What's the point

The prompt to this story has nothing to do with it, per sé. Truth is, yesterday I went to my office of my old IT business. The office is technically a glorified storage unit right now. I'm slowly shifting stuff out of it, but there's still a lot of things to clear out. However, I have until December to get it all out of there as this is where my rent is paid up to.

While at the office, I spoke to the other IT guy next door to me. Somehow the topic of time came up. He said that there are measurements for everything. However, time has always eluded people.

I retorted with "Well, time is made up, perhaps not time itself, but the value it has had put on it was made up based on observations over a long period of.... well... time. Everything is made up. It's all invented."

There was a moment of silence.

Much deep thought over what I just said. There was very little spoken, but a lot to digest.

Instead of 60 seconds in a minute, why not 75 or 80. Then maybe we'd only work 6 hours a day instead of 8. Don't do the maths on that, I could be way off. But that's the point. I could make up any number. The number 8 has that value because it was made up. Much in the same way one minute equals sixty seconds and not sixty one or more. Or less!

Prices are made up. When you decide to sell your house, there's no value on it. The real estate agent comes in and guesses a price based on what other agents guessed around your neighbourhood. A $5 dollar note is printed on the same piece of paper as the $50 note. So why are the two not the same value?

My house is just as nice as the one next door. But theirs might sell for $50,000 more. Why? They're both identical.

Words are made up too. They're all just stupid sounds when you think about it. Yet somehow we make them just right so we all understand each other.

The letter "E" makes an "eh" sound. But why doesn't it make a "joo" sound?

If you think that sounds silly, an "E" can't possibly make a "joo" sound. Then think about how in other languages an "X" has an "heh" sound, or the letter "J" makes a "ye" sound.

And when I later thought about it all, I asked myself, "What IS the point of it all?"

Why is there money when we use to live for hundreds if not thousands of years before hand using a barter system just fine?

Why do we have to "work" for someone else, so we can survive?

Think about that for a minute. Why do you work? To get money.

Why do you need money? To pay bills and buy things.

Why do you need to pay bills? Because you use other peoples things.

Why do you need to buy things? Because we want something or need it but don't have it.

Why do we need it? Because we've been told so.

What if everyone took their money out of the bank tomorrow and kept it under their pillow? All the banks would go broke. But how will you get paid? Well, it worked in the good ol' days when you got an actual pay packet. An envelope with money in it. In fact, I use to get paid like that only 10 years ago when I was a motorcycle mechanic.

Then I could use my money to save or to spend.

I still have to pay my bills. So I get some solar panels, cut myself off the grid and no longer have an electricity bill. Phone? Nah, just allow people to pop in if they're passing by, again, like the good ol' days.

What about land rates? Last time I looked, I bought my land. But I still have to pay someone else rates on my own land. And that someone else is the government. So there's almost no choice there. But what if you didn't pay your land rates? What's the point of the rates? I understand water rates, power, waste disposal. But land tax, on land I already bought and paid tax on when I bought it? Hmm, why?

What's the point?

It's all made up. Someone, one day decided to create land rates. And everyone paid it. And now, hundreds of years later, it has morphed from bully tactics of the chief or king to our dark overlords, otherwise known as Government.

I once read a book that suggested the more money you make, the more expenses you have. At the time I thought it was stupid. Now, I think it's even dumber!

Why? Because as your wages go up, so does the cost of living. I know when I bought my house 10 years ago. Our power bill was $140 per quarter. Now it's up around $320. Our water bill use to be $80 a quarter. Now it's $180. We could fill a grocery cart at the supermarket and not spend over $100. Now I spend $100 bucks and walk out with two plastic bags.

I don't want to make it sound like doom and gloom. But I can't help but think that a group of people, or in fact many groups of people someone pulled the wool over everyones eyes. And the general public is paying for it.

The other day I was listening to the radio and they were talking about the safety signs that go up in school areas to remind motorists to slow down, reducing or preventing the likelihood of children getting killed during the times when school is about to start, and finish. This gives children a safe period of time to walk home, or to the car, or cross the street.

The subject on the radio was about the cost of the signs. These signs are large, have flashing, high brightness LED's. And are also solar powered. A couple of three metre tall poles, and add some labour to erect each sign and according to our latest government information via the budget reports, each sign cost $90,000 to erect.

Ninety Thousand Dollars!!!

I think each sign is worth about $2000, and a lot of the cost would be shared between the labour hire and the solar panels. The rest is a $5 electronics kit from Dick Smith.

$90,000.00

Talk about making up stuff. Someone made that price up, and some other idiot agreed to it, spent millions on a couple of flashing lights and walked away, proud of themselves because they are looking after our community.

But then, my friend would say "But you voted for the government". Which makes it my problem because it was my choice. I voted for these idiots.

Truth is, the people I vote for never end up in power. But I don't even want to vote. Though I have to because it's compulsory.

The real truth is, I'm starting to lose the plot. I can't see the point of working so damn hard to enjoy what little time I have left in the day to enjoy my life.

Maybe that's a really negative way to look at things. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just the same old guy I always was. Realistic. Or I'm talking complete crap and you can tell me to shut up. Either way. I'm done for now.

Trash talk

We're all human, and because of this, we like a bit of gossip. Even if you say you don't. There's always that tiny, insignificant part of your life where you do like to hear something about someone or maybe even say something about someone.

The buddhist say if you have only bad things to say about someone, keep them to yourself.

This is fair. While you may still think these thoughts, it's probably best to keep them to yourself. If anything, just to not harm your own self image.

While I have bad mouthed people in the past, and occasionally I'm still guilty of doing so. It is my flaw. It's something I've been working on for years, and I can tell I'm getting better at not doing it. I still find myself occasionally letting out what I think about someone, and letting it out in a bad way.

One of the ways I know I'm getting better is that I don't do it as often, or other peoples flaws effect me less than what they use to. But the most identifiable factor is where I see others do it to me. Don't misunderstand, not at me, but to me.

What I mean is when I may know a group of friends. I like them all. But one might say something bad about the other friend, and the other friend says something bad about them. Though in person, everyone gets along just fine.

Recently I spoke to two people I know. They know of each other, but they're not friends. However, one person told me about how they felt towards this other person. They voiced their opinion about their personality, their practices and their ways. I took this into consideration, as I agreed with some of what was said, though a lot of it was due to their own opinion, which I had no experience with, therefore I could not agree.

The person it was aimed at doesn't know what's being said about him. They don't know that I know this either. However, today, meeting that person, they bad mouthed another person in the same circle.

It would seem that everyone is talking about each other, but no one is actually speaking to one another. What the heck does that mean? Well, I might say something bad about you, but you say something about our other friend, and they might say something about another friend, who said something bad about me, or you.

And the vicious circle continues to spin round and round.

Everyone has an opinion, and that's fine. But when it conflicts or undermines what I think, I am affected too.

Todays talk was about someone who has helped me. The problem is, the person I spoke to today has been bad mouthed about from someone else I know.

It's really funny because when I started to teach music and organise myself, I started to make friends in the music industry more and more. It turns out that competition is almost non-existant. Everyone seems to be helpful with each other.

I started doing drum circles, and rather than other organisations that do that sort of thing contacting me and telling me to piss off, they were there first, I'm on their turf. They have all encouraged me to do more drum circles. If I opened a car yard right next to another one tomorrow, do you think I'd get the same response? Heck no! I'd be in direct competition with the guy and probably start a war.

But my experience with music, everyone seems to support everyone else. As if we're all in it together. And I like that.

Now, today I met up with the guys from the music shop I looked at purchasing a while ago. They called me in to have a meeting due to their heads up on me opening my own school. I knew why they called me to come and see them. I didn't mind. My wife said it's a waste of time. Do your own thing. But I'm friendly and open to opinions and options. So I went to see what they had to say and see if it was different to what my wife and I assumed.

While we were just about spot on with what the nature of the meeting was about. I held my ground. I'm sticking with opening my own music school. Not someone else's. However, I chose to take the meeting as an opportunity to voice my opinion and feelings about opening up the music school.

I think their fear was that I was competition. The word was mentioned. So I brought that up, and mentioned that we're too far apart to be competitors. Amalgamating, well, no, because that requires me to pay you fees, and I'm here on my own, just how I like it. Reduced fees. Yeah, but I've already invested my time and money on my own thing, to start again is going backwards from here. Even if it was cost free.

Either way we looked at it, I had my ball rolling and wasn't planning on stopping it or changing direction. However, despite my assurance that we can still work in the same industry and still be friends didn't seem like it went down well. Again, my gut feeling tells me that this is going to be rocky. I don't want to dwell on it too much, if at all. In fact, my head is down in my own thing now more than ever and I really don't care what other people's intentions are. However much they have rocked the boat for me.

Truth is, we're not competitors, we are friends, so lets just work together and not bad mouth others who are not only in our industry too, but people I still talk to and deal with. If you feel that way, fine, keep it to yourself and we can all be happy.

I thought about how I was going to write this, and as like all my blog entries, it's just another brain explosion, or Kasplosion... KASPLODE!

Today's meeting just confirmed to me that I am glad I didn't end up within that organisation. I'm in control of my own karma.