The road less cycled

So, I worked for my car deck and Chevron Oil company today.  Made about $80.00, gave $50.00 back to the guy who owns the faceplate my car came with, spent most of the rest on gas.  Dang, but why does it seem like I have to gas up every other day?  Yeah, I drive a lot, but the only way gas can go that fast is if I had a tube going to the tank and I was drinking it while driving.  Speaking of drinking unpleasant substances, the other day we paid S.S. to sample a bottle we found filled with an unknown yellow substance to find out whether it was apple juice or urine.  Poor fellow.  Let’s just say it wasn’t apple juice and he was filmed doing it.  But he got his $5.00.  Well, I shouldn’t say we…I was too cheap to fork over anything for the pleasure of seeing him drink it…pleasure which I got anyway because somebody else paid him, so score.  I suppose the stigma that Dutch people are cheap skinflints is rubbing off on me and I’m becoming a cheap skinflint.  There’s no end of banter about cheap Dutch bastards in the store – not exactly sure where that originated, but it sre if fun.  Whatever floats one’s boat, I suppose.

Realistically though, I’m not all that cheap.  I have very little respect for money, and when I have it I’ll darn well spend it without hedging too much.  For instance, some drivers will write down their tip amount after every delivery so they know exactly how much they should make at the end of the night, whereas I simply take the payment, shove it in my yogurt tub (yes, my yogurt tub) and jump in the car and take off.  I figure the less time I take writing, the quicker I’m back in the store, the more deliveries I get to take, the more I make in tips, and at the end of the day I’ll do better that way than painstakingly tracking everything.  I don’t like to sweat the little things.  You’ll never catch a millionaire counting pennies, because he knows his time is too valuable for that.  (”He” being a gender neutral term ).  I do believe in both giving and investing fairly liberally, roughly 10% each.  Every financial advice book I’ve read (the best are The Richest Man in Babylon, The Monk and the Merchant, and Your Money or Your Life) recommends giving away at least 10% of your gross earnings, and that’s what I try to do.  At the same time, it’s recommended to invest that much as well.  For quite a while I did both; lately I’ve done neither, mostly because I had no or little income and big tuition bills.   I acknowledge the importance of money; I damn well resent it strongly, and I don’t let it rule my life.  Neither do I treat it casually.  The older I get, the more cynical I get about how, truly, money does make the world go round, and with our wacked up system of having to borrow money from private banks at interest just to pay the interest on our collective debts the more I just want to say, and here I offer my very insincere apologies for fatigue induced profanity, “fuck this shit; I’m heading somewhere to start my own country.  But where?”.  If you divide the U.S. population into the U.S. national debt, each U.S. citizen is something like $30 000 in debt, in addition to their own personal debts.  Yaaay.  It’s tempting to offer platitudes such as “if you do what you love, the money will follow” or “money doesn’t make the world go round, love does.”  We are fortunate to live in a country where opportunity still abounds, but anyway you look at it, Canadians have less retirement savings, are working longer hours, and have greater collective debt.  The national savings rate is at or close to zero, the workweek is increasing, social services are declining and health care is harder to come by.  These are the hard realities, together with the fact that in the main metropolitan areas of Canada, young people like myself are being priced out of the homeowner’s market unless we make all the right moves, like being career focused and investing knowledgeably and not splurging on material goods.  Those of us who don’t will by and large find themselves with a 40 year mortage or being lifetime tenants.  It’s not a very pretty picture, and yet this situation has crept up on us so slowly that few of us realize how widespread it is.  Even fewer know what to do about it.  It’s the old frog in boiling water syndrome.

 On that note, I feel like I’ve become more materialistic and identified with popular culture in recent times; I’ve never really been that way at all.  Some people demonstrate rebellion through embracing rebellious aspects of our culture and society; I demonstrated it by pretty much ignoring most of what my culture offered altogether.  Lately however, I’ve really begun placing increasing importance on the material things that I surround myself with, and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps I’m seeking to strengthen my personality through that; perhaps I’m merely bored.  It is a trend I recognize, however, and that disturbs me a little bit.