The Illusion of Ownership and the Trap of Status

A car has a price—or does it? What if it’s given to you? What if you won it? What if you rented it? What difference does it actually make if it’s in your name or not? When you say I need this amount of money to buy this and that car, aren’t you limiting yourself to one possibility? Ownership is so overrated. Owning a home is status…where and when? Twenty years ago? Having an expensive car is status? Where and when?

Every luxury car can be leased for an affordable monthly payment, so it says little about you other than that you pay your bills on time and most likely are an employee with an unlimited contract. So when you look at a car, you decide that you just want that car and focus on the how, or are not programmed on the how. For example, there are many people who don't know how to live without a credit card. Taking their credit card away is taking their lives away. Or the idea of receiving a car without a loan, without credit, is so beyond comprehension. This idea that young people no longer want credit cards, car ownership and home ownership seems to reflect a problem when perhaps it is a solution, a choosing of freedom over obligation. The end of monetary slavery.

Unless you lose that job, and something goes wrong and you can't get back on that horse so fast, then you start to learn how much all these companies you are loyal to love you as they rip your life apart, shred it into nothingness, treat you like the last shit to have rolled down the hill of life into a puddle of pitiful disgust. You think you have status, but if you owe others and cannot repay, you have the status of slave with no hope for buying your freedom, for you will never make that money you owe, for if you could afford your life you wouldn’t have borrowed.

And then we think we're better than animals, but they would never adopt such an enslaving system; they would never voluntarily run to their slaughter. But humans will indeed justify that slaughter is beneficial, that slavery can somehow lead to a greater freedom. That things, things we cannot afford, somehow improve our lives. Having eaten all that delicious food, seen all those wonderful places, having things to show all those nobodies, has made our enslavement so much more worth it.

And then we're too old or too stressed or to who knows what to enjoy any of it, and into the grave we go, finally free of a life that was always meant to be free if we were not dumb fools. Not realising that a beautiful, plentiful life is always within grasp and a given not to be chased, especially through personal enslavement.