OK, let’s take a break from any posts about making money online. How long could you live without the stuff for?
I’m just skimming through a blog written by Mark Boyle, who is approaching the end of living for a year without money - a concept he terms as the ‘freeconomy‘. I’ll have to admit that there’s a lot that I like about some of the basic ideas of the Freeconomy - in essence, the idea that not everything is about money money money - but for me, this is always something to exist alongside our greedy capitalist world, not as a replacement for it.
Apparently, Mark’s big conversion was from watching ‘Gandhi’ during his final year as an economics student at university. I think that’s when many of us started our conversion away from wishy-washy idealism and towards how things work in the real world. Still, every day without spending money is a day when an internet marketer can’t fail to improve his or her bank balance - but I guess not spending money, and just not using it full stop, are two separate concepts. I still prefer the former, but it doesn’t take an idealist or a beatle to tell you that money isn’t everything, and that all you need is love - most entrepreneurs and self improvement manuals will tell you that aswell. You just might have to fork out a small amount of cash to pay for them.
Money is an immensely practical and useful invention. It facilitates trade, stores value and saves time hugely. So I am fairly unconvinced that there would ever be any benefit from ‘living without money’.
It’s true that value can be stored and specialisms exchanged in other ways - promissory notes for example: I’ll design a web page for you in exchange for delivery of 1 basket of fruit every day for 20 days - but that’s just an inefficient kind of money, isn’t it?
Comment by Alan L — November 1, 2009 @ 11:29 am
No Alan, it sounds like a great bargain. Where do I sign?
Comment by admin — November 2, 2009 @ 3:35 am