The article helped me understand how much our society emphasizes money as the one true objective in life, and how weird that is. We send our kids to school so they can get good-paying jobs, not so they can feel a spark of joy from reading Epicurus someday or so their life’s work can be the resolution of a social problem. We keep believing the advertising that says we’ll be happy if we buy just this one more thing, despite the thousands of times that advice has failed us before. The people we respect all have money, and we learn to respect them through our screens, which are financed by people who want our money. All that we do seems oriented toward becoming a better trader of our lifetimes for money, but we do not ask whether such a trader could ever be considered prosperous.
Compare this society to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who sent their children to schools of philosophy so that they might learn to figure out for themselves the “why” and the “how” of the good life. Who do you know today who has even considered asking such questions? We have a cultural default belief about the good life, and it involves spending lots of money- ideally more than others are spending.
In place of self-examination, our culture has businesses who will take your money in exchange for a sort of prepackaged sense of meaningfulness, social reassurance that we are good people despite our riches, and of course the social status and respectability we crave, obtained at a discount compared to the alternative of earning respect through helping people.
The whole society works as a system, consuming the lives of both rich and poor in the struggle to consume more than someone else. We think we have it made, but can’t even buy the things our ancestors took for granted: a breath of clean air, a dedicated friend in the real world, and the ability to focus on anything but work.