Being Reduced

My primary objection to hand-to-mouth living and anyone being reduced to a productive asset, is the inability to see each other. Whether it is reduction to money, muscles, and sperm. Or reduction to feeding, caring, and reproduction. Breadwinner. Homemaker. I don’t object to any of the things that need doing. Just to us being defined by the things that need doing, or forgetting the reason why we are doing the things that “need” doing. 

You may get marriages where the couple never see each other, but one pays the bills and the other holds their world together. Some would call that a good team. I call BS. Unless that is truly what you want… then I have no problem with that. Other than the risk involved if that world gets bumped. That is not what I want. 

I love deep conversations. I love “democratic goods”… things that are valuable but cost very little because they are plentiful rather than scarce. It’s not that I don’t like scarce goods or see their value. It is more the trade-offs that take the shine off. How much time do I sacrifice for those things? What conversations do I miss out on? What are the unintended consequences of choosing to work for that thing? What we do matters. 

Our actions have consequences. Consequences connect and build. Constraints, boundaries, and agreements create and destroy the worlds we experience, and how we see each other.

Reducing the Sauce

Allowing for Extra

How do you start? Building Capital so that you can gradually become less dependent on your earning ability, seems like a game reserved for the wealthy. Advice is tricky because we have different lifeboats in a shared storm. When people talk of being “self-made”, they are often referring to whether, or not, they inherited Capital or a pre-packaged business from Mom or Dad. It is more complicated than that. Most of us have weird relationships with money. Wrapped in our sense of worth. In our relationship with our parents. In their relationship with their parents. In our politics. The advice I give is deeply wound up in my own story. Our self is a bigger container. The bubble we grew up in. Mine is based in Apartheid and Feminism. One based on inequality and gender roles. For me, starting starts with constraint. Having a firm and absolute hold on what “enough” looks like. Then not feeling like more than that is better. I wasn’t trapped in debt, and had the option of choosing a path to develop skills & knowledge to get an income. So my first steps were pragmatism, spending discipline, and delayed gratification. Building a buffer. A few months spending in the bank. Then putting the extra to work. I realise that extra is a foreign concept for most. That is what needs to change.

One More Step

“Fitting the curve” is when you take the results of an exam and change them to fit what is “normal”. Through squashing, stretching, and standardising unexpected shapes. If a group has an average, almost no one is average. A Standard Deviation is the average amount each result is different from average. Again, almost no one is the average amount different from average. “Normally”, about 68% of results sit between one Standard Deviation below and one Standard Deviation above the average. 95% sit between two below, and two above. 99.7% between three down, three up. That we do this for exams results shows that the goal is not education. It is sorting. Most education is designed to find your role in the world. This is the exact opposite of what we should be doing, and limits everyone to their starting point. Like Samwise Gamgee, the step you need to take is to realise the story is not about you. Education should be about understanding, and solving, the problems in the world. And financing the things that aren’t problems, but need money. At some point, you need to take the vital step that snaps the connection to the constraints you don’t find helpful.

Normal Results