![]() ![]() Money is largely irrelevant. Scarcity, however, impacts on both happiness and meaning, although with much larger impact on happiness - 20 times greater negative impact. The overall conclusion was that having sufficient to buy objects of desire, both necessities and luxuries, is important to happiness. Simply, money does have a significant positive relationship to happiness but is irrelevant to meaning. Sufficient money to buy the things you need and the things you want does has a significant impact on happiness. Does it create greater meaning in life? A research team lead by Roy Baumeister believe they have found the answer. Money may not buy love, it does seem to buy happiness. ![]() Money is a cultural artefact, but it does exert a powerful influence on our lives. It is used to satisfy our most basic needs - shelter, warmth, food. Humanity has always lived in trickster times, but one suspects his presence is being felt now very strongly and at very many of the cross roads we have to navigate in everyday life.ĭOES MONEY BRING HAPPINESS OR MEANING IN LIFE? There are times when the trickster represents not just the boundary crosser, but at times he is the creator of boundaries, bringing to the surface that which was hidden or denied in order to give clarity to the fog of choices. He is both wise and ridiculous. When plagued by indecision, it is to the trickster we might turn, to the trickster within as we ourselves recognise that we live with ambiguity and ambivalence, duplicity and deceit, contradiction and paradox. In these days, we might speak of choosing the least bad option from among an ocean of negatives. It is at these times when what was least bad becomes good. As we are grappling with the challenges of the 21st Century we are finding that we must choose from a range of undesirable options, balancing our individual wants against social/planetary sustainability. It therefore so that the trickster is the creative fool, for the fool is never completely foolish. Thus it is that Trickster is a boundary crosser, always at the gates of the city leading in or leading out. In social life, he supports groups and individuals to distinguish between the poles of right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female - all the binaries that need to resolved by choice or integration in the confusion of motives and values. Trickster can help or can hinder. He navigated between lofty peaks and deepest ravines, between the harshest of the sun's rays, and the darkness of the abyss.Īt his helpful best, trickster travels not just as messenger, but as thief, stealing from the gods the valued tools humans need to survive in the world. Hence Hermes represents the ambiguity of much of life - when good and bad are not easily defined but can be reversed. Along the North Pacific coast of America, the trickster Raven is a thief of water and daylight, in Japan it was the trickster who stole the arts of agriculture from the heavens. To do so, tricksters needed to be masters of deceit in order to bring gifts of plenty to the world of humans while avoiding the wrath of the selfish gods. The trickster lord is always on the road and far from the hearth. He passes through, ever on the move, always agile (just joking). As a guardian of road and journey, travellers built stone cairns as altars in homage to Hermes, to acknowledge a journey safely navigated despite the risks and uncertainties of wrong turnings or predatory thieves and scoundrels. Hermes is always found where the tension of opposites prevails, whether in form or in spirit. He moves between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. As the messenger of the gods he guided the dead to the underworld, and back when they were required to walk among the living on some transitory errand. ![]() HERMES - TRICKSTER LORD OF THE IN BETWEEN ![]()
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