I believe that it's an attitudinal shift we need to make in order for that to happen I would love to hear your experiences with money it's an evil to you does it doesn't have redeeming features is it necessary for our culture to exist how could our our attitudes or the way we use it change or shift in order to make it so that it's a force for positive instead of a force for negative your wisdom your insights your thoughts share them all below I'm very very excited to hear from you thanks for watching