Dec 29, 2003, 12.00am IST
Most people see money as the starting point of exchange, a means to acquiring goods and services. To be able to access more and more of goods and services, we strive to acquire more and more money, working extra hours.
What we often tend to forget is that money comes at a real price. Money is not the first point of exchange in this world: it is an intermediate point. You earn money for a good life , and, ironically, even as you are struggling to earn money, you are exchanging your good life for it.
Pursuit of money can become an end in itself. It can distort all values, and make you blind to the basic purpose of life. Henry Thoreau discusses this phenomenon in his celebrated book, Walden.
When you, for instance, build a large and grand house, or buy a new car, how do you understand the cost of your acquisition?
You may express it in terms of how many rupees you have paid for your purchase. But this amount represents a certain number of years of your labour and earnings, a definite part of your life.
Thoreau prefers to understand the cost of any acquisition in terms of how large a portion of life you had to expend to acquire it. If the cost of a house is the equivalent of, say, a decade of your toil and earning, the expenditure on the house is 10 years; equal to maybe 12.5 per cent of your entire life.
Thoreau's view of eco-nomy in life is how to minimise the portion of time on toil devoted to organising food, clothing and shelter, so that the bulk of the prime time is available for attending to callings of a higher value in life.
The situation in our present day world is most often the opposite of this. Most of our life is spent in the pursuit of money. Even the education of the children is chosen with the purpose of equipping them for this pursuit.
Result: Occupation tends to become the sole preoccupation, until acquiring money becomes a way of life, drowning the very habit of thinking about any higher pursuit. Thoreau sees much of what passes as livelihood as a fool's penance.
He pities young men in his town "whose misfortune it is to have inherited large estates".
Ego-driven, men expend the best part of their life to raise their social status in a fool's paradise. If and when they do get to it, they find it hardly fulfilling.
Having made it to the top rungs, they cannot descend, because they fear a loss of face; and so they continue to pay with the balance of their life to maintain their 'position'.
A successful CEO expressed this irony in the form of a sequel to the fable of the fox and the grapes. The fox, failing to reach the grapes, 'rejected' it as sour. His friends, however, said he had failed and so he was calling the grapes sour.
The humiliated fox was provoked into action — while his friends slept, he worked hard for long hours, practising the high jump. One day, as his friends watched, he jumped and deftly grabbed the grapes. The fox earned their respect and titles were conferred upon him.
The poor fox, however, discovered to his dismay that the grapes he'd managed to attain were in fact sour. How could he reject it now? Would he not be jeered at?
The fox had reached the point of no return; he must feed on, pretending to eat the sour grapes with great relish. Miserable and unable to share his secret, the fox eventually fell ill and died.
K S Ram
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