The Fourth Day of Christmas – Who’s In Control?
Did you sit there as a kid watching Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray catch ghosts and wonder how much their annual salary was, what their 401k (superannuation) fund was like or how many hours per day they worked? Me neither. I wanted to be a ghost buster because it looked like fun, plain and simple.
Where did it all go wrong? At what point did you go from wanting to be a fireman, a life guard, a deep sea diver or a pro surfer into giving in to being a corporate mule?
Focus
I recently read a great article by Ash at The Middle Finger Project that touched on the subject of working at McDonalds in your teens. Working at the Big M isn’t a bad thing, you’re focused and work equals money. You don’t work there because you have a passion for the Big Mac Secret Sauce* or that you really admire the hamburglar. Our first jobs are often the most care free, you go to work to make money to enjoy your spare time, seems quite simple but as we’ve moved on we’ve forgotten what money is ACTUALLY for. Now it’s for paying off our new plasma television, the new car we didn’t need or our credit cards.
Life moves on from being completely carefree and slowly but surely you acquire responsibility. With this responsibility of supporting yourself brings the need for an income, with the income comes the overtime and spending on life’s little luxuries. Before you know it, you and everyone other man and his dog are running along in the same never ending race.
Who’s in Control?
What would happen if we all quit work tomorrow? I love a good ‘conspiracy’ at any time of day, and one of my favourites that I’m always involved in is the whole ‘working, paying taxes and being in the governments ‘rat race’.
It goes like this: you go to school and you’re told to get a well paying job, you then head to university to get a qualification for said well paying job, you start work, pay tax, get a house, suffer the wrath of interest rate fluctuations, watch TV and soak up the media and are easily influenced and under control. Is there a way to step outside of the rat race? To run your own race? Maybe to not even run in the race at all?
What if you didn’t have to pay tax? Or if you could minimise your tax and build some wealth & assets? Maybe start up a few alternate income streams? Or you knew how money worked, how to acquire it and make it work for you? That’d be brilliant!
If only we were taught things like this? Say for example, in a…. school? Who benefits from our tax dollars, controls the school syllabus and has the final say on what we’re taught? It shouldn’t be too hard for you to figure out! 
So luckily we know all there is to know about plate tectonics, we learnt an obscure language that we’ll never need and we can calculate the circumference of the world. But we don’t know anything about how to handle our money, reduce our tax or stand on our own two feet?
Let’s forget money & control and reminisce about a simpler time: playing basketball all day, poking your tongue out, shaving your head bald, wishing you were black and insisting your were going to be Michael Jordan when you grew up.
P.S. *Big Mac Not-So-Secret Sauce = Mircale whip, sweet relish, french dressing, sugar, pepper & powdered onion (in case you were wondering)
Related Articles
-
Dena
-
Dave Doolin
-
Andrew Caldwell
Did you enjoy this article? You can have each new post delivered to your inbox or RSS feed. New posts will be sent roughly once a fortnight.
You can easily unsubscribe at any time with no hassle -- just click the cancellation link at the bottom of email. Your email address will be kept confidential and won't be shared.
