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In my next life, I’m coming back as a rich SOM (Son Of A Moose… so much more polite than SOB)…
… a Jay Gatsby, Tony Stark, or Bruce Wayne-type who never has to work another day in his life…
- someone whose clothes are precisely laid on the settee at the end of the bed for me each morning (with a valet to dress me like Lord Grantham)
- someone whose windows and bathrooms are meticulously cleaned and polished each week
- someone whose sumptuous meals are set at the table when I return from my tennis match and dirty martini afterwards
- someone who breathes for recreation rather than need.
My appeal is modest really.
I’m not asking for much in a world that houses Bezos, Gates, Musk, the Kardashians, and Putin (why do we ALWAYS compare our lives UP the wealth scale rather than downwards into poverty?)
Happily, I acknowledge that I live like a king by historic standards… my food is plentiful in quality and quantity, health well-tended, housing comfortable year-round, free time to enjoy “toys”.
But every self-respecting king or queen aspires to live higher, to reside at the Mount Everest of human existence moneywise. It’s natural and I try my very best to live my life in harmony with nature. Call me a financial environmentalist!
Bottom line here is that I want to do: what I want, when I want, where I want, whenever I want.
Want. Want. Want.
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Waste not want not, the idiom goes… ie. if you do not waste that which you have (waste not), you will not later want that which you have wasted (want not).
NO.. that is how the IDIOT goes…
But why are you talking so flippantly today Larry? Where does all this spoiled nonsense come from?
Simply, it’s comes down to housework.
Not homework where you learn valuable and fascinating things, enriching things… no… housework, where you spend hour upon hour doing those things that merely get you back to the beginning of the spinning rat wheel, turning and turning to only end back in the same spot where you began. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn…
Don’t get me wrong here… I actually enjoy handwashing dishes, vacuuming floors, ironing shirts, and cooking (but please don’t ask me to clean a toilet), and I really love cooking … these can be stressless distractions to a busy mind… BUT…
… I’m also a spoiled First World guy… I ONLY want to do all these housework chores (see definition of chore: an unpleasant but necessary task) when it suits me and my timetable.
I do not want to do any of these merely because they dictate to me that it must be done.
I want to be boss and do them on MY terms.
Of course, this doesn’t bode well for a mere plebeian… a middle-class lout like me.
It’s a paradox, a conundrum… maybe even an inner frustration, because…
Upon further introspection, while I pine for the ultimate freedom to do what I want when I want…
I also realize that my very human nature knows that given the extra “free” time to do my desirables, that freedom would likely end up squandered by: social media distractions, deciding which pyjamas I’ll put on at 5 pm, checking the colour of my pee to see if I’m hydrated, or reading labels on every wine bottle at the liquor store.
Maybe, after all, this SOM just isn’t cut out for the giddy freedom of mega-rich’dom…
… sometimes the life we lead is really the one we deserve.
Man On The Fringe 