Material Man

I need to get rich.

As I went through school as a child, I listened and related with the responses of fellow classmates to the question, “How rich do you wanna be when you grow up?” The typical answer was, “I don’t need to be rich, I just want to be well-off.” Now, while ‘well-off’ as relative and terribly ambiguous, used in it’s context it makes a point very clear- the general consensus was that once you could provide for yourself and your family the necessities of life, you were well-off. Well, well-off is no longer enough for me.

I’ve watched many ‘well-off’ people in my life, including my own parents, deal with the common-day hardships of life. Things that they should haven’t to think twice about are thought about a million times- things involving the use of money, that is. Money has been such a stress sometimes. There’s this particular project that my mother’s been trying to get done for years, and it’s been a constant struggle, one which has brought her to tears more than once, all because she’s found it hard to acquire the necessary funds to get it done.

Make no mistake, I do not come from a poor family. Both my parents are tertiary-educated, made a life for themselves, got the children, and eventually got the cars and the house and whatever else comes with it all… they’ve come a long way… yet not quite long enough. If they’d gotten how far they needed to go, my mother would have no reason to be so distressed all the time. She’s ‘well-off’, yet life’s still a struggle.

Well I don’t plan to go that route. I hardly see the point in life if I progress from a toddler, to a studying child, to a working man, and then spend ALL the rest of my existence in an office and home again, struggling with sending children to school, and paying bills, and acquiring property, and all the things we want and need to make us happy. By the time I reach that point of satisfaction, I hardly have enough time and energy to enjoy it.

Nope, not me. I need to get beyond that point. I still don’t know how, or when, but it has to happen. While I don’t want to become a fiend for money and riches, I do want for myself and my family a life that isn’t burdened by the stress of not having what it takes to make us not worry and toil more than we need to.

I need to get rich, somehow.