Raise your hand if you want to pay less for things – less for beer, bread, shoes, fuel. Of course we all want to pay less. Lower prices leave more money for other goodies, for other necessities, for unexpected expenses that arrive sooner or later. Now raise your hand if your local shopkeeper wants to charge you more – for beer, bread, shoes, or fuel. Anyone? I thought so. With the cost of living in Kenya skyrocketing with no signs of slowing down, everyone is in desperate need for a reprieve, or at least a pay rise!
However, society has drilled it into our skulls for as long as we can remember that money is an evil thing, reinforcing this train of thought with the following cliches: “Money doesn’t grow on trees”; “Money can’t buy you happiness”; “Money is the root of all evil”, and so on. Luxury is discouraged and humility is stressed, perhaps maybe too much.
If you think about it critically, money is just a piece of paper we gave a certain meaning to and which has evolved into the backbone of the system we created for ourselves. Many people have experienced ills and evils in the name of these ‘sacred’ pieces of paper, it has been used for dominance and control for millennia. Corruption has permeated all levels of society, from the wily street hustler to the highest corridors of power. There are charlatans in religious institutions who are just as bad as those in any other sphere of commerce, using spirituality as a guise to hustle believers into funding their own prosperity. All this and more has resulted in changing the overall energy of money on the planet to something negative; people are dying for it, hoarding it, stealing it and perverting it. On one hand, there are those who have been driven to this simply by cruel circumstances, but the real villains are those driven by an intense and selfish desire to acquire more with little or no regard to others.
So how do we break out from this vicious energy cycle? When you want to improve the money mindset specifically, the first step is getting rid of the ‘money is evil’ concept. This train of thought will hinder you from making progress in your life’s goal to create more money in your life. Money is the pathway to freedom for yourself and for others in your life. Good fortune gives us the capacity to benefit others by having a greater positive impact. It reasons that you will have the ability to help more people by being wealthy, than you will be by being poor. Being thankful for money or value you receive is also important. When you give money for any service you are expressing appreciation for that gift of service. Tracking money – discovering where it comes from, and where it goes — hands the control right back to you. Knowing what you can afford, and then being conscious with your purchase decisions is really freeing.
Another key to making more money in your life is to help people realise their own dreams. Creating something or passing on the knowledge to help someone else create is a positive step in the right direction as it encourages knowledge to be in constant circulation.
Will all that in mind, we present our Conscious Economy issue, and what is a big comeback for us on a personal level. (Check out Rand’s piece on our ‘re-launch’) We take a look at the good people at HEVA Fund, who have decided to enrich the Nairobi creative scene in the most noble of ways. We take a few well-aimed shots at the aforementioned religious charlatans who have pulled the wool over believers eyes. We’ve got all this and loads more in the issue, so turn the page and let us explore the way forward into a conscious, go-getting economy.
