Justification for Money
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Attention! If you don't have a lot of family and friends, this article might be dangerous for your to read. So please be careful.
This is kind of both an update on my current financial state and also a deep dive into philosophy and the ethics of money itself. As you maybe know I am struggling with even basic necessities at the moment. And I might get kicked out of the house. I have a lot more hope now than I had before that. I still don't exactly know how I will pay the rent this months. But judging by my father's tone when he spoke to me about it. It seems like it should not be a problem. I will probably write a proper update ones I get out of this mess.
Instead I wanted to focus on the issue that I think caused all of it. And how I believe I solved it.
The issue is psycho-philosophical.
For the last year or so I couldn't get a job for longer than maybe a few months. I justified it many different ways. I found smart, good sounding justifications for every single job I've left. No matter if I left it myself or I was fired.
The first one wanted me to work over-time. And they wanted it so badly that they were short of threatening to fire me if I don't. So I left. Sounds reasonable, isn't it?
Next one was just plain terrible. Bad accommodations. Dirty toilet. Physically exhausting. So I left that too.
Next one was somewhat better in some aspects. But kind of still the same. I was getting home at 3 AM dirty and cold from the rain. The director gave me money for taxi, but failed to understand that I can't get no taxi in the middle of the night without a bloody smartphone, which I don't own. And the apps for it are proprietary anyway. So after suffering it for a bit I couldn't take it no more and I left.
Next one was almost good. Even though the director was very toxic. But nobody ever took any of what she said and did seriously. And she didn't seem to have a capacity to control us in any meaningful way, so we did the job that had to be done, despite her trying to sabotage it. Yes, it was annoying that she took then all the credit for our job, to herself. But non-the-less it was the best experience out of all of those. The reason I left is illustrated in the article that talks about my current position.
Then was a good job that I was fired from for a very minor technicality. By law every worker has a right to 30 minutes of a break. And a director wanted me to do something when I still had 5 minutes out of those 30 left. I told him about the 5 minutes. He got so pissed off that I was fired. And since then I pretty much didn't work at all.
But even though I made very good justification for each one of the jobs, there was one that was messing with me for pretty much all my life...
You can't justify having money.
I cannot afford a psychologist to understand me beyond my own ways of manipulating myself. So I had to focus very hard on the problem at hand. I remembered that at some point I was very depressed and wrote an interesting post on Mastodon about how I justified being depressed. The post read:
Isn't striving to achieve #happiness is #selfish in a way? Therefor #depression is more logical when you want to be a #good person.
If you change "happiness" to "money" and "depression" to "being homeless" you will get how my brain thinks about money.
That lead to a discussion with @mamday@kolektiva.social who claimed that my views were religious. And lead me into a rabbit-hole on philosophy. He argued that something that can debunk my theory was the views held by Friedrich Nietzsche. Who argued not in terms of what is "good" but rather is terms of why is "good" even needed in the first place. He is a kind of "become the strongest motherfucker possible and kill anyone that stands in your way" type a guy. I understood how that could debunk my view on depression but I didn't feel good about Nietzsche's views. They felt strangely too Nazistic for my own taste.
See I couldn't justify being happy or even having anything nice, therefor I couldn't justify money. Therefor I couldn't justify making money. Therefor I couldn't justify working. Though I still felt pressure to pay the rent. So I did work. But only as much as I needed to pay the rent off and have something to put into my mouth. But that started to flake away. I kept getting farther and farther away from justifying money. And that lead me into a cycle of so little money that I ended up nearly on the street.
And the fact that my country extremely over-reacted to a terrorist attack, which made me making money ( and paying taxes ) almost directly participate in making everything worse, made me feel even worse about all of this money thing. So I wanted to just become homeless and die.
Except I didn't, people helped me out.
Luxury is evil.
Another interesting philosophy that I found when I dove into the rabbit-hole was the philosophy of Peter Singer to which, even though it is radical and uncomfortable, I subscribed in a way. Making justification for having money even harder. And therefor making my financial position even worse.
In a nut-shell Singer argues that anything beyond absolute necessity is unjustified to posses as long as there are people in need of necessities and as long as there is a way to give them their necessities. And because in the modern world where there are countless charity organizations who help people to survive in very bad places, to which donating is relatively easy. There is no justification to not donate and instead to buy something for yourself that you don't even need. Basically "Luxury is evil".
My brain got that in a very strange way. Basically if I don't have any money. I can't buy anything at all. Therefor I don't have that ethical issue.
There are two problems with that:
1. If I don't have any money I'm adding to the problem. Creating another person who doesn't have basic necessities. Me.
2. It is borderline impossible to find a job, let alone keep myself in a working order, if I try to only get as much money as what I need just to get my bare minimum necessities.
Therefor it quickly fell apart and my father ended up paying me for rent and food.
Justification for money.
I knew that if I could justify money I could start doing something to get myself out of this situation. I found one round-about pseudo-justification: If I make money with Libre projects enough that I can more than survive on that money, or even enough that it could challenge the income of proprietary projects of the same type, I could help the world by solving the copyright issue. Making copyright not needed and therefor increasing overall freedom.
I was not very sure what or how it could even work. But I talked about this goal of mine in the 2024 Libre Planet Presentation that I did. And later I started testing one idea of how this can work with my Dani's Race game. Even though at the moment there is no money nowhere near. Here is what I am testing. You can kind of imagine that it could work with money too sometime in the future.
Here is the problem: This approach doesn't justify me going to a regular job and paying rent and stuff. Only when I make money from Libre projects. And therefor it is not enough, even for it's own goal. See, in my country I have to be registered to receive money. This costs money. And therefor I need to justify simply having money in the first place.
At first I thought that I could convince somebody else to make my idea. Therefor I don't need to have money. And I would not make any money. But it will still solve the problem that it was going to solve. But then again. My father paid for my rent in the same time.
And then it struck me.
When I was writing that depressive article I was under the impression that I will die. That nobody gives a damn. But people gave a damn. My dad gave a damn. My friends gave a damn. And a lot of people reached out to help. I realized that I added to the problem. I became somebody without necessities. And I became the one people give ( or at least try giving ) charity to.
And therefor here is my current justification for money: I should have enough money that those that care about me will not want to give me anything. And I can use the rest of the money for some charity work, or something alike, because simply working a normal job will give me more money than I need, technically speaking.
So for example: My girlfriend bought me a fat meet sandwich one day. Because she is thinking that me not eating meet is not good for me. So to stop her from buying me these things, I should be rich enough to buy it myself. Therefor I'm not adding to the problem. And then for larger sums I guess the second, Libre projects justification would do.
What do you think?
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