When you get older, they already told me in my twenties, you'll be just as narrow-minded and conservative as all the other old farts. I'm brutally aware of it. I find it odd, for example, that nowadays you make money. There was a time when everybody was convinced that you had to earn money. Marxism, very much in fashion when I was a student, never really intrigued me. Still I never stopped to believe that everyone should be entitled to receive an appropriate reward for his respective achievements. It was, of course, always accepted that a clever trick may make gamblers, crooks and God's favorites rich. But now it's not just accepted, it is what everybody wants and hopes for: make money, so you don't have to earn it. Even a school dropout can become a millionaire when good luck gives him a chance to participate in a tv quiz show. I'm not blaming anyone. I am just a bit narrow-minded. Maybe it is inevitable that it will soon be normal also to simply make love instead of earning it.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Make Or Earn?
When you get older, they already told me in my twenties, you'll be just as narrow-minded and conservative as all the other old farts. I'm brutally aware of it. I find it odd, for example, that nowadays you make money. There was a time when everybody was convinced that you had to earn money. Marxism, very much in fashion when I was a student, never really intrigued me. Still I never stopped to believe that everyone should be entitled to receive an appropriate reward for his respective achievements. It was, of course, always accepted that a clever trick may make gamblers, crooks and God's favorites rich. But now it's not just accepted, it is what everybody wants and hopes for: make money, so you don't have to earn it. Even a school dropout can become a millionaire when good luck gives him a chance to participate in a tv quiz show. I'm not blaming anyone. I am just a bit narrow-minded. Maybe it is inevitable that it will soon be normal also to simply make love instead of earning it.
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I agree, but when you disregard all these modern kinds of gambling (there were ancient kinds in earlier time as well) and when you commemorate 19 th century with millions of emigrants heading for America and its promises of wealth and living. Still on cruise they dreamt of making money, not of earning it. What I want to say is, that making money is only the vague and airy idea of a career, it is the first step.
ReplyDeleteGreed is the new 'American Dream', but greed distorts our cultural values and destroys our souls. On the other hand, Seth Godin, and Zig Ziglar before him, teach a different marketing philosophy: Permission marketing, e.g. earning your permission to interrupt your day with my offerings, which--as almost everything IS marketing--may eventually re-educate us about the value of giving and earning.
ReplyDeleteThis may sound far-fetched, and maybe it is. It'll certainly not happen overnight. But marketing destroyed us - why shouldn't it be able to save us?