Why we never have enough money

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Do you feel like your life is taking you somewhere else? You work hard like a black man in a quarry, but there is still no gap, and every day the unbearable weight of life is pressing on you more and more? Do you rest less and less, and the joy of rest brings less and less? Congratulations: you have entered the Matrix, and she drinks blood from you by all means available to her.

The article shows some of the ways the Matrix has us. Perhaps the conclusions from these stories will help you loosen the grip of at least one of its tentacles on your neck.

Credit cards

Petya Klyushkin receives 30 thousand rubles a month. He also has several credit cards with a total debt of 100 thousand rubles. For servicing this loan, Petya pays the banks ten percent of his salary every month: three thousand.

It turns out almost a church tithe. If Petya worshiped the Golden Calf, he would, perhaps, be happy with such a situation. However, Petya prays to other gods, and quietly hates his banks for the monthly extortion of money.

At the same time, Petya cannot slowly pay off the loan and stop paying tribute to the usurers. Firstly, he is tightly hooked by such a technique as the "minimum payment": if Petya stops spending money from credit cards, he will have to live on half his salary for several months, which he cannot afford.

And secondly, there are so many temptations around, so many things-that-can-be-bought-for-money … that Petya sees no other way out but to continue feeding the banks fattening on his trouble year after year.

Fun fact: Petya has long dreamed of his own business, while a profitability of thirty percent per annum would more than suit him. However, Petya cannot organize an absolutely iron gesheft - to pay off the debt to the banks and start putting the interest on the loan into his pocket. The matrix does not resolve.

Cars

Kolya Pyatachkov loves cars. He used to ride the subway, then he saved up money for a Zhiguli. Now he is moving on a loaned Lancer. He doesn't have much money, and he often has to save on the most important things, such as vacations or doctors. But Kolya can no longer imagine life without his car.

He needs to pay off the loan for the car, pay for the additional equipment that the dealer has snatched up, and ridiculously expensive insurance. He needs to solve a bunch of minor problems with parking, with scratches, with the replacement of consumables and with warranty repairs. He needs to change tires once a season and fill himself a full tank three times a week.

Kolya, in principle, does not complain. Every single cash injection into the car is quite manageable. But if Kolya had carefully calculated the cost of owning his treasure, he would have found out that the narrow-eyed four-wheeled "friend" devours a third of his salary and half of his free time every month.

Could Kolya buy an old good Lada Chisel instead of Lancer, so as not to bother at all about CASCO, or rust / scratches, or expensive spare parts? To leave your car anywhere, and to have a small price list in good service near your home, without paper fuss and without queues?

Probably could. But if you tell Kolya that he chose a car not according to the level, Kolya will not even send you in the ass with your advice. Kolya will simply make surprised eyes and twirl his finger at his temple.

Advertising

Lena Vurdalakina drinks cola, smokes marlboro, chews stimorol and eats hambugers in three throats at McDonald's. She always smells of dolce gabbana, and Lena carries her iPhone in her Louisitton bag.

At the same time, Lena is sure that advertising does not work on her in any way, and a sick stomach and an empty wallet are her own choice.

Predatory snouts from the TV screens in chorus support Lena in her naive delusion: "You are a free man, Helen, you are a smart and beautiful woman, you always absolutely voluntarily and independently choose which of us you will humbly take your next salary to."

Charity

Vitya Pechenochkin is a good guy, he has a lot of friends. Friendship is around the clock, so he constantly helps everyone. To meet the neighbor's mother-in-law from the airport, help his nephew with an essay, help Marinochka from the accounting department with a car, haul furniture to a friend in the garage … Vitya does not forget about blood ties either. All relatives can count on him firmly. Vitya never refuses to help.

No, Vitya is being paid. Sometimes they say thank you to him, sometimes they feed him with yesterday's cutlets, sometimes they kiss him on the cheek or shake his hand. But if Vitya opens the diary and calculates how much time he spends personally on himself, and how much on relatives and friends, he will get sick. Since he will see that he has long since turned into a free lackey, who is used in the tail and mane by all and sundry.

Of course, Vitya thinks that services are a two-way road. Now he helped, and tomorrow they will help him … But here's the thing: Vitya himself doesn't need anything. He somehow solves his problems himself, without bothering anyone. And those people, whom Vitya turns to once every couple of years, belong to the category of his acquaintances who have never used him as a free labor force.

Sweatshop

Masha Puzikova works twelve hours a day, six days a week. On Sunday, the bosses usually let her rest … or at least leave work early. Masha is paid little, her salary is constantly delayed. Masha is often shouted at, Masha is constantly unfairly accused of not having time to correct other people's mistakes. Masha never has either money or time. She is constantly running around in the park and trying to solve several overripe problems at once.

Probably, if Masha took a vacation, would fly to the sea, think about her life, she would make the right decision and quit. But her boss is not such a fool to give her slave at least two weeks off. He perfectly understands: if Masha starts thinking, comparing, looking for other options, she will immediately leave him. Therefore, the boss loads Masha to the limit, so that by the evening she will not have the strength to even rummage for fifteen minutes on sites with vacancies.

Of course, Masha can always slam the door and proudly clatter her heels to nowhere … but only you remember - they pay her little and irregularly. Masha is always in debt, she simply does not have the opportunity to live in search of a new job for at least a month or two.

Expensive things

Gleb Shcherblyunich is not rich enough to buy cheap things. More precisely, he is not rich at all. Gleb is a rogue, and he often does not have enough money even for a cup of steaming coffee in the machine on the floor below his office.

However, Gleb does not know how to say, “Fuck your ass, it’s too expensive for me”. Because of this, he constantly buys things for himself, at the sight of which even a much better-off person immediately closes cold green paws on the throat.

A leather jacket worth two salaries? I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things. And it doesn't matter that Gleb does not understand the sizes and styles, which is why he looks in this jacket like the brother of a buyer of stolen goods.

The latest model laptop for eighty thousand rubles? I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things. I’ll take out a loan at insane interest rates, I’ll eat oatmeal and salt for two years and ride the subway as a hare, but then I’ll have a beautiful silver laptop gathering dust on my shelf.

The question is, why shouldn't Gleb be more modest, and not buy himself things a little worse, but ten times cheaper?

It's simple. Gleb is too lazy to spend three hours of time comparing prices and characteristics in order to calculate the pros and cons of a purchase. It is easier for him to chop with a cavalry hand and say "I decided to buy." In addition, despite the holes in his shoes and the glasses sealed with duct tape, Gleb somehow hesitates to tell the sellers that he is a rogue.

Repair

Klava Zagrebryuk thinks that apartments in Russia are too expensive. God only knows what efforts it cost her and her family this new two-room apartment. Now Klava is making repairs in the apartment.

Take the kitchen, for example.

You can go to a hardware store and buy the cheapest kitchen there, for eight thousand rubles. For this money, Klava will receive several wretched chipboard cabinets, albeit without any design claims, but still able to store plates and pots inside themselves.

You can go to the Swedes at IKEA and choose something more decent for yourself, so over fifty thousand. The quality, of course, will not be a fountain, but if you find a good collector who will spend several days fine-tuning the products of tight-fisted Swedes, it will turn out to be quite nice.

You can visit any of our furniture factories and choose a custom-made kitchen from the catalog. It will already be two hundred thousand, but Klava's girlfriends will clatter their tongues approvingly at the sight of the lights inside the cabinets and the sinusoidal cornice above the decorative dust-collecting shelves.

You can walk into a salon of Italian furniture and succumb to the modest charm of the bourgeoisie. There, prices for kitchens start somewhere from one million, but if you are a little lucky, you can grab something from the old collection with a huge discount …

The question is, what kind of chlorine Klava, with all the wealth of choice, bought a kitchen for six hundred thousand rubles? This is her annual salary (!) With her husband. At the same time, no savings are planned in the family, they already had to borrow in order to complete the repairs by winter.

No, I understand, the kitchen is important, the kitchen is for a long time, Italy is the quality … But if Klava could not influence the price of the apartment in any way, then at least the price of the renovation was in her power? Seriously, if Klava had spent not two million, but two hundred thousand rubles on repairs - what, the three years of work saved would not have compensated her moral suffering from the appearance of cheap tiles and a thin laminate?

Nagging

Egor Oskopchik constantly tells his friends stories, one is simply more amazing than the other. About the crisis. About some politota, rallies. Egor is always on edge, someone is constantly wrong with him: either the boss, or the traffic cop, or the popularly elected President of the Russian Federation.

Of course, we live in a free country, and Yegor has the right, in the circle of friends, to put genitals on anyone … but Yegor constantly suffers from other people's problems. The habit of getting into other people's problems regularly makes him feel oppressive powerlessness, realizing that something is bad somewhere, and he cannot change anything.

If someone explained to Yegor that our world is arranged unfairly, and that the only way to make it better is to start with himself, Yegor would probably have already been in some kind of leadership position for a long time. Yegor's brains and hands are in place, the energy from him is still rushing.

But Yegor, unfortunately, prefers to spend his inexhaustible energy not on creative activity, but on exposing and punishing people who, in Yegor's opinion, behave incorrectly.

Yegor considers himself a person well adapted to life: he knows how to scandal and stand his ground, can, on occasion, even kick in the face. Friends, however, look at Yegor with poorly concealed pity. Since Yegor constantly plunges out of the blue into scandals, then into fights, then even into some ridiculous courts.

Ethanol loop

Yura Skobleplyukhin periodically looks in the mirror and thinks that it would be necessary, finally, to sign up for the gym: remove the beer belly and curl up the muscles with dumbbell weights. However, Yura works five days a week, and after work drinks a mug or two of diluted ethanol.

He is not an alcoholic at all: Yura believes that alcohol in small doses, if not useful, then at least not particularly harmful.

However, work and alcohol structure his time so well that he has no time to sign up for a gym, and after the exploits of labor, he no longer has any strength left for sporting feats.

Yura has no acute reasons to change the rhythm of his life. It's just that Yura looks fifteen years older than his age and all the time feels a little lousy … but in general, everything is ok. The Matrix holds Yura with a steel grip. The chances of ripping her fingers off Yura's throat are, frankly, not much.

Bad teeth

Grisha Snegiryak does not suffer from toothache at all. He knows that he has deep caries on fourteen teeth … but specifically now nothing hurts and the visit to the dentist, it seems, can be postponed for now.

Grisha understands that caries is not a runny nose, it will not go away by itself. Grisha understands that inserting prostheses is not only long and painful, but also expensive. Grisha understands that there is no need to delay the visit to the dentist.

But now he has so many different things to do, and now he has so many urgent expenses … Well, Grisha will now cure one tooth. And what will change? After all, there are still thirteen patients left.

The Matrix rarely leaves its slaves with the power to take care of their health. The Matrix requires slaves to pay her bills first.

Weddings and birthdays

Alice Skotinenok is getting married. Alisa works as an assistant manager, her chosen one is a junior technical support engineer. The budget of the newly created family is forty thousand rubles a month.

The budget for the wedding is five hundred thousand.

Why not Alice quietly sign in the registry office and go to celebrate the exchange of rings with her husband in some quiet restaurant? Why does she need this petrosyan toastmaster, why does she need these shameful contests, why does she need this crowd of drunken cattle, clumsily stamping their feet under Verka Serduchka?

Why go into debt, ruin your parents, feed and water people who, let's face it, are quite capable of eating and drinking at their own expense? Alice is not stupid and understands that if she does not arrange a wedding, no one will pay attention to it: they will shrug their shoulders and forget the next day.

Alice has two reasons to waste the family's annual income. First, the Matrix commands it in the face of our customs and traditions. Secondly, Alice wants to show off in a white dress and Alice thinks that a year of two people working is quite a normal price for a few wedding photos.

Of course, defenders of a naive girl could say now that a wedding happens once in a lifetime … But there are also birthdays, funerals, New Years celebrations. How much money will Alice spend annually on these stupid gatherings?

Minor expenses

Vasya Zhimobryukhov works as a plumber on call. There are a thousand, there are two, here are five hundred rubles … in general, it should have been a good salary. However, Vasya's wallet rarely accumulates noticeable amounts; he is almost always broke.

Why?

Because Vasya, as he earns money, spends it: not counting. Five hundred rubles for a taxi home. A thousand rubles for lunch at a restaurant. It seems like you work and work … but there is no money.

If Vasya got himself a notebook and began to write down all income and expenses, his hair on his butt would move in horror. Vasya would have seen that eating in a restaurant is not a miserable thousand at a time, as he thought, but fifty thousand a month, six hundred thousand a year. Vasya would have seen that a taxi is convenient and comfortable, but two months of traveling by minibuses will allow him to buy a new computer, which he has been dreaming of for three years.

However, as befits a normal slave of the Matrix, Vasya does not consider it necessary to count money.

Expensive savings

Dima Gustitsyn is forced to save on food. He eats homeless bags: he dilutes them with boiling water and eats them with a plastic fork in disgust. Sometimes Dima spoils himself, eats purchased dumplings.

Good pasta with normal meat would have cost Dima cheaper than dumplings with dumplings … however, someone once said to Dima that doshirak is cheap, and to calculate with a calculator how much “cheap” things really cost him, Dima somehow does not guess.

Dima is sure that money is something petty and dirty, and that only goons count them. At the same time, Dima is not embarrassed by the fact that his unwillingness to understand finances regularly makes him act as a decent bastard - without giving his friends debts, for example.

Something like this, probably, they reasoned in the Middle Ages: a neat person never washes his ass: after all, touching impurities with your hand, washing them off the body is such a shameful and unworthy occupation …

See also: Hidden mechanisms of slavery