Time is not money.

This was, I admit with some embarrassment, an epiphany.  I have a job, and I'm earning money, but I want time.  We sell our time for money, but whoever has time has more than someone who has traded the same time for any amount of money.  So they are not members of the same valuation - contra capitalism.

Capitalism exists in many senses - as a legal arrangement, as a form of activity, as an economic or as a political theory, but also, perhaps especially, as a culture, with its particular mores and taboos, and its proper dogmata.  The dogma at hand:  that all values are mutually convertible, one for the other on a single scale of exchange, which we express in terms of the simplest to track - that of money.  For this reason, slavery and prostitution are the natural expression of capitalism - and perhaps their antiquity suggests that capitalism is not entirely a modern creation.

Antique or not, however, it is naïve - how much would we pay for others to care about us, and what forms of care would we spend more for?  Similarly, the notion of a "job" is a modern superstition.  We have all bought the notion that life works this way:  to live, you must give up part of your time in service to priorities not your own, to follow rules and schedules and limitations not your own, to fill the only thing you own - your time - with experiences that are not your own, and which are not members of your soul.  All life is, for each of us, simply our particular field of consciousness through which flows the stream of experience.  And we believe we must yield title to our field and stream to another so that we may simply live.

Certainly, though, not all do this - from hobos to authors to preachers and artists...  For this reason, I have no patience with those who condemn artists for being in it "for the money".  They are in it for the time - to sweeten the time, to keep it uncluttered and pristine.  I don't care much what sort of work they do, ultimately - I simply applaud their success.  "Con artist" is a redundancy - but they have time.  And so with other varieties of grifters, from professors to pundits.  One must work out a suitable scam - and yet, this possibility is barely acknowledged.

And so:   Time.   And so:  The SubGenius must have Slack!