All for the sake of altruism

Vanity. It’s hard to fully feel the impact of this word, but I assure you that we all succumb to it. This perpetual desire to feel respected for our work and our actions outweighs the thought about what we truly need. What I need is feedback for my written work, but the lack of viewership nags me in my quest for self recognition. There will always be forgotten writers. There will always be forgotten individuals. Only the work that you do remains, and in this world even that can be easily forgotten when there are so many. It becomes hard to appreciate the work of others when you have no clue who did the work. What we call life is the result of countless decades of horrible conditions, all working towards a better future.

Everyone does not share this belief. Some live their lives in blissful ignorance, hoping only for a peaceful existence. They can not be blamed, for they know only what they were exposed to. A man who has always had a home has no idea about the life of the homeless. A woman who has never held a job knows nothing about the working world. While we may have an inkling of an idea of the pressures of the world, we know only what we have seen. Either from personal experience or through media, we claim to know about the lives of others. This simply isn’t the case, because we are born selfish.

Being selfish is not a bad thing. We all want what we want. To want something is to open yourself up to new possibilities and new experiences. While some never share, we can never fault them because we are them. The wish to be altruistic is easily trumped by the need for security. You could live a life of good intentions and help thousands for the satisfaction of making a difference, but when the world is chaotic and a struggle to survive, you simply cannot help everyone. You know that for every single person you help, dozens more are in the exact same position and they never receive the help that they need. Humanity is faulted by a lack of humanity.

We live for money. We go about our day, working as hard as we possibly can to give ourselves security and a stable life. But that pleasure is never good enough. We know that for every person busting their ass for minimum wage there is another that simply inherited their fortune. The ones born into wealth never try to see life from the perspective of the less fortunate. I can’t speak for the wealthy because I am not able, but you don’t give up a life of riches to become homeless. You never aim to loose the sense of security that so many fight to achieve. The irony is that the whole institution is ridiculous on purpose.

I make no claims that money isn’t powerful. It can be seen far and wide the results of such investments on society. What makes me laugh is the stupidity of what we go our entire lives hoping to gain. Designed pieces of paper and coins with marked imprints impact more of society than a person could ever be worth alone. It is a symbol to all that provides one with the ability to live. There have been so many forms of currency that stretch back eons. We are not the last society to use money, and we were never the first. The problem that I find is in the worth. It is worthless to me, but the uses are not. I have to find value in it, because if I don’t there is no way to live.

Money is not precious. It’s not a memory of a loved one or the laughter of a child. It has never given itself in the sake of altruism. It serves only as a way to keep track of work done for other humans. It is the great tool to manage time. It works far better as a time measurement tool than a clock, because we convert it into hourly increments.

All that we have in life is time. When that runs out, all that we are left with is how we spent it. The cruel sense of life is that we must work to enjoy the hours in the day. In order to live we must give back in some form, even when most should never feel the burden of working themselves to an early grave. So many generations have fought for a better future, yet we never see a society that has no need for one to work. It is the work of many that we all never stop working.

Before I end, I would simply like to state that I am in no way attempting to preach or nag to the world about my qualms with society. I don’t wish to overthrow the order of things or break down the society that so many have worked towards. My only point is to make claim that we need to re-think a few aspects of how the world should work now. Now that we have the ability to be everywhere and anywhere. We are connected like never before, and we will never go back to the dark ages (if we can help it).

We have to leave Earth. Our species will become doomed if we don’t. It’s obvious that we have made an impact that will be hard for us to reverse when time cares nothing about our presence. The Earth was not formed in an election cycle. The countries that we live in are not older than the ground that they exist on. We simply can’t become a multi-planet species if we worry about fickle things like currency. What is the value of a dollar on a world that it has never existed on? What weight does a currency serve on a world with few resources to trade it for? If we do nothing, we are surely doomed, and that future sounds pathetic when you look at all the work thats been done. It will all be in vain if we go down without a fight.