There is a lot of money to be made by getting people to purchase more products and add variables into their personal lives. Appliances. Medications. Gizmo’s. Doodads. Toys. Useless Technologies. Fast Fashion. You see this around the holidays especially.
There is no money to be made by subtracting this stuff from your life, there is no money in that.
Follow that.
There are two parts of a transaction, one that people miss all the time.
- You receive good or service.
- You give your dollars to a person/entity for that good or service.
When engaging in a transaction you give a vote of trust and confidence to who it is you buy from. After all, you are giving them money.
A valuable heuristic to filter who it is you want to transact with: Would I give this person this same money if they weren’t offering me any product or service in return?
In other words, Who would I prefer to donate this money to?
An example; think about the global online sludge dealer; Amazon. Vs. the collective of local artisan moms, Etsy.
Global companies print money – or so it seems. They will be fine without your purchase if you can afford the alternative. The local artisan mom who crafts Christmas tree ornaments on the weekends likely doesn’t have the kind of financial standing Amazon does.
One has money, the other doesn’t have nearly as much. Follow where the money isn’t.
When I want to spend money, I usually don’t. When I need to spend money I try to give it to people who have less of it than others and have more skin in the game. It’s not always easy.
We have no choice if we want to transact or not. Things must be bought!
The wise thing to do is to analyze what you could could do to not put money in the pockets of people you don’t trust and do that, or rather, don’t do that. This may require doing homework about who it is that’s you buy stuff from and then deciding who it is you trust and who you don’t. It’s up to you.
When you go thru a drive thru and get your food handed to you in a hot paper bag through a window, odds are you don’t know where the patty on that hamburger is coming from. This is analogous to just about everything in modern life. We are ultimately disconnected from that which we consume daily.
We don’t know where anything comes from. This is the ultimate disconnect.
Four Fourths 