Getting to the root of the need for cash

As you might have noticed, I’ve been away for a bit. I’ve been away, doing a lot of thinking somewhere very different from credit crunch England where people have rather different attitudes to money. I have been in Africa, met the Masai in Kenya and spent some time talking to the inhabitants of a poor village on the slopes of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Here, ethical shopping isn’t an issue. Both the Masai and the villages have very little money. They are mostly self sufficient, living off the land and making do with what they have. It really brought home to me that we in the west have a bizarre attitude to money. We work all day to make money which we then spend on ‘stuff’ to cheer us up and entertain us because we’re so exhausted from working all week. Whereas the people I spoke to worked hard to eat. They just got on with living, and they were some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Of course they would like more money but then so would almost everyone that I know. I think the different is, that they have their way of life and it’s been that way for generations and that’s how everyone else in the village lives. Here in the west we see rich people with their big houses, fancies clothes and posh cars and want to be like them. There is a line in a song ‘if I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor’. Perhaps we need to stop aspiring to be someone we’re not and learn to accept who we are and live within our means. During the current financial problems we’re experiencing in the west, its probably best that we focus more on being content with what we have, spending less and just enjoying the simple things in life. Well, when you put it like that it sounds rather idyllic!