Your Money Or Your Health. Is Your Profession Hurting You?
Making money has never been a problem for me
I’m lucky enough to have the support of a wealthy country, a system that gives anyone who chooses to put in the time, an opportunity to create wealth and plenty of hard working role models amongst my friends and family to emulate.
Saving money? That’s a different story. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always managed to spend every cent in my pocket. Literally. Compulsively.
Never have I saved with the intention to have my money working for me. That has now changed.
Over the last few months, I’ve been working closely with some money savvy friends of mine who’ve been patiently teaching me about money and how more money creates even more money which is called compound interest!
Holy shit.. why wasn’t I aware of this 20 years ago?? Then one night lying in bed I thought to myself.. How can I get even more money to get more compound interest and get even RICHER!!
But then I pulled one the hand break and asked myself.. What IS money? And since all the activities we partake in, to earn money, cost in some way or another, more importantly, what is the relationship between my money and my health?
So after a little research and a bunch a musing, here is what I personally, think money is, and how making it, can have a direct effect on my health.
Money is power
We’ve all heard this before, better put, money is energy. Or more precisely,
Money is a quantifiable, tangible representation of life energy consumed, sitting in stasis, waiting to influence another to transform their life energy into something else of value. Hear me out.
Julius Robert Mayer’s law of Conservation of Energy states that “Energy cannot be created or destroyed.” In other words, the total amount of energy in the universe never changes, although it may change from one form to another. Energy never disappears, but it does change form.
Life energy expelled. Think of it as calories burned. how many calories burned over a period of time. Something we rarely use at JB’s but gets abused by the fitness industry on a regular basis. eg; “Hay Tony! I just burned X amount of calories running on the tread mill in under half an hour! So.. where we going for drinks tonight”?
We use calories burned in relation to exercise with the expectation of getting something in return. “Fitness”. Counting calories burned is slightly interesting yet almost as pointless as counting calories consumed. So instead, we use our intuition. If we start getting tubby, we know we’re eating more than our bodies are consuming.
So lets look at life energy as a unit that involves a bunch of stuff like stress, job satisfaction, community, love, happiness AS WELL AS time and calories consumed.
So the energy we consume in calories over time physically moving, plotting, trouble- shooting, writing, converging, managing, worrying etc in exchange for money (or a quantifiable, tangible representation of life energy consumed, sitting in stasis, waiting to influence another to transform their life energy into something else of value) is something we generally call “work”.
This exchange, depending on variables such as type, intensity, duration etc, take a toll on our body. Just like “exercise” does.
We exchange our life energy (time and calories), for a representation of life energy in transit (dollars), then use it to purchase the result of someone else’s expelled life energy. A good or service. where it sits in stasis ready to once again motivate another to change its form. And so the cycle continues.
Investing life energy is a global affair. So through the cycle of this life energy in transition, and with a little help from the wizardry of GDP, by the time this life energy reaches us from developing countries, it has diminished in value so much so, that it is no longer worth what it once was when it was expelled. Buy in vast quantities, and the the value drops even more so.
Yet, when we send it back out there, the same wizardry increases its potency through transition and similar amounts of energy we expel, amplify as it hits the shores of our developing neighbours, enabling us to invest, import and gain returns in much larger quantities than what would have been possible on an equal “tit for tat” scale. Obviously this is a very simplified description and if your an economist, your probably cringing right now but the point im trying to get across is, we have more wealth than the majority of our overseas neighbours.
So we, in the developed world, are now in a position of power.. And being in a position of power, life can be very tempting indeed. We now we have the opportunity to wield this new found power that our forefathers never experienced and capitalise on a situation that benefits us greatly..Or does it?
The opportunity we now have to be able to accumulate wealth on mass over short durations of time means many of us are sacrificing our LIFE ENERGY in exchange for the potential of larger amounts of life energy in transit. In the scramble to build financial wealth, we are sacrificing more important forms of wealth such as physical, mental and spiritual wealth.
Here are three examples of how exchanging life energy for money can affect our health depending on where we choose to expel it.
Blind investment.
Some intentional, most unintentional. Our pool or collective of energy in stasis, is not really in “stasis”. As it sits in what seems to be a mundane state (our bank account, managed funds, shares, super..) our energy in transit is being used elsewhere in the world being invested in industry we know nothing about.
The problem with this scenario is the fact that we have no idea what these industries are. It could and most probably is being invested in some nasty negative shit. Short term corporate growth you know nothing about, is potentially at the detriment of our planet’s health. If our planet is sick, that means we are sick. The relationship is directly proportionate.
We can mitigate this corrosive phenomena by simply doing our research. Invest in industry you believe in. As people become more aware, Companies are responding. There are many super and managed funds that now give options to choose where you’d like your money to be invested. You don’t have to be in a high risk category to invest in a sustainable future anymore.
Better yet, if you believe what you are doing for a living is getting you a step closer to a healthier you and in turn a healthier planet, invest in yourself. Capitalism can be a very powerful tool.
-High stress, cash money driven income.
A profession that ONLY pays in money can and will take more life energy than it returns. No matter what the salary. If you’re finding yourself counting down the days till your next holiday the day after you just returned from one, in a constant state of fatigue, finding it impossible to lose that roll of belly fat, ALWAYS carry niggling injuries, have completely lost your sex drive, bitch to the person next to you about how you dislike your working conditions or a just plain grumpy to be around at work, then there’s a high chance you’re giving more than you are receiving.
No matter how much cash you make, if you have no job satisfaction, you can bet your arse your health is suffering because of it. You are working at a deficit and the exchange is at a loss.
Work toward a future that pays you with money AND revitalization. Finding a profession that pays with more than just cash is vital to one’s health. There are immense psychological and physical health benefits connected to helping our fellow humans or contributing to a greater cause or belief. These benefits revitalize the energy expelled on what would usually be considered work.
Ask yourself two simple questions:
Are you passionate about how you choose to expel your life energy?
Are you being paid in ways OTHER than cash, recognition, status?
Mass consumption: We’re all guilty of it. Consuming more than necessary.
Purchasing products built on negative life energy such as cheap plastic toys (children’s and adults), low grade processed foods, clothing from sweat shops and throw away items produced in miserable conditions off the back of cheap labor is all at the expense of our health.
Whether our planet is heating up or not, to be healthy, again, we first need to have a healthy environment. It is of the utmost importance, we must look to preserving the current state of nature for as long as possible so we can continue to exist. It doesn’t matter if you’re a gun loving petrol head or a vegan hippie. To be healthy, we need a healthy environment.
Think before you buy. Be aware of the products and their origin before you purchase them. Think quality over quantity. Then ask yourself the toughest question to answer before you purchase.
“Can I one day pass this down to my grandchildren?”
You don’t need grandchildren to ask yourself this question. This is one of the greatest forms of recycling humans have practiced since the dawn of our existence.
Like any endeavor, working toward a healthy future can and should be taken in small steps.
Every financially driven move we make, every life energy unit we exchange, either leads us closer to a utopia of health and abundance or farther from it.
Our health is dependent on the choices we make on a daily basis. Not just the choices relative to nutrition, recovery and training. Be mindful of how you make and spend your life energy in transit. Its powerful stuff and abusing it will surely have adverse effects on your health.
Be good!
Teora.