Suppose you are a sale rep for a water bottle company and you have a target this month to sell 10 million dollars worth of water bottles. And by golly it’s going to get done. That target is going to be reached. Maybe even exceeded if we want to do extra well.
Or perhaps you are a six year old collecting Halloween Candy. Three grocery bags worth that you will consume over the next month. Very rarely does the six year old consider what that will do to their gut health and concentration and focus correspondingly.
Now water, as far as human beings is concerned, has a relatively innocent effect on us. It’s pretty hard to over water a human being. But what about the water bottles? They end up in the ocean, in garbage dumps, and so on and this is one of the more innocent example I can think of.
What happens when there are sales representatives for pharmaceuticals that have sales targets to meet for a specific drug?
Targets have nothing to do with what is good for the planet or any of the life on it. They are purely game driven.
The same goes for budgets. If someone has a 10 million dollar budget, they will spend the money. Why? Because they want 10 million dollars or more in the next budget cycle.
So transactions are often made to facilitate the expedition of these budgets. And where does the excess end up?
Related Concepts
Because nature is multi-dimensional, language is linear. Language is scrawny, and therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the world as described, it’s as if you were trying eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. Or eat numbers; a lot of people eat numbers. People play the stock market; they’re doing nothing but eating numbers. And yet they’re always unhappy, absolutely miserable — because they never get anything. So therefore, they always hope more is coming, because they believe that if they eat enough dollar bills, eventually, something satisfactory will happen. So eating the abstractions all the time, we want more, more, more time. Confucius very wisely said “A man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/tao-of-philosophy-8) in the evening.” Because when you understand, you don’t put your hope in time. Time won’t solve a thing.
— Alan Watts
