10 years ago, looking for material to write a collection of short stories during a prolific fiction phase, I developed a series of ideas around the various mechanisms that our society had developed to exchange information. While I was looking to create a story that was telling of the dot-com days, focused on certain technologies that would have the ability to sense implicit agreement between unaware people, it was a much simpler idea that distracted me and ultimately killed that project: the fact that money acts as a powerful medium to exchange information globally. Yes, the basic premise was that in a society that has learned to assign a sticker price to pretty much everything, money became the sole mechanism by which we were given clear instructions on what to do, where to live, how to spend our lazy hours, how far to travel, which people we should know, etc. The school of liberalism had had its message about empowering individuals to pursue happiness oversimplified to a slogan worthy of the most grotesque marketing campaign. This was clearly more the topic of a dissertation than material for a short-story and so it died.
I was reminded about it a few days ago while reading “Happy New Year – Why money is not enough” from Alain de Botton in Monocle #19. Trying to figure out what kind of year we have ahead, he quotes both Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin and their respective attacks on the ruling economic systems of their time, concluding the current economic environment will lead to deeper reflection about the real source of happiness, inviting us to
…set aside our monetary conceptions of wealth in order to take up a “life”-based view, in which the wealthiest people would not be the bankers and the landowners, but those who most keenly felt wonder beneath the stars at night or were best able to interpret and alleviate the sufferings of others.
2009 seems an odd year to reflect about happiness and yet, judging from the fact that I picked up the pace of my blogging as a result of the current financial crisis, it would seem that I may be at peace with the idea of monetary uncertainty but never with a doubt about being happy. Every Saturday morning I wake up to a new village around the world, hoping to grasp the popular wisdom that has made life in them the perfect example of simplicity.
Here is hoping that this weekly ritual leads to insightful ways to be happier.
