Value and Cost.
I’ll be honest… If I won the lottery tomorrow I would quit my job, pay my family’s debt, take up art, writing, and yoga studies full-time, go to massage therapy school, learn French and Spanish again, and travel….. a lot. Last month the mega millions lottery in the U.S was one of the biggest ever recorded in lottery history, and it got me thinking about what money buys us. It purchases the opportunity to access, connects us with services not available to people without money. It buys status, and privilege. What it definitely doesn’t get us is happiness, or love or meaningful connection with other people. It’s a cliché for a reason; money can’t buy peace of mind, and we’ve all seen how that ends up time and time again.
What, truly do these pieces of paper that we’ve deemed equivalent to denominations of value actually do for us?
What does money afford us and what does it take away. I’m not talking about exorbitant amounts of money or even the mega millions jackpot, but a large amount of money for any average person.
Money for as much as it provides, allows, or gains access to; it equally separates us in so many ways.
Access to money, especially in a very expensive city like New York, can purchase time, expensive things, convenience; but never any of the things that actually matter to us.
Yet here we are all working three and four jobs, just to pay our bills. We do jobs, instead of following our calling. We work in offices punching keyboards instead of creating wealth of knowledge and understanding for each other. We save up to retire so we can travel or buy that car we always wanted. We break our health and sanity to make copious amounts of money that buys things, monetary comfort when years, decades go by and we still struggle with pain, loneliness, fear, isolation, depression, and sickness.
In the end… What would you do with a 250 million dollars?
Eleana Kouneli 