As humans, we have two kinds of currency to spend at our leisure. The first is given to us at birth, a sum stored in a bank vault with a number on it, but we are never told what the total is. This is called Time. The second we start at zero, but can measure very precisely, and we call Money.
As we grow, we are at first able to spend time on whatever we choose, until slowly the freedom leaches away in society, school, and social obligation. At some point we realize that we have a lot of time, but aren’t very satisfied with the state of having lots of time and nothing to spend it on (or maybe we are, but authority figures tell us we shouldn’t be, and we listen), so we trade away time for money. This is the beginning of the end.
The interesting thing about money is: once you have some, you forget how to live with less. Somehow, over time, additional income begins to feel a lot like the lower income, and nothing has changed. This is why people making $20,000/year struggling to make ends meet can be in the same situation as people making $250,000/year struggling to make ends meet.
How could they possibly end up in the same place?
The answer is not hard for us to comprehend, but it is a simple truth many people don’t ever realize – that the entire modern system is setup such that you will be entangled to the proper degree. Every dollar you earn is another way to become entangled. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that is how most people end up.
Entanglement starts with a need, or a desire. Often, these are valid things that every human desires: love, freedom, security. Fundamental human desires are simple traps to entanglement. If we follow one of the most basic human needs, the need for water, it is easy to see how society has manufactured various levels of entanglement.
I need to drink about 8 glasses of water per day. My only real requirement is that it is fresh and disease free – that meets my needs as a human, so I drink from the tap. My wife’s friend read a book about how tap water contains cancer causing things like fluoride and copper, so she bought a filter for $20 and replaces it every month. Now, when she comes to our house, if I offer her tap water she asks for filtered water, so of course I also need to have a filter for her, of equal quality (or else I’d be cheap?). Thus I, also, pay my dues to the water filter companies. I drink tap water, but I am entangled to filtered water because of social graces, though the entanglement is weak since I have no problem stopping (it is stronger for my wife’s friend, who believes tap water causes cancer. I guess it might, I honestly don’t know).
Another friend of ours decided that filtered water was not quite good enough, so looked around for the proper water to drink and found Evian. He decided that this would be the only water he would drink, and began holding days worth of drinking water at his house, in the form of Evian bottles which he brings everywhere. He probably consumes $20 per day of water now.
To feed habits like this, we must pay one of our two currencies, Time or Money. We could spend time if we wanted to – collecting rain, digging a well – but almost no one does that anymore (why not?) Or we could spend money in various amounts (“market segmentation”) through tap water or bottled or whatever. How has a simple and easily satisfied need, which could be satisfied for free (and was for thousands of years) turned into a $20 a day habit?
Societal Entanglement has brought us to the point where every minute must either be increasing entanglement through desire fulfillment, paid entertainment, or working to pay off our manufactured addiction to it. In the end, eventually, it leaves us only with The Mundane Existence.
