Can't Buy Me Life

"The objects of the world act as intoxicants. Money is opium. Man to woman, and woman to man, is wine. Position is Ganja. Power is brandy. Landed property is champagne."

-Sri Swami Sivananda

Last week I moved to a new apartment and started a new job. There you go, here's a life.

I took over an apartment from a friend who had lots of nice things. She moved to Asia. Now I have lots of nice things. Someone who came over left two drips of red wine on my white table, which isn't even technically one of my nice things. It's a door on two crates. All the same, I leapt across the table to clean it. These friends have been back from Peace Corps for only a few weeks. Can you tell I've been back a year?

I told my friend I was getting sucked in to the materialism. Especially working at a place frequented by people who can afford to drop $80 a night on wine and cheese, I have a desire for crisper clothes, a nicer haircut, shoes that aren't splattered.

Now I'm going to have money. Soon. I'm going to be making a lot of money. A lot of money for me. A lot of money for the world.

I just Googled "average world salary", and this is what I found. You put in your salary and it tells you if you're rich or not. After hitting Enter, I stared with my mouth open for a while.

I don't feel like I'm there. I feel somewhere toward the left. Our poor little monkey brains. We have no way of truly appreciating that we are rich. I bet if we put pictures of starving Africans on billboards instead of Calvin Klein models, we'd all appreciate life more.

"The ego wants to want more than it wants to have." Eckhart Tolle wrote that. No matter what you get, you'll still want more.

I have this opportunity, in the form of this money. Don't fuck it up, I say to myself, which somehow seems the surest sign that I will fuck it up.

My friend some Peace Corps, in whom I confided that I'm being sucked in to the materialism, said to me, "My two years in Peace Corps were the happiest two years of my life, and I had the same clothes the whole time." I'm trying to remember that. They were mine too.