Party Vibe

I thought long and hard about this (especially as my own personal political views are progressive/left wing) but somewhat reluctantly chose money as I’ve grown up in times when my family did not have a great deal of money (when my parents lived in London in the 1970s and then had to bring up me and my sister in the 1980s) but my parents through hard work managed to improve all our standard of living.

by the the 1990s we had a semi detached house, Dad had got a decent car, even the cats had the arts/fashion section of yesterdays Guardian to line their litter tray each day (all that it was good for, even though the rest of the paper was better) and I saw how it changed my parents, they slowly became more tolerant and less judgmental about how me and my sister behaved and it was because they didn’t feel paranoid that if/when we made inevitable mistakes in life they would not have the resources to support us.

I’ve more recently been lucky enough to somehow rise up the career ladder to the point I am apparently a high earner for this region but also have a job which has many good aspects as well as the inevitable boring bits, and I will be honest, I do feel far happier than I did back in the 1990s or early 2000s when I lived in Reading, even though my life involves far less “extreme hedonism” than it once did.

But it is also a matter of balancing things and being content, I probably could earn more money going back to London but have a more stressful time of it, at the same time I know other folk my age here who have done even better in the short term because they actually got their degrees, got a dream techie job at rat salad park and far more money than me then they get laid off or market forces mean they have to do less fun jobs and they find it very hard to cope..

@MR207 551108 wrote:

Money IS happiness, happiness isn’t money

This is a very vague poll.. you need money to do anything really, unless you find happiness in sitting at home knitting with your cat, which in that that case actually nevermind, costs money for the needles and yarn, oh and for the $800 cat.

I agree you need a basic amount of money for happiness.

but $800 for a cat? in Europe you can get one for €80 donation to the rescue home and that increasingly includes Siameses, Bengals and other “expensive” ones because folk buy them and don’t realise they are more high maintenance than other kitties.

The “crazy cat couple” live down my road, but the animal shelter charity give them a van and they collect up all the strays and rehome the kittens. They used to do the adult ones too but these go to another shelter in the countryside, because when they had adults one holed the back of the communal enclosure with paws and claws, and they would escape in the night and terrorise the rest of the estates pet cats. Hoiwever just before feeding time they would crawl back through the hole they had made so when matey and his wife counted them they were adamant they had no cats missing (I think in the end a policeman and the animal control authorities had to have a friendly chat to them)

I was going to volunteer to help with the kittens but then I realised I’d probably encourage them to meow more and that might not help them get homes..