What's it worth?

When I lost a tooth as a child, there was no fanfare and definitely no toothfairy. So, since Smallsteps lost her first tooth yesterday, we decided that she will go through the ritual of putting it under her pillow in a little box and the fairy would visit.

The fairy only had a 10€ note, so her first lost tooth might have been overvalued.

Does it set the expectation for the ones to come?

Perhaps she will be happy just to get something for her lost teeth, since at this point, the value of money is pretty well meaningless to her in a practical sense. One euro is just as good as ten at this point.

Who carries coins these days?

I do try and teach her about money and good habits around it, but it is not very easy to imbue the concepts into her. Overall, she does understand, but she has very little interaction with the economy directly herself, so I think I need to do a better job of having her go through the buying processes and discussing the decisions that she makes and the consequences of one of the other. I'd rather her learn the lessons now, than decades later like some people (me) do.

Ten euros doesn't buy much these days and it isn't even enough for a coffee and a bun at the local café, as for those, it is around 12.90€ at the moment and that price, will never go down again, regardless of what the economy is doing. Very few of these prices are going to go down again and instead, the only way to keep up with the increase in cost of living, is to earn more.

I was reading the other day about a person who too the "drastic step" of getting a second job to pay the bills, where she added an extra 20 hours a week onto her normal 40. Is that considered drastic? In my thinking, it is a do what you have to do to survive move and it is not uncommon in the world for people to work two jobs, especially poor people. I guess the drastic-ness of it is that she wouldn't consider herself a poor person, since she is a working professional with a degree.

But, this is the thing about "being poor" as it is relative to the lifestyle, where people can struggle with nothing, but people can also be struggling just as much, with a lot. It seems that the people who are struggling financially is moving rapidly up the earning scale, as more and more people take on larger debt commitments to soak up any additional income gains. The more that is earned, the more that gets spent and it seems that there is no end in sight for people willing to increase their debt portfolio.

Debt portfolio.

It seems far more common than an investment portfolio these days, with pretty much everyone using some kinds of financial debt services. One of my colleagues the other day was talking about paying interest only on their house loan in 2023 in order to cover the expected electricity costs. This is not uncommon at the moment, but this is someone who is also driving around in a 100K-euro hybrid SUV. People in their kind of situation should have zero money worries for normal living, yet are increasingly suffering.

Self-inflicted financial hardship.

How many teeth do we need to lose before we realize that there is no toothfairy coming to save us from our financial misfortune? It seems many are turning to the governments as if they are going to magically bail them out, but that is part of the problem that has got us here today, economically screwed. Economic mismanagement at the government level that has kept building its own debt portfolio that has to be paid by citizens in the future, but has simultaneously mismanaged the corporate processes so that far more money is going out, than coming in - even in relatively good times.

Collapse is pretty much the only way it is going to go now, though in order to keep the debt model strong, war is going to also be used, or at least, the threat of war. While they have no money for nurses in this country and the hospitals are supposedly overflowing and they are turning patients away, they keep finding a bottomless pit of money to spend on the military and the constant threat of war.

Humanity is not overly intelligent, is it? You'd think that after a couple hundred thousand years of societal evolution we would have found a way to improve ourselves without going to war over the most ridiculous and senseless things - yet here we are, year after year, still facing-off against each other across borders, while within those borders the people who are being "protected" suffer through existence.

Humanity is pathetic.

I am always in two minds these days when it comes to teaching my daughter about the world, because I want her to have a good life, but the reality of existence is increasingly making it difficult to have one. In some ways, I am considering of just giving her the illusion, the "blue pill" view of the world and hoping that she never wakes up to feel the reality. The problem is, the truth always comes out eventually.

No fairies. No Santa Claus. No Easter Bunny. No one coming to save us.

Plenty to chew over. Nothing left to chew with.

Toothless.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]