Posts Tagged ‘Money’

Latest economic news: Christmas bought in recent takeover activity

Dec 22nd, 2008

If you’re not in the mood for a Christmas rant, I suggest you turn to one of my more positive and upbeat posts. You might want to check back here in a few days when you’ve had enough festiveness. My rant has been building up for a while and had to explode sometime. I guess just before the festival begins is as good a time as any.

Let me say first of all that I really enjoy the Christmas of holiday, family, gifts, pine trees, pretty lights, good food and mulled wine. What I don’t enjoy is the blatant commercial pressure to celebrate in a particular way. The Corporate Way.

It’s hard to avoid the constant bombardment of messages about what Christmas ‘should’ look like with its avalanches of snow, expensive gifts and fake smiles. When it’s combined with crystal clear messages about what presents to buy (assuming that you do, in fact, LOVE your children!) then I just want to hide away and only come out when it’s over. I really sympathise with the Grinch and Scrooge.

Leave me alone – I want to be free to celebrate in my own way!!!

I was impressed when I first moved to Eastern Europe in 1994. Decorations started coming out a few days before Christmas and giving gifts was much more a symbolic matter with shops subdued in their promotion of the concept. Kids, generally speaking, received a few small gifts and adults none. The focus was on family gatherings, going to church, eating and celebrating together. I found there to be a real respect when everyone greeted each other with personal wishes spoken face to face rather than written on a garish card. It seemed that generosity was from the heart and not from the pocket.

14 years on and the Corporate Takeover is almost complete. Around mid-October the retail trade starts reminding us of the impending joyful days and the message is clear. Spend! Spend! Spend! A few shops don’t even bother to take down the tinsel and baubles but leave them up. Why remove them when you can use Christmas to encourage people to be buying all year round?

Over recent decades a new Church (of Commercialism) has copied the early Christians and has been stealing Christmas from under our noses. Originally, of course, it was a pagan festival to mark the winter solstice until the early Christian Church cleverly stole it. As they did it so gracefully and so long ago, we’ve accepted Christmas as a mainly Christian festival to celebrate the birth of Jesus, a reasonably important symbol to Christians.

Now it seems the takeover of Christmas is almost complete, with the corporate world mopping up with what might best be described as a ‘re-branding exercise’. It’s become ‘politically incorrect’ to talk about ‘Christmas’ for fear of alienating people of other faith or no faith. After all, non-Christians have money and know how to party too, don’t they? Why should they be excluded from the spending spree? I’m not sure what ‘politics’ has to do with this and it’s more accurate to call it ‘corporately incorrect’.

Even Santa Claus is not exempt from the re-branding. He’s increasingly called ‘Father Christmas’ which I suspect is transitional and a step away from his Catholic roots (Santa = Saint). Clearly ‘Father Xmas’ would be a bigger step on the way to becoming the ‘Festive Parent’. Come to think of it, he’ll only fully meet the high standards of corporate correctness when he gets rid of the kids on his knee and the white beard to become ‘Seasonal Person’. After all, he/she needs to appeal to every single buyer on the planet.

Apparently unconnected, we’ve seen corporate induced climate change destroy many a white Christmas. The ‘good’ news is that it’s done wonders for sales of fake snow, tinsel and white lights. Is it really coincidence that the takeover has gone hand in hand with polluting the Earth? Is climate change part of some evil plan to make us buy more? Hmmmm!

Rant over. Sorry about that, but I do feel a whole lot better.

Finally, here’s my Christmas message.

Christians

Reclaim Christmas as your own and don’t give in to corporate correctness.

Everyone else

Relax, have a good time with your family and party (Christians – you can party too if you want)

Find your own way to celebrate Christmas (or not)

PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!

resist the pressure to ‘Do’ Christmas the Corporate Way

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Price Of Three Inches

Oct 15th, 2008

by ianpeatey.

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Last night I was sitting on the plane to Brussels (a frequent destination for me), vaguely wondering how much leg room I had. Not that I was uncomfortable, more like I was drifting in and out of sleep and this random thought came to me.

Apparently the answer is 32 inches (26 inches is the minimum required by law – see Airline Leg Room). No, I’m not going to convert that to centimetres as this is not really the point of this post.

Market Is King!

Here’s the thing.

It struck me how ingrained is our acceptance of market forces without a human face to determine so much around us. I consider myself fortunate to be invited to travel by people who are willing and able to pay for my flight. If they had chosen a budget airline to pay a bit less I’d have got 29 inches – (three inches shorter) and in business class I’d have had a luxurious 36 inches. If they had enough money for a private plane then I guess as much legroom as I wanted.

What on Earth has the amount of money I spend have to do with the amount of leg space I need?

Does spending money make my legs longer? Does spending little money mean I need less comfort, less respect, less consideration as a human being? Or do I just accept it as ‘the way things are’?

Now, I fully understand the economic laws of supply, demand and pricing (I have an Economics Degree, after all!). I also accept that I have a choice whether to fly or choose alternative transport and what category of ticket to buy.

Those choices, though, are determined within a pricing system or mechanism that mainly (99%) sees me as a source of money. It doesn’t experience me as human being – that only comes from the human to human contact I have with, in this case, the airline company.

Even this human contact is restricted in the growing ‘religion’ of market forces.

I can buy my electronic ticket and check in over the internet. The pilot is locked away and I hear his (or her?) voice twice – generally reading a standard script. Even the cabin crew go through a standardised set of interactions with me with little scope for any personal touch.

I’m not seen as a person.

It’s not my intention to criticise the airline companies as I see this repeated in so many areas of life. I could have picked virtually any walk of life where money is involved, from retail to banking to any other service. What I get is hardly ever determined by who I am and almost always by how much money I have available and choose to spend.

Pricing With A Human Face

I don’t have an alternative system to suggest but I’m asking myself what I can personally do about it.

Up until recently I’ve offered my services (workshops, retreats, training) for an agreed price independent of the means and willingness to pay of my client/customer.

My intention (and I’ve started) is to ask for as much money as the client is able and willing to pay. If I really want to deliver the work, and the client really wants to receive it then I don’t want money to get in the way. I want to be able to contribute, first and foremost. Managing my own economic life, while important, is secondary.

Naive?

Maybe .. but only when I buy into the myth that money makes the world go round. I want to relate and work human to human and not put money and prices between us or to be driven by money. It’s important but I don’t want it to become my driving force.

Value for money

Aug 19th, 2008

by ianpeatey.

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A few years ago I was playing with my relationship to money. My intention was to find ways to experience more joy whenever I paid cash for something. I wanted to find a different way than my habit of paying for something with a heavy energy or at the very least as an automatic act.

I tried for several weeks to focus. Each time money left my hand I wanted to connect with gratitude, to give money as feedback for my appreciation for what I was receiving. I tried several approaches, all of them unsuccessful. I wrote daily in my journal, I scribbled myself reminders on post-it notes, I put a slip of paper in my wallet so every time I opened it, out it fell. I even considered adding a tattoo to the back of my hand.

Nothing worked. Each transaction continued to flash by unconsciously, irrespective of what it was. A taxi ride, a coffee in a café, a carton of milk, not even a bar of chocolate (something I’m especially grateful for). Every time I bought something pretty much same sequence happened over and over again:

enter store with intention to buy some small thing
remind myself (using one of my highly inventive methods) to connect with my gratitude when it came to pay
spot desired item, pick it up and head to cash desk
completely forget to connect with my gratitude
take out money, hand it over, leave shop
remember that I had (yet again) completely failed and feel like a complete idiot

It really was uncanny. The more I focused, the further away I was and the more determined I became to do it. For a few weeks it became something of an obsession. I wondered if I was attempting some impossible feat … but I just couldn’t see what could possibly be so complicated. Clearly I was missing something important.

Breakthrough!

As the saying goes .. ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.’ After 2 or 3 weeks of struggling, it dawned on me that I needed to do something different. I even remember the place where this revelation came to me. I was in Budapest (I forget why) on my own and I had just sat down at the first restaurant that looked empty.

Usually I avoid empty restaurants on the basis that good ones are full, bad ones are empty. On the rare occasions I eat out on my own I choose the opposite strategy as I prefer privacy over quality. This particular restaurant did nothing to change my general rule as the food was less than outstanding.

But I decided to try an experiment. I was reading Paulo Coelho’s ‘The Pilgrimage‘ at the time and in one of the chapters he describes slowing down and concentrating attention completely on the smallest details around. Sitting in this sub-par tourist restaurant I decided to give it a go and see what happened. The food was taking an age to come so I had nothing better to do.

I imagined all the minute details that went into preparing the food I was hoping to be eating soon. I pictured the farm, the seeds, the fields, the animals. I saw the people caring for the food as it grew, harvesting it when ready. I added in the tools they used and the long, long history behind them. Where the materials came from and the countless generations of invention and refinement. I imagined the transport needed to get the food from farm to storage to restaurant. I could see the kitchen staff from time to time bobbing past the serving door, preparing the food. I visualised all the cleaning and peeling and cutting and cooking and mixing. I even noticed the care and attention of the waitress despite all the troubles she must face (judging from the complete lack of smile in her eyes).

And as imagined all these things I was filled with a huge admiration and awe. I felt quite small and large at the same time. Small in that all these things were about to culminate in the plate of food about to arrive in front of me. Large in that all these things were about to culminate in the plate of food about to arrive in front of me.

Guess what? That food tasted delicious! I’m not saying that it was great food. But in that moment, connected with all the love, care and human ingenuity in front of me, I felt truly privileged. When the check came, the money that left my hand contained all my gratefulness and love. I’m sure those particular Forints still circulate somewhere and bring a smile to whoever holds them.

The piece I had been missing was crystal clear. I had not been appreciating the other side of the buy/sell transaction. Every purchase now has the opportunity to bring so much pleasure and joy. When I connect to what is captured in a product or service then I get double joy. First from the product itself and second from giving money. It is no longer a ‘cost’ or a ‘payment’. There is no longer any loss or sacrifice.

I still slip into old habits, of course, but I have finally seen the light in getting value for money.

Dream blindness

Aug 5th, 2008

by ianpeatey.

4 comments

I was inspired today by an E-mail I received from a friend who decided to write down her life dreams and then send this to all her friends and family.

Some years ago another friend asked me what my dreams were.

I was thrown by the question because at that point in my life I was not aware of any dreams. I could remember having dreams when I was younger but somehow they got lost as I became an ‘adult’. Experiencing this lost feeling was combined with a real sadness and I have come to believe that fulfilling our dreams is a fundamental human need connected with our need for meaning and purpose.

It is hard to fulfill our dreams if we remain unaware of them and this ‘dream blindness’ I experienced through my early adulthood triggered a real sense of lack in me.

Where did the dreams go?

I’ll write about my own dreams some other time. For now I want to explore the reason why I lost my dreams. Talking with others about this I realise that I’m for sure not the only person in the world who experienced this. I have a theory that many of the challenges we face as a species are somehow linked with this. That when we collectively lose sight of the future we want to create then we stop creating. We exist but without growth or direction. And this is true for individuals, organisations and human kind.

One of my current interests is exploring how the meanings we attach to words shape our personal and collective worlds. Now I’m not a linguistic expert, but I am curious. I think it is no coincidence that the word ‘dream’ has two different meanings.

a picture of a desired future
an experience we have while sleeping

The first I create and hold in my conscious being and the second is created by my sub-conscious (as far as I know) and rarely enters into my conscious world.

Night time dreams often defy logic (mine always do!) and the real world in which I live and they rarely stay with me.

It seems to me we get these two things mixed up when thinking (or talking) about dreams. Consider, for example, labelling someone a ‘dreamer’ which usually has a connotations that the person does not live in the real world – or at least has trouble focusing on the real world.

I also believe that the world we’ve created (‘domination system’) relies on most of us losing our dreams. After all if we all dreamed, with all our being, of a better world then little could stop its realisation. So this mixing of meaning is probably encouraged (or at least not discouraged) through the messages we receive through the media in all its wonderful forms.

I find it helpful to take personal responsibility for myself and to untangle the two meanings.

If I trace back to when I lost sight of my dreams it was when I entered the adult world of work, making money and taking on responsibility. My ‘dreams’ were not in the real world and that is the world I chose to live in. For a period of my life I engaged purely in the day to day business of the ‘rat race’ – and I was moderately successful at it. Pushing my dreams to one side was probably a self protection strategy. My life was hardly moving me any closer to my dreams – in fact the opposite.

Looking back, this was an important stage of my life and probably I needed to get it out of my system. Then, when I started to open my mind and heart to the world around me (a slow, ongoing process!) I started to rediscover my dreams, my ideals, my hopes for myself, my family, my species and my world.

To finish up … I would like to encourage everyone to reconnect with their dreams.

Their fulfilment is at the heart of our search for meaning and purpose.