Cost to get on the viewing deck of Pinnacle@Duxton: 5 bucks
Through this last holiday of my uniformed education journey, I've already spent a whopping $2418.50, give or take ten dollars. The DSLR single-handedly takes up more than half of that at $1675, and the next highest item set me back by $300, something I bought in Japan. The cheapest item on my list was the 6 bucks I paid to watch New Moon, and at six bucks, I'd say that at least I don't feel that much of an idiot.
All I can say is that I've spent a ton so far, and in the coming days before my enlistment, I'm not literally drained of finances (though they are indeed very, very finite as of now) but I'm more of drained of the desire to spend. The nominees for the most superfluous buys (and it pains me to say this) goes to the twin transactions of my prom blazer (90) and the expensive dry cleaning for the piece of cloth at this shop nearby (16) that the devil himself holds the title deed over.
Anyway, I mention all this in slight relation to something Yichen asked me some time ago, about the possibility of a utopian world where money had no place in society, and people could get nearly whatever they wanted without the need for money. Of course, he said, this barred a personal aircraft carrier, among other things. Thing is, who is to keep check and regulate such a society, who is to law down the law on what you can and cannot obtain freely?
My dad once told me, I'm sure it wasn't original, but that it is not money that's the root of all evil; it's the love for money that is the root of all evil.* Money as a form of currency that attaches value to any and every tangible, and for that matter, intangible object, cannot be divorced from our society and our way of life. It is a practical means of assessing how valuable and accessible something is to any person, and to each individual, he or she values it differently because not everyone is equally endowed with the means to purchase something. And because this concept cannot be removed from our society, such a utopian society is in my opinion not possible.
Money isn't just manifested in paper notes and copper coins, it used to be seashells and smooth pebbles, and I believe that money existed even before it existed, in the conscious minds of cavemen and homo sapiens. To every game and prey they killed, a value was attached to the meal in terms of the time taken to kill it. Even if they lacked interaction with each other, the concept of value was nonetheless something that the individual himself could understand. More so when groups of people got together, with some specialising in different fields like farming and hunting. That's when trade arose, and even as a precursor to a standardised form of currency, we can already see that a certain value was attached to anything and everything. Of course, I'm saying this in a purely hypothetical sense when I discuss the ancient past, so feel free to rebut it.
The point I'm trying to make is that having a conscious understanding of 'value' is something intrinsic to us as a species, and if we lose the whole concept of money, as the idea of 'value' has adapted to become over centuries, then we will become a species that interacts with each other and the rest of the Earth in a radically different way, one that I simply cannot fathom. Once people are able to get anything they want without working for it, be it working for the money or working towards the thing itself, there's no stopping the insatiable wants and needs of people. Just as we have been taught in Economics, there will always have to be a balance between the unlimited and infinite wants of people to the limited and finite resources available to satisfy them. A utopian society such as the one put forth is thus just not within my ability to even begin to comprehend. And yes, Yichen, I have to think about such technicalities when considering such a scenario.
*My dad made this statement starting off with something like, "90 percent of the people get this concept wrong". I tend not to like it when he does that, more so because he told Joel to stop doing that a long time ago. It kind of puts across this impression that he's done some irrefutable research, when obviously that isn't the case. Just sayin.
I know it's another long post, but I just thought I'd add this in. It's a version of the song We Didn't Start the Fire that I really like that I found a few days ago. Also, nowadays I find that I have this annoying habit of using one too many commas in my sentences.