On money, unconditional giving and receiving, and shame

These last few days I’ve been having various conversations with people about money, unconditional giving and receiving, and the shame associated with these topics. Let’s unravel it.

My financial situation has been precarious… since somewhere in 2015, when my last semi-stable contract ended. More so the last 3 years, when the unemployment money I had ran out, and I made decisions that led to more freedom and autonomy for me, at the cost of financial stability. I decided against more unemployment benefits – which carry some – to me – crass rules that are not easily combined the way I’d like to live my life. I also decided against finding a company to hire me on a (semi-)permanent basis – this would, again, be difficult to combine with the way I’d like to live my life.

What is this way? I like having the freedom to choose what I do on a given day – to see which needs want to be met, and to then see how I want to meet them. A lot of the time this involves work in some form. Hah! There it is. The impulse to justify. “I do what I want to do and I really, really like working! Really, I’m not lazy, or wasting time. I’m a benefit to society!”

If I don’t work, then I am not useful. I am worthless. That’s the thought behind it all. And it’s bullshit. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

Let’s take a step back to understand this better. Once upon a time, someone, somewhere, decided: there’s not enough. There’s not enough for everyone. And so the rat-race began. We live in a Black-Friday-Sale world. Constantly scrambling to get enough – not just money. Love, intimacy, fun, connection, meaning, freedom, safety… everything we need. We learn from a young age that there’s not enough for us. That we need to do certain things to make it more likely that we get the thing we need. That it’s conditional.

With time, this grew into capitalism. It grew into belief systems that say that what you earn is an indication for how important your work is. That say that you need to work, otherwise you are not useful. That say that if you give someone something, they need to do something useful with it. That they need to give you something back.

With this in mind, I’m not at all surprised at the state of our world. We find it hard to trust. We feel shame when we ‘need’ something. Because that means we can’t take care of ourselves, right? That we can’t provide for ourselves? It’s so ingrained that we need to fight for ourselves, that we forget that asking for support is a way of taking care of ourselves. We’re social animals. We need others. The expectation that everyone should be able to manage to lead a perfectly happy life with no support from others is ridiculous. It’s unrealistic. It’s unnatural. And yet, we strive to fulfil it. With disastrous consequences.

Here’s what I think:
We all have our intrinsic worth. Every single person has their value. And sometimes, we don’t see it – in ourselves, or in others. But we’re all connected. One action from another – no matter how small – can spark something in someone. And it doesn’t need to be something ‘positive’, like smiling at a stranger, as propagated on the internet. Just be you. With everything that’s there. That is enough. You are enough.

Unlearning all of this is really fucking hard. But it’s happening. In the people around me, in myself, in others I don’t know. It gives me hope. And it gives me courage to continue on my financially precarious path, trusting that somehow, I will be held. That I’m not alone. That this isn’t just my problem, my challenge, my thing to solve. We’re all in this together.