Poll Of The Month: If money were no object and you could do whatever you want with your time on Earth, what would you do?
June, 2025's poll in the Mirrors For The Mind, Heart and Soul series
I stumbled upon an Alan Watts clip that inspired this month’s poll.
This poll poses the following question: If financial expenses were never an issue for you again and you could do anything you want (without violating the Non-Aggression Principal) what would you do?
Due to the fact that endless possibilities exist within the potential spectrum of what individuals may want to do with their time, creative capacities, hearts, minds and hands the multiple choice format will be quite limiting here.
I will throw out a few token possibilities (some far out potentials from my own mind and some others have told me they would choose if money logistics were not limiting them) for those less inclined to comment and engage in discussion to be able to at least engaged in some way, but for this poll to really serve the purpose of holding up a candle and a mirror it will require a comment explaining one’s vision for a potential life that has no financial limitations.
Please vote for only one of the ten options below.
Regardless of what you do or do not vote for, please explain your answer to the question above in a comment to promote constructive discussion and so we can all learn from each other’s unique perspectives.
The video that inspired this poll:
For some additional historical perspectives on money as well as present day writings on the topic I suggest reading:
After visiting France (in the 1600-s) and then returning to the Eastern Woodlands of Turtle Island, Kondiaronk (the Wendat chief described in this post) offers this distillation of the indigenous critique (on money in particular in this excerpt):
“I’ve spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single one of your ways that isn’t inhumane, and I sincerely believe that it can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’.
I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evil; the scourge of souls and the slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine that one can live in the land of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining that one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigue, deceit, lies, betrayal, insincerity, all the worst behaviors in the world. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all for money. In light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right to refuse to touch or even look at money?”
Kandiaronk continues, explaining human qualities valued by the Wendat by saying:
“Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity – wisdom, reason, equity, etc. – and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.“
Kandiaronk’s view was that the greed, poverty, and crime found in French (and by extension all the rest of European Statist) society arise from lust for money. By refusing to deal with money, the Wendat were able to live in freedom and equality.
Kandiaronk:
“Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?”
The above excerpt is from the post below.
James Corbett reads an excerpt from his excellent new book (REPORTAGE: Essays on the New World Order) titled “Selling Your Soul For Matrix Steak” :
An excerpt from my post on Gift Economics:
The human fiat currency economy necessitates scarcity (or at the very least the perception of scarcity) and its propaganda systems attempt to instill in us from a young age that “there is not enough to go around”, that it is a “survival of the fittest/dog eat dog world” and that success in life is measured by how much fiat you can hoard and/or how many material possessions you can accumulate. Of course, scarcity is an illusion and where it exists in relation to food, in an empirical sense, is the result of said scarcity economic model crippling the local ecology and ancient cultural practices of a said region, which at one time, embodied, recognized and perpetuated the abundance inherent in that bioregion.
The ancient living economy of the Earth, on the other hand, is based on a perpetual cycle of gifts moving freely within a self-organizing, anti-fragile, symbiotically connected community of beings (which each have niche gifts that they provide to make their community increasingly resilient, biodiverse, beautiful and nourishing as a whole). It is the antithesis of the human fiat economy, as instead of hoarding, it involves giving gifts to other beings and having faith in the soundness, elegance and longevity of Creator’s design.
Take a leaf for example, each one embodies the architecture and dynamics of the larger gift economy (ecosystem) it is seamlessly embedded within. The leaf breathes in cosmic light (which is gifted freely to the Earth and countless other worlds by the beings we call “stars”, in our case, a star we call “Sol” or “The Sun”.) Through the alchemy of photosynthesis the leaf also breathes in CO-2 (which we humans and countless other beings gift freely to the plants each time we breathe). The leaf also absorbs water (which is gifted by the ocean as well as by the way of extraterrestrial sources such as meteorites in the form of water vapour, which is gathered into raindrops in clouds via the gifts of fungi and trees, which help initiate rain drop nucleation by the spores and pollen they send up to literally create rain storms).
Last but not least, the leaf completes the miracle of photosynthesis through absorbing the minerals from the rich earth below (which was created through countless beings gifting biomatter and their very bodies over centuries). That leaf combines those gifts to make sugar (and a diverse range of other phytochemicals) which the plant in turn gives as a gift in the form of food. The gift of food created by the alchemy of photosynthesis (enabled by the gifts of many beings on Earth and beyond) is then gifted back to the earth (both in the manure of the being that ingested the food, and in time, via their very body which was built with that food) returning to the Earth as well, completing (and enriching) that ongoing perpetual cycle of gifts that makes up the Earth’s living economy.
Above excerpt is from this post:
I voted 100 acre food forest. I have been working towards that since 2007. I would continue and expand.
A recurring dream I've had my entire life - since I was a wee young girl, has been, what would our world be like today if instead of 'conquering' the first peoples of these lands on turtle island, we adopted their ways, their knowledge, their spiritual connection to all this living and non living but still of matter that has wisdom and essential life force of it's own expression.
I would only wish to travel the world in every place possible if their cultures were still intact and I could learn from that diversity.
I love being surrounded by a natural environment, and although I feel too tired and sore from more than a couple hours work, I feel my knowledge in the regenerative/biodynamic principles in growing a reciprocal 100 acre food farm and biodiverse regenerative farm and community has always been a life dream of mine as well.
Nothing would bring more peace to my heart than to see people working together in harmonious ways that inspires each others creative spark and like a rising tide, lifts all boats.