A month or so ago, I was at work hating my job, when the phrase “A world not ruled by money,” came to mind. I started thinking about it, but had to stop because I was depressing myself. But I had the great idea of an anthology of stories based on the prompt of “A world not ruled by money.” That is a great idea, but for somebody else to do it. I don’t have the patience, organizational skills, or money to do such a thing. (While the stories would be about a world not ruled by money, we unfortunately live in one that is, so selected stories should get something, even if it’s just $10.) So if you are a person who could put something like that together, please do. And then let me know so I might submit a story.
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To show why I was
getting depressed, here was what I was thinking. I was just getting an idea for the world, I
hadn’t figured out a story for it, yet. I’m
not worried about someone stealing this idea, because one possibility would be
to have all the stories set in the same world, and this could be it.
So in this world,
everyone gets, say 1000 Credits each month.
Someone could have a modest one-bedroom apartment with water,
electricity, and internet, all the healthy food they’d want without any worry
of going hungry, no worry about any medications they need, and they could take
classes – online or at a university – either for a degree or just out of
interest, and once a week they could hang out with friends at a bar, or a game,
as well as have a date night of dinner and a movie, all for, say 900 Credits a
month. And with what they save up they
could go on a vacation or two each year.
Basically, you could live a healthy happy life without much trouble.
Now if you wanted
a car, or a house, or more vacations, you’d have to get a job. In this world a lot of the manufacturing jobs
would be done by machines, so humans would be left to the more human jobs. Skilled jobs – doctors, teachers, etc. – you’d
have some set schedule, but a full-time job would only be like 15-20 hours a
week. For “unskilled” jobs – wait staff,
janitors, etc. – it might be the company would have a list of workers and they would
call them up and ask, “Can you work five hours on Thursday?” Some people might stick
to one company, but I can also see people working at a different place each
week.
The beginning idea
for the story I had, was a “Day in the Life of” type. Character wakes up, not with an alarm but
they just wake up, and they have breakfast.
Then they get on a subway to go into town. Their phone has a cracked screen, so they
stop at the phone store to have it replaced, and maybe they put in a new
battery since it’s a couple years old.
Because if the phone companies weren’t so motivated for you to buy a
whole new phone, they’d be easy to repair.
And maybe they get a call to see if they could come in to work in a
store because someone is sick, and they go in and it’s a pleasant
experience.
This is where
things started to depressing for me, because there are so many weird things the
store I work in does in the name of capitalism.
Like, we have different sized drinks, but the bottles twice as large
cost half as much because they’re not cold.
People want a cold drink, so they’ll buy the more expensive version because
it’s “convenient.” And I don’t know how much of my time is spent just dealing
with putting up and taking down sales. The
point of sales is take the $5 item that you don’t really need and would
normally walk past and make it 2 for $9 and you think, “That’s a deal!” so you
get two of these things that probably only cost $0.50 to make. Shit like that wouldn’t happen in a world not
ruled by money.
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So that’s the
interesting idea I had. But unless somebody
puts together such an anthology, I can’t afford to put time and effort into it.
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