the Piper Paradigm.

There was a response to my post – I Don’t Care About Money, I Care About Hiking. – that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

This was the comment: “I don’t do anything based around how much money I’ll have.”

I replied: “That’s kind of like building a house without the framework.“

…which is true, and it’s even more like saying, “I don’t care about where I’m going when I get in my car. In fact, I prefer driving with my eyes closed.”

I’m not criticizing the person that made the comment (you do you bro, no shade, to each their own and all that. Plus, commentary = future writing prompts!). I can only share my thoughts and how this got me thinking about an MTV series me and a group of my guy friends were obsessed with as teenagers – the comedically anarchistic Jackass (my fellow elder millennials will understand).

After all, getting behind the wheel of a car and hitting the road blindfolded is exactly the sort of thing the guys from the Jackass series might do. This show had tremendous appeal to it’s target demographic at the time (teens to early 30s in 2000-ish). While the popularity of this show may seem initially surprising in retrospect, it’s really not. It was pure glorification of reckless and irresponsible behavior without always immediately obvious repercussion. Is this not exactly how most of America views and behaves with money?

I see so many of us in America that love this anti-establishment attitude – somehow that equivocates in our minds to an expression of individual freedom. We like to think that ignoring or eschewing the systems that exist gives us more freedom. I think it’s the opposite.

Driving a car with your eyes closed might be momentarily exciting, but it doesn’t take much to understand how the risk outweighs the reward here. Why do we travel down the road of life playing the “ignorance is bliss” game?

It’s true that when you get behind the wheel of your car that you did not create the system of roads that you are traveling on. You did not decide where the asphalt or gravel was put down, where the twists and turns are, how the roads are maintained, what the speed limits were determined to be, how other people operating in this system are behaving. BUT – How you operate within this system IS up to you. It’s your choice. It’s your responsibility even. The more you understand about this system, the more freedom you have to operate within it. You get to decide what route you take, what machine you’re using on the route, who you’re taking on the route with you. You learn to look out for potholes, how to avoid accidents (how to mitigate risk). You even have the freedom to decide what boundaries to push – is it worth the possibility of a speeding ticket to go a little faster in that one area? Maybe.

You have none of this freedom if you choose to “opt out” of the system. I would rather learn to drive a car than be stuck without that option. I would rather keep my drivers license up to date than risk the consequences of driving without one. I would rather not run the stop sign and risk causing an accident. Most of the time I would rather follow the speed limit than risk getting a ticket.

If you can learn to drive a car responsibly, I am 100% certain you can learn to operate the tool of money effectively.

Here’s the truth – even some of the guys from Jackass understand that money is a tool to be handled with care and understanding. How do I know? I used to manage a few of Danger Ehren’s investment properties (Ehren is also a very talented photographer, property DIY-er, and knowledgeable as hell about the asset class he invests in). My point is – if even Jackass-es can care about the system of money, maybe the rest of us might want to think about caring about it too.

So when I write, “I don’t care about money, I care about hiking,” I mean to tell you that I care a lot about the system of finances because doing so provides me the freedom to utilize my time to do what I care about most.

(Tongue-in-cheek here, with a shrug)…

Maybe just be careful about what kind of jackass you choose to be.