Life and money. Two things quite under attack at the moment and have been for a while, see my article It Seems An Attack for more on the various ways in which it’s being felt. But I was giving thought again to words, and how we arrange them for purpose and meaning, in particular, towards life and money.

That familiar greeting for many when meeting someone new and discussing your ‘situations’. What do you do for a living? Or how do you earn a living? Either of them quite adequately conveying there is an implication you must have a trade to live. Either a trade of skill that can be converted into payment, or a personal trade of time or something you have to offer in order to ‘qualify’ for assistance or to justify why you don’t have to.

Living beyond your means. Again, one we have heard over the years, of people who can’t budget or are just spend happy – like we have in government today. It should be known as spending beyond your means, because that is what it is. But even the phrase itself is a strange one, to live within something, a set financial boundary which isn’t at all set is it? Because it changes almost on a day-to-day basis now, so even if you are able to budget and manage, you can only work on a month-to-month basis, as you never know what.

The Cost of Living – just as a term it sounds ominous, making it a familiar phrase as with others of late, but a serious one where someone has run the numbers and looked at The Bottom Line, to see if you fall into their categories of A Costly Life, or a Profitable Death?

Earning your keep. As if you have to justify your existence, with input and output turned into industry and given a monetary value, so you and others can value yourself on that. Becoming as faceless and sterile as the concept itself. Time is Money and all that. Yet, on one side we have people being made happy with money, and then we have the other side where it’s used to make people miserable. Making Money from Misery for that happiness. Two sides of the same coin if you will.

But overall it implies that without ‘a living’ you won’t be able to survive and actually live. And it is society that determines your ‘living worth’, with salary rates, taxes, pensions, costs, benefits and fiscal terms and traps to swallow you whole from cradle to grave. What Are We Worth? looks at the more sinister aspect of that, and There Is A Price touched upon the need to have everyone seeing things in monetary terms, including themselves, so they would continue to play that large societal game of Monopoly that has now somewhat raged out of control. And doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon…

(c) MKW Publishing