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About Me
- Pretty Lady
- Darlings, where to start? Sometimes I feel as though I have lived a thousand lives in this one, dewy and unlined though my complexion may be. To Tell All may be to intimidate; thus I maintain, at most times, a discreet reserve. But here I share my musings, perhaps revealing the secret to my exquisite poise and charm.
9 comments:
You are so right PL. I couldn't read more than a few paragraphs of that article before my stomach turned and my blood boiled.
There is an assumption that in order to make one's business look successful, one's business surroundings must look expensive. In other words, to keep attracting the best clients, you have to have a really fancy office trumpeting how successful you are, with pictures on your desk of the wife and kiddies playing on the beach at the summer home, or perhaps on your boat. As a customer, I have the opposite assumption. Especially in a financial situation, I prefer that profit to go back to me, the customer, in the form of lower fees and commissions, than toward showing off the wealth of the business in their expensive real estate. It just goes against common sense. It's the keeping-up with-the-Hamptonites Ponzi scheme. Guess who ends up at the bottom of the pyramid? It seems there is a reason I never understood high finance: because it goes against all reason!
Arggh!!
That article makes my blood run all bolshey.
Arrrgh, indeed. Joe just pointed out that being able to manage money well is NOT the same skill as being able to make so much money that you don't have to think about managing it well. It's about time we started hiring the former kind of person to manage the financial system, rather than the latter. Maybe even hire me. Or my sister; she knows all about finance from developing her co-housing project. She'd be really good at it. Where do I submit nominations?
Yeah, they ought to acknowledge the money-managing skills of someone who can live on $30K in NY by giving them a job managing money. Hmm, this is starting to sound suspiciously close to our idea that they ought to hire non-MFA's to teach in MFA programs because we have figured out how to make it as artists without benefit of graduate school and therefore have more skills to teach students. Ah, yes, but then there's the issue of harming the brand. If a non-MFA is teaching MFA's, doesn't that imply that you don't actually need an MFA to know this stuff? Yes, I am becoming a broken record, a metaphor that has to be explained to the very young because they might think it means breaking an Olympic record, running faster than the previous fastest runner.
Oh never mind. It's been one of those days.
You've pointed out a key element of our broken economy, O--having practical skills makes you less employable, not more so. I've been self-employed for the last seven years because I refuse to waste time and money jumping through hoops that just waste time and money. Certifications, diplomas and W-2 forms don't guarantee competence, but they're the only things that get you hired. All kinds of businesses, whether they be corporate, academic or health-related, have completely divorced their daily 'working' processes from any tangible results; they pay people in order to do meaningless busy work for a certain amount of time, not to accomplish a task.
I really, really hope this financial meltdown forces this country to shift to an economy that connects financial compensation to some sort of ACTUAL WORK. Meanwhile people like you and me may be surviving via barter.
"I really, really hope this financial meltdown forces this country to shift to an economy that connects financial compensation to some sort of ACTUAL WORK."
PL, I share your hope but have no illusions. Pavlovian dogs conditioned to having their folly (or criminality) rewarded are not about to change. Greed has a natural enemy - fear. Remove fear from the equation and greed will develop all manner of scam to avoid ACTUAL WORK.
George: huh. I have always seen greed as being driven by fear. Fear of poverty, of insignificance, of being alone, of abandonment, of death. Fear of getting to know one's own psyche in a deeper way. The greediest people I've known have also been the most fearful--they'll grab at anything, and keep grabbing and grabbing, rather than sit still and appreciate what they already have.
It is true that nothing will usually stop this cycle except a complete personal catastrophe--bankruptcy, divorce, a heart attack or other health crisis. Even then the person has to decide to confront their fears and change their ways, or they'll go right back to their old habits.
But the natural antidote to fear is love, and once we have set some firm boundaries in place against blatantly criminal behavior--both systemic and interpersonal--really learning to listen to one another's concerns seems to me to be a more promising path than bullying the fearful.
PL, the fear you allude to is very real and drives many people to the greed you speak of but this is more a matter of a personality/character disorder. The fear I had in mind is that which you refer to as firm boundaries. Setting firm boundaries involves, I believe, putting the fear of retribution in play, not only for criminal behavior but also for malfeasance, misfeasance, or any manner of ineptitude.
The fear I’m talking about is the fear of failure, of letting people down, of having failed a responsibility. Such fear was once the order of business. The extreme manifestation of such fear was that you’d end up in the same bread line as the employees, depositors, or investors you’d failed. That fear is gone and has been replaced by bailout and the miscreants just keep on going on – with nothing to fear.
Very well said....love it~
Mir
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