What is your ultimate aim in life? Don’t waste time with the middle — go get what you really want.

Money as a means to an end

Everyone wants money. But why? I think people want money as a means of buying their personal freedom. Freedom of time, thought, and how to live your life.

But I can say this:

Money doesn’t buy freedom. Your approach to life does.

What do you want to do once you have freedom?

Let us not get suckered by money. Let us imagine:

Once you can control all 24 hours of the day just to yourself, then what do you wanna do with your life?

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The ultimate end

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The reason I like space and future movies:

How would you live your life in a post-monetary society?

A good view is that of the ancient Greeks— before they invented coin and monetary based systems. It seems the virtues or goals of the ancient Greeks were:

1. Victory in battle and war
2. Eternal individual glory via death in battle (courage)
3. To spread an empire — to subjugate “barbarians”. The goal of Alexander the Great to propagate Hellenism with the whole world.

Also it seemed the highest ideals of the ancient Greeks were to either become a king, warrior, or philosopher. Ideally all in one — like Marcus Aurelius.

Currency as proof

This is also why I invested around $25k of my own money into speculative Bitcoin/Digibyte/crypto currency. I am fascinated by currency and money as a technology and a tool of mediation between human beings. Also what led me, Jun, and the ARS team in developing ARS COIN for arsbeta.com.

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What do we really want as artists?

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Some of us have ideas or notions of making money from our photography art — but towards what end?

I think we don’t want to make money in our photography for the sake of it. We simply want respect, admiration, and “proof” that others truly admire us and our photos.