Sunday, June 29, 2008

money tantra

Is there a connection between money and our sex life or not? My good friend and "inspirator", Tom Volkar (http://www.delightfulwork.com/) recently joked about me telling people in this blog to get laid. Another subscriber from half around the globe asked me to write about how sex and cash connect. Gawd, I feel so torn ...

Firstly, money is more intimate an issue for us than sex. You and I know individuals who can walk into a bar tonight, establish a casual connection with a stranger, and have sex with person X within hours. Exchange of bodily fluids with a stranger is quite normal for some of us--including the taking of risks: manufacturing children (couple of decades of child support can easily be costlier than today's bank balance permits), serious illness, death--but none of these people would feel as willing and comfortable to exchange credit cards or to share their bank accounts with that same random acquaintance. On average, we care about those last $500 in our bank accounts more than about our very lives! On average, our sanity isn't worth much, is it?

Yeah, but that separates sex and money. Where is the junction between the two? I thought you'd never ask. Bad sex is better than no sex, just like some money is better than no money. Sure, we'd love to have a lot of both and of supreme quality, naturally, but reality may have humbled some of us here and there. Both, too little cash flow or a lack of a decent sexlife often translate to desperation. Desperate individuals are nervous, can get pushy, they're prone to use emotional blackmail, and they are likely to develop typical stalker qualities. We can smell such creepy folks from a twenty feet distance, and in business or in relationships we better run from them as fast as we can!

Here's the kicker: I know guys who believe women have no interest in them because they don't earn enough money. Wrong! Women sense desperation--a lack of confidence--and they don't waste their time on figuring out where its roots may be. No money is no problem, no self-respect is the problem. No sex is no problem either but feeling low, incomplete, and stressed about it is a huge disadvantage. People may shy away from doing business with you, "knowing" something is out of balance with you. Sex, money, who cares what caused it? No money or no sex did not cause anything: YOU are the cause of anxiety and of other people's response to it. When you are needy in ANY department, it will come out of your pores and most people around you will know. Neediness affects all other areas in your life negatively and it is between hard and impossible to fight against it. It is an uphill battle if there ever was one.

That's what I have in mind when I suggest to people who struggle with money issues, men and women alike: hey, why don't you get laid. Even your wallet may thank you. If and when you feel desperation somewhere in your life, locate a different area--seemingly disconnected from the painful subject--that allows you to make immediate improvements easily and playfully. That will do more for the complicated departments in your life than feverishly trying to force yourself to succeed where you've been stuck for awhile. By the same token, individuals with messed up relationships turn into workaholics, because that's what appears to work when nothing else will. It's o.k., but only temporarily. Use this technique as a trigger and not as a solution, or it will quickly become a new trap.

La petit mort--the small death--is a common way to experience orgasm and possibly a period of melancholy right afterwards. Bunches of people can't wait to get there, and then they realize they have just lost what they were after. In other words, people use sex to make the feelings (they so cherish) GO AWAY. Has the idea ever crossed your mind to compare orgasm with goal achievement and success in general? For lottery players, winning large amounts can be the worst that can happen to them. Success can be devastating and even deadly. Example: Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, and Co.

Nothing wrong with success or orgasm but if that's the only thing that counts: you are doomed, with or without the orgasm, with or without material success. Performance anxiety, fear of not being able to make it or to get the partner where we believe she or he "should" end up, works nicely as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we are anxious to get there--whatever "there" may be for us at the time--we are royally screwed. There will be no enjoyment of the entire process. No surprise people hate their jobs. We work for the weekends, for our goals, for successes--and we have sold our ability to be happy the entire time. We are having sex with an eagle eye on orgasm, and sex turns out to be stressful, a fine reason for arguments--verbal and non-verbal--and maybe the reason for extended stretches of no sex. Nice!

Our very goals can become reasons for under achievement. Having to make or fake an orgasm is likely to prevent the real thing from happening, and if it happens it'll be too quick. A small death: so frustrating and tiresome an experience that the guy will want to roll over and forget about it. The girl will lie awake for awhile, disappointed. And that's with orgasm, mind you. People are having some sort of what they call a sex life and they end up being more desperate than when they had no sex at all.

Success in life, your damn orgasms, windfalls of cashola--that stuff is meaningless and next to worthless, unless you enjoy and savor as much as you can whatever you are doing right now. Quickies can be fun, I agree, and so can lottery jackpots be a cheap thrill. But those things are not satisfying longterm. Idiots want to get the money and run from their pitiful cubicle life, just as thousands of couples want to get to the goodies as fast as they can, to get it over with. Rat races are for rats, and I refuse to race anywhere.

Are sex and money connected? Duh. I watch individuals breathe, and I know how their money life looks in general. I hear people bitch about their relationship to their work, and I have a pretty clear idea what's happening--or not--in their bedrooms. I cannot and I will not teach you tantra. In fact, I categorically refuse to teach anything to anybody, but I suggest you stick your nose into a couple of tantra books (for example: Diana Richardson, The Heart of Tantric Sex, A unique guide to love and sexual fulfillment).

I don't care about your stupid sex life: it's none of my business! But translate any tantric idea you come across into your work environment, and your happiness will get a kick in the buttocks that your money can feel.

Apropos books: final version of my book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is still not in print yet, but you may pick up an "Advanced Reader's Copy" through my website (http://www.moneybymistake.com/). Paperback is $11.00 for this "Uncorrected Proof," or it'll cost you a puny buck if you want to download a copy. One condition: I want your feedback, a brief "blurb" I can include in the first edition! I don't care if it's positive or scathingly negative, but your feedback must be offbeat. Don't even think about boring my readers with normal niceties.

I love you too ... oh yeah, and your money!

Egbert

P.S.: There is no long road to happiness, you know? Only a short cut: admitting happiness, no matter what the circumstances may be like.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

hunter and gatherer

I admit it: I watched 'Sex and the City'--by myself. I don't have the excuse that a girl dragged me into a chick flick. It was my own doing, and I'm not even that gay. Here's what I saw:

We are a silly species. Rational decision makers? What are you talking about? No, we are nuts and obviously we have found sophisticated ways to enjoy that fact. Oh, this is just a stupid movie! Really? Sure, it's over the top, but you and I have met people who have made similar choices as the characters in Sex and the City. Damned, even I have married people while I should have followed my gut feeling and canceled the wedding on the wedding day, regardless of consequences and implications. Millions of people have watched this stuff season after season because too much of it rings painfully-enjoyably true.

Four girls move to NYC to find love, and twenty years later that dream hasn't materialized as intended. What a surprise! Some of them may have found what goes by the name of 'love' but, as you know, we get bored with what we have and we want more. Love won't do and we want marriage, a baby, or a $50,000 ring. Once we get that we are upset because it didn't show up "the right way." Remember Christmas gifts of your childhood: by mid January most of them had begun to collect dust.

Now, had these girls found love in the first episode of the first season, you wouldn't have seen hundreds or thousands of designer dresses--some cute, others so aggressively hideous that I wonder if women are too proud or too insecure to get their guys' opinion on their outfits before they attack the public. Even the cute ones aren't cute for everybody but a lot of girls apparently don't care or worse: lack taste. Selling haute couture was doubtlessly important to produce the series and the movie. But there is something else preventing these four girlfriends from finding love:

We don't want to find love!

We want to "pursue" it. The quest has more value to us than finding love and the impossibility of having to live with it. The pursuit of happiness is your inalienable right, as the Declaration of Independence states so prominently, NOT happiness itself. Same with love. The pursuit of love is so much fun. Once we believe we found the damn thing, we treat it and the other person in the most crappy ways. The person who loves us may be worth less to us than "the way he gave me that ring." Or a marriage becomes more important than the girl or guy we pretend to love. Love looks like a great idea for individuals who don't have it. The pursuit of love is cool. Once accomplished, the pursuit of something else is cooler. What we can't have has a higher value than the contents of our pocket. People are interesting until we "have" them ... or until we discover we never will. After that moment EVERYTHING changes! We resent people for succumbing to us, and we resent them for never giving in. There are exceptions but not many.

We live for the tension of hope, the electrical charge in the "becoming" phase, when we don't know if or when or how. We are junkies. Deep down in the core of our spines, we are hunters and gatherers. Some of us believe we evolve, learn, or spiral up to higher spheres of consciousness and higher vibrations. That's fine, but you better realize it's just another form of the same pursuit and no more sacred than hunting quail or carving another notch in the butt of your pistol. We learn how to operate cars and computers, but to this day we haven't figured out how to "operate" children and for sure we don't have the slightest idea how to be ourselves. Wow yeah, we sure have learned a lot! Throughout the millennia, we remain hunters and gatherers, and we are pretty good at it. Only problem is we think we should be somebody else.

There are parallels between the pursuit of love and our pursuit of money.

We are afraid to get there because dreams end with accomplishment. You know plenty of stories about lottery winners who literally destroyed themselves within a few years after being cursed with a jackpot. They discovered they were the same useless fools after than they were before, and self-destruction kicked in. Money in large quantities just makes obvious who we are. It takes away the mystery we treasure. Money works like a looking glass, making clear--painfully so at times--and public what we are made of. Money makes good people visible and it makes idiots visible. A great number of people hesitate making huge chunks of money, because they are scared to remove all doubt. We want the pursuit but spare us the sobering experience of end results.

The dumb thing is we don't admit how much we enjoy the pursuit. We claim we hate our jobs, and we would be willing to leave our despised jobs if we got the big pile of dough. Nonsense! We love the work we complain about and we love it MORE than anything else, including quick riches. That's why we work where we work. Duh.

We love the hunting and gathering part (of money, goals, husbands, one-night stands, diamond rings), and we do well to stand up for it. Not getting there is not a problem! Naturally there are challenges during any hunt, but they and exactly the stuff we hate are what turns an otherwise instant collapse of our dreams into a drawn out hunt. Reaching a goal "collapses dreams?" Yep. Poof, and the precious tension, driving force and your energy source, is gone. By definition, lots of the stuff you acquire become worthless in the instance of success.

Should you stop pursuing goals, money, love? Of course not! But you could do the same and enjoy the happiness OF the pursuit. Eventually getting what you were after will not take away from the happiness you already have. The stuff you want will then fall into the hands of someone who is worthy: You!

Egbert Sukop

Sunday, June 8, 2008

outsourcerer

I grew up in Germany on a water mill and farm that had been in my family's possession for over 800 years. Farmers love to see their kids become farmers also, and so did my parents. They talk their brood into developing love for the soil and for hard, honest work. They proudly tell their children about generations of down-to-earth business as down-to-earth can ever be. Aah, farming! One of the two oldest professions, both trustworthy and noble ...

It didn't take long for me to figure out that farms in Northern Germany made most money producing sugar beets, a highly subsidized crop. For decades German farmers survived--some of them quite comfortably--by destroying the livelihood of cane sugar farmers worldwide. The German government--the tax payer--has a nice history of preventing outsourcing.

Before I hit age 21 I learned that, to a degree, starvation in developing countries was caused and maintained by people in civilized (sic!) countries too proud and arrogant to let go of their outdated jobs. I was one of those people. As if it's not enough of a guilt trip to grow up German, the idea of continued farming and family tradition made me sick to my stomach. If you dumb yourself down enough and numb yourself sufficiently, you can do it.

How deeply can you be in love with "your own" soil, your clod of earth, when you know it's been financed by people who have nothing to eat, and paid for by your fellow countrymen who actually produce something of real market value? Hell, I probably killed people (in the Third World, as it used to be called back then) just by growing up peacefully.

It never seizes to amaze me how murderous non-violence can be. Apropos, the holocaust was not based on violence and hatred, either: it was made possible by a non-violent society, by people who wanted nothing more than their damn peace, by individuals like you and me lacking balls and spine to stand up for themselves and for another person's very life. You know, it took me many years to realize this, but the dirty truth is I have no respect whatsoever for a soft spoken ass who wants peace no matter what. Peaceful people can be of the most cruel nature.

Uh yes, we do have a subject. Prevention of outsourcing the sugar production in Germany not only guaranteed existing jobs, but permitted for new generations of farmers to grow into the same position of down-to-earth thievery. Yes, I learned that too: someone who tells you he is down-to-earth may just as well be a thief, willing for others to pay exorbitant taxes so that he can pretend to be needed in his society. Moreover, the down-to-earth person may not stop stealing from you until all you have left is the bare earth you are sitting on. Down to the last bit of earth you got ... if you happen to live on the wrong side of the globe. For the last thirthy some years I have not trusted anybody selling herself as a down to earth individual.

Remember "the elevator man?" These guys--yeah, definitely a vocation too sophisticated for women--spent their miserable lives in uniforms, riding up and down in a stinky cube with people too elevated to have a one-minute conversation with. There was a time in the history of employment when elevator operators were scared to lose their dreadful jobs! You think you hate your job? Pussy (I won't apologize)! No matter what you do for a living, it can't possibly be as dark and doomed as being literally stuck in an elevator your entire adult life. 30 - 40 years in an elevator, imagine that. And they still hated losing their jobs to computers that would allow a five year old to reach her destination if she was tall enough to push the correct button.

I can relate to folks afraid to lose their jobs to someone in Asia who can do the same for a fraction of the money you demand. But, do you miss the career opportunity of the elevator man? As high up as he got from time to time, how sad and disappointed are you that you are denied his kind of life? If you don't suffer from the absence of superb elevator operator job opportunities, nobody will miss the jobs you deem worth defending today--thirty years from now. Sooner or later the stuff you are doing will be obsolete.

People hate their jobs, and then they hate it even more when their object of hatred has been given to someone else to hate. Sure, we want to end poverty in the world and we like to help people, but giving them what we hate--our most useless jobs--is still too good for them. We like to help people in developing regions with goodies that are worse than what we hate. Quietly we hope these people in India, China, Vietnam, and Pakistan will become as civilized as we are. We hope they will become thieves like us, also willing to steal tax money from productive people. We hope they too will be callous enough one day to take from the poorest who'd love to do better--uh, when it comes to your job you don't think cheaper is better, do you?--what we can do so wonderfully expensive. For those who object to outsourcing, civilized equals superfluous.

If your job can be given away, there is something better for you to do, something more meaningful, with a real market value and most likely greater compensation. Being pissed off at "evil corporations" for losing hated jobs that lack sophistication and can't pay for their existence is one of the dumbest things I have seen our societies capable of. Why aren't we upset with an educational system and with school teachers who fail to teach what we need to make money without reaching into other people's pockets?

Funny, some of the wealthiest individuals on planet earth don't have a complete college or even high school education. They did not learn their trade or craft in school. They certainly didn't learn in school how to be successful. Teachers can teach you how to become a slave, how to get a job you will hate for life, and how to hold on to your subject of hatred until you retire and die (peacefully). School teachers have learned from their teacher's union--one of the most powerful organizations in the country--to use political leverage to maintain outdated, idiotic, and useless things.

Teachers are failing daily to teach what a human being needs to know to adapt to quickly changing markets, to be creative to invent your own opportunities as you need them, to keep you out of slavery, to--God forbid--make yourself and those around you happy. Too much to ask, I know. I don't blame the teachers. But by Gus, I cannot blame companies for their interest in making a profit for their shareholders--for you and me--and for moving to other locations that which everybody here has hated to do for years. How nuts are we, really?!

Who has taught us to crave slavery so much? We are willing to do what we hate to put $2,000 rims on our cars? What a crooked, corrupt bunch of useless pricks we are! My shiny rims are more important than a dumbass in India who wants to feed his damn brats? Fifty years from now, most of the employment market as we know it will have disappeared, and rightfully so. Our modern day job slavery will be abolished. Those who hang on to it are not on your side, nor on the side of humanity.

Motivational speakers? Gone, 'cause only people who hate what they're doing need motivational snake oil. Blood sucking slave traders, I'm sorry: employment agencies like Monster, will not be looked at as favorably in the distant future. Preparation for retirement will be called by its name: time-released suicide. Hey, you want to retire some day? You know already your life sucks!

We hate it, and therefore it must be a good thing? If that's what you learned in school, you should have spent that time with a truck load of bourbon. It could not have been worse. I do what I hate and I hate what I do until retire, is a statement of a wasted life. How pathetic!

"What do you want to do?" means for too many people, "I don't know. I have to see what's out there that I can hate doing." I am confident that's not you, but we spend our lives next to people who think and suffer that way through their desperate existence.

Instigate individuals to make a buck in their own name, outside of the slavery of jobs. It costs you nothing to make someone else hungry to take initiative for her own business. Question the status quo, and you may help a person realize there is a "parallel world" of more fun, more profit, and perhaps more happiness ripe and ready to be picked.

Egbert